By Noah Goldberg
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES Los Angeles Fire Chief Jaime Moore admitted Tuesday that his department’s after-action report on the Palisades fire was watered down to shield top brass from scrutiny.
Moore’s admission comes more than two weeks after The Times found that the report was edited to downplay the failures of city and Los Angeles Fire Department leaders in preparing for and fighting the Jan. 7, 2025, fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
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“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report,” Moore said Tuesday during remarks before the city’s Board of Fire Commissioners. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief. And I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief.”
Moore, who was appointed fire chief in November, did not say who was responsible for the changes to the report.
The report’s author, LAFD Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, declined to endorse it because of substantial deletions that altered his findings. Cook said in an Oct. 8 email to then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva and other LAFD officials that the edited version was “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”
Mayor Karen Bass’ office has said that the LAFD wrote and edited the report, and that the mayor did not demand changes.
On Tuesday, Clara Karger, a spokesperson for Bass said: “Mayor Bass fully respects and supports what the Chief said today, and she looks forward to seeing his leadership make the change that is needed within the department. Chief Moore is a courageous leader with strong integrity who continues to show his deep commitment to the people of Los Angeles and to the brave firefighters who serve our city every day.”
Villanueva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Moore’s remarks, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Palisades fire, were the strongest admission yet of missteps by LAFD leaders. They amounted to an about-face for a chief who in November critiqued the media following a Times report that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the area of a New Year’s Day fire even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering. That fire, the Lachman fire, later reignited into the Palisades fire.
“This is about learning and not assigning blame,” said Fire Commissioner Sharon Delugach, who praised the chief for his comments.
The most significant changes, The Times found in its analysis of seven drafts of the report, involved top LAFD officials’ decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy available firefighters ahead of the ferocious winds.
An initial draft said the decision “did not align” with policy, while the final version said the number of companies pre-deployed “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”
A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.
Another passage that was deleted said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment on Jan. 7, 2025.
The department made other changes that seemed intended to make the report seem less negative. In one draft, there was a suggestion to change the cover image from a photo of palm trees on fire to a more “positive” image, such as “firefighters on the frontline.” The final report displays the LAFD seal on its cover.
A July email thread reviewed by The Times shows concern over how the after-action report would be received, with the LAFD forming a “crisis management workgroup.”
“The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise. The immediate and most pressing crisis is the Palisades After Action Report,” LAFD Assistant Chief Kairi Brown wrote in an email to eight other people.
“With significant interest from media, politicians, and the community, it is crucial that we present a unified response to anticipated questions and concerns,” Brown wrote. “By doing so, we can ensure our messaging is clear and consistent, allowing us to create our own narrative rather than reactive responses.”
Maryam Zar, a Palisades resident who runs the Palisades Recovery Coalition, said that “when news came out that this report had been doctored to save face, it didn’t take much for [Palisades residents] to believe that was true.”
It was easy for Moore to admit the faults of previous LAFD administrations, she said.
“He’s not going to take any heat. It wasn’t him,” she said. “He’s not the fire chief who really should have stood up and said, ‘I didn’t do what I should have.’”
City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez called the chief’s comments “a refreshing change of position” but said it took too long for the department to admit its mistakes.
“There were a lot of unnecessary detours to getting us here,” she added. “There was a lot of evading blame ... but I think evading it didn’t result in any less questions being raised.”
The after-action report has been widely criticized for failing to examine the New Year’s Day fire that later reignited into the Palisades fire. Bass has ordered the LAFD to commission an independent investigation into its missteps in putting out the earlier fire.
On Tuesday, Moore said the city failed to adequately ensure that the New Year’s Day fire was fully snuffed out.
He said that LAFD officials “genuinely believed the fire was fully extinguished.”
“That was based on the information, conditions, and procedures in place at that moment. That belief guided the operational decision-making that was made,” he said. “However, the outcome has made it incredibly clear that our mop-up and verification process needed to be stronger.”
“We have to own that, and I do,” he added.
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