The chief of the Los Angeles City Fire Department Tuesday acknowledged for the first time that the after-action report on the Palisades Fire was edited multiple times to make the department leadership look better.
While speaking at the LA Fire Commission meeting, Chief Jaimie Moore said the report was tweaked several times to thwart the blame on the LAFD leaders.
“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of the department leadership in that final report,” Moore admitted. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as Fire Chief. And I can assure you that nothing of this sort will happen ever again while I am Fire Chief.”
NBCLA previously reported that an anonymous letter emailed to LA Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmembers Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Traci Park, saying the LA Fire Department’s After-Action Report on the Palisades Fire wasn’t thorough because some of the fire officials who made decisions during the fire also supervised the report’s preparation.
Moore also recognized that there were significant shortcomings in his department’s response to the Lachman and Palisades fires in January 2025.
While repeatedly highlighting the firefighters were not to blame for the destruction caused by the Palisades Fire, Chief Moore, who took over the department last year after former Chief Kristin Crowley was fired over her public spat with Mayor Karen Bass, said leadership decisions and systems in place led to multiple failures.
Moore said the handling of the Lachman Fire, a small brush fire that ignited on Jan. 1, 2025 near the Temescal Ridge Trail in the Pacific Palisades, was insufficient.
“At the time, fire companies were instructed to pick up hose. The department genuinely believed the fire was fully extinguished. That was based on the information, condition and procedures in place at that moment.”
However, the after-action report following the Palisades Fire revealed that embers from the Lachman Fire continued to smolder underground and fanned by Santa Ana winds to later explode into the Palisades Fire.
“As a result, we’ve already changed our mop-up procedures, and we formally incorporated the use of the drone technology to enhance post suppression verification, situational awareness, and detection of residual heat,” Moore explained.
What the two wildfires exposed, according to Moore, was staffing challenges and issues on the placement of resources.
“We cannot continue to rely on a system that is stretched thin on its best day and overwhelmed on its worst,” he added.
Since the fires, the chief said the department’s made several improvements, including changes to dispatch and pre-deployment procedures.
But the staffing issue was yet to be resolved, according to the firefighters’ union. According to the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the LAFD has the same staffing that it had in the 1960s. The department currently has 3,400 firefighters, but it needs about 7,000, the union claimed.
The union said it’s trying to bring a ballot measure to add more funding to the department.
Moore did not take any questions during the Fire Commission meeting Tuesday.