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Water pressure became a big issue as firefighters tried to fight the Palisades Fire.
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David Swanson
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AFP via Getty Images
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Topline:
More than a month before the Palisades Fire, former Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley issued a dire warning: Her department was woefully understaffed, response times were high, equipment was in disrepair and emergency preparedness was suffering. Other reports and analyses appear to support those claims.
Why now: It's not clear whether a better funded Los Angeles Fire Department would have slowed the firestorm that tore through Pacific Palisades. Firefighters faced gale force winds gusts of up to 100 mph when the fire broke out. What is clear is that day-to-day service calls — most of them for medical help — suffer because L.A. has one of the smallest big city fire departments in the country.
Key statistic: The population of the city has grown to more than 3.9 million, from 2.5 million in 1960, but the number of firefighters has not grown proportionately.
Read on ... for details of the reports that say L.A. should build more fire stations and hire more firefighters.
More than a month before the Palisades Fire, then-Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley issued a dire warning: Her department was woefully understaffed, response times were high, equipment was in disrepair and emergency preparedness was suffering.
It's not clear whether a better funded agency would have slowed the firestorm. Firefighters faced gale force winds of up to 100 mph when the fire broke out.
What is clear is that day-to-day service calls — most of them for medical help — suffer because L.A. has one of the smallest big city fire departments in the country.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model and size of the LAFD has not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote in a November memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners.
The population of the city has grown to more than 3.9 million, from 2.5 million in 1960, but the number of firefighters has not grown proportionately.
Crowley has since been fired by Mayor Karen Bass, who last Friday cited the chief’s failure to increase the number of on-duty firefighters in the hours before the Palisades Fire and her unwillingness to participate in an evaluation of the department’s response to the disaster.
In a statement after her firing, Crowley did not address the Palisades Fire or the mayor’s accusations directly but said she based her actions “on taking care of our firefighters so that they could take care of our communities.”
But Crowley has not been the only one ringing the alarm that the LAFD is stretched to the limit.
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Before the latest firestorm, LA had been warned that its Fire Department is too small
Reports obtained by LAist through public records requests found rescue ambulances and fire trucks from the department’s 106 stations have scrambled from one call to the next with ever-increasing response times in recent years.
“It's not about one budget. It's not about one mayor. It's about decades of neglect of the LAFD,” said Freddy Escobar, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles. “The 911 caller is going to pay the ultimate sacrifice because we don’t have the resources.”
Kristin Crowley was removed from her position as LAFD chief last week, but she plans to remain with the department.
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Myung J. Chun
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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Longer response times
L.A. has just under one firefighter per 1,000 residents. Since 1986, the average number of firefighters in densely populated cities across the country ranged from 1.54 to 1.81 per 1,000, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
As calls for service have increased, so have response times. The overall response time for 90% of calls jumped more than a minute, to 7 minutes and 53 seconds, from 2018 to 2022, according to a 2024 Standards of Cover analysis by the International Association of Firefighters. The IAFF is a labor union of firefighters that also provides analysis of fire operations to local fire departments.
The National Fire Protection Association recommends a 4-minute standard.
Response times are especially complicated in L.A., according to a separate 2023 Standards of Cover report by Citygate Associates. Citygate is a consulting firm that evaluates fire departments across the country.
The challenges include a “hilly topography in some areas, and a public road pattern that, in certain areas, is geographically challenged with rivers, open spaces, and/or a lack of major cross-connecting roadways,” according to the report.
As areas continue to redevelop and add population, the department will need adjustments “just to maintain, much less improve, response times,” the report reads.
Medical calls dominate resources
L.A’s Fire Department responds to more than 500,000 calls for service per year. More than 80% are calls from people who need medical help. The department takes more than 600 people to hospitals every day. It treats hundreds more people on scene, and many of them are unhoused.
The LAFD responds to more than 66,000 calls per year related to the city’s unhoused population, according to the department.
“If we were a hospital, we would have the largest emergency room in the country,” Battalion Chief Eric Roberts said in an interview.
According to the Citygate report, fire trucks are too often busy with medical calls, stretching call times for fires and other calls. The consulting firm recommends expanding the use of lightweight pickup trucks to respond to less serious medical calls and small fires. They’re called fast response vehicles, and the LAFD has three of them.
“The alternative response program needs to scale massively and quickly to lower the workload placed on fire units back down to moderate and serious emergencies,” the Citygate report states. “Well over 100 new non-firefighter personnel must be hired and trained for alternative response measures to meet the service needs of the city.”
The report also recommends staffing 12 to 15 new rescue ambulances and building one new fire station — in the northern San Fernando Valley.
The International Association of Firefighters study recommends adding 32 rescue ambulances and 378 firefighters. In addition, the study recommended adding 62 new fire stations.
Neither study placed a cost on their recommendations.
Personnel by the numbers
Over the past five years, the number of sworn and civilian personnel at the department has stayed relatively constant, rising only slightly to 3,877, from 3,831, according to budget documents. But in the latest budget for the fiscal year that started July 1, 2024, the department lost 58 positions from the year before.
In a December report, Crowley recommended adding 438 positions.
“I think it's important for us to look at what resources do we want to grow,” said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who sits on the city’s Public Safety Committee. “If we have new stations, if we have new apparatus, we need to have persons assigned to them.”
Part of the department’s short staffing problem dates to the 2008 recession, when city tax revenue plummeted. The department lost more than 10% of its positions and mothballed fire trucks.
“We reduced our resources in a way that we have not fully recovered from,” Roberts said.
McOsker agreed.
“Over a number of years — many, many years — we have not put enough money into the Fire Department,” McOsker said, adding that the Palisades Fire has increased urgency. The councilmember, whose District 15 includes San Pedro, Wilmington and Watts, said he thinks “everyone in the city recognizes that it's important to have adequate fire services.”
Calls for increased funding for the Fire Department come as the city faces budget problems. Four months into the fiscal year that began July 1, the city had already overspent its budget by nearly $300 million, according to the city administrative officer.
“We might have to shrink in other areas,” McOsker said.
Councilmember Traci Park, whose District 11 includes the Pacific Palisades, said the city will have to make some hard decisions.
“We can’t keep investing in and doubling down on programs that aren’t getting us results,” Park said. “And I feel like homelessness is a good example of that.”
The question is whether reducing spending on homelessness would increase the burden on the Fire Department.
More from Crowley
Crowley, who has elected to stay with the department in a lower rank, decried the loss of civilian staff and overtime variable staffing hours, warning the reduction has “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large scale emergencies.”
As the Palisades Fire was burning, Crowley said $17 million in cuts to her department in last year’s budget hampered the department’s response — in part because there are not enough mechanics to fix broken fire trucks.
A spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass said the signing of a labor contract that boosted salaries for firefighters and the funding of new equipment resulted in a net increase in funding for the department of $110 million. But Crowley said it still wasn’t enough.
“We are screaming to be properly funded,” Crowley, the first woman and first gay person to lead the department, told a T.V. station during the first few days of the fire.
In that December report, she requested 438 new sworn and civilian positions for her department as part of a 7.6% increase in her operating budget.
Park, meanwhile, is seeking to place a bond measure on next year’s ballot that would increase funding for the Fire Department.
The councilmember’s proposal has been referred to the City Council’s Rules Committee.
LAist Senior Reporter Ted Rohrlich contributed to this report.
