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The Plain Truth Today Follow up :California Wildfires 1 Year Later: How Politics Failed the Recovery
One neighborhood after the other, street after street after street.
Nearly the entire community of Pacific Palisades has been destroyed here over the past couple of days.
RESIDENT (VOICE 1): When it comes to City Hall and Sacramento, negligence is the word I can only come up with about January 7th. I don’t know how all these so-called leaders and people that are supposed to serve and protect honestly go to bed at night thinking that they’re good humans because we were definitely left to burn.
The Palisades fire erupted on January 7th, 20 25.
It burned over twenty three thousand acres and nearly seven thousand structures.
One year after the fire, residents are frustrated that there has been too little rebuilding and no accountability from state and local leaders.
But there are signs of hope.
Some people have started to rebuild their homes.
Schools and other institutions have returned to the community.
Here on the one-year anniversary of the Palisades Fire, we look back at the past, but also ahead into the future.
on the next hill over there is a hiking trail that goes above a rock formation called skull rock and that is where the fire started on new year’s eve heading into new year’s day shortly after midnight
an alleged arsonist set the fire that became known as the lockman fire and that burned several acres up there on
It was a clear and calm day when firefighters could control the fire.
They put that fire out and then returned the following day for what they call mop-up operations.
What they failed to do was to stop the fire from smoldering in the roots of the plants up on that mountain.
And when the extreme wind event arrived 6 days later on January 7th, it reignited the Lochman fire.
That fire then moved rapidly from east to west, down these slopes, through the canyon on the other side of this hill, and it lit up the hillside like a blowtorch.
And the first homes started going up, perhaps about 90 minutes after the fire started.
And by nightfall on January 7th, all of Palisades was burning.
So the fire started right over there.
It jumped throughout all these houses.
INTERVIEWER: So you watched your house burning down on camera from afar?
RESIDENT Yeah.
So I was on my ring cameras, and I see my house starting to burn down from the front, from the back.
And from the front side, I see the gas leak.
Our house just exploded.And from that point on, all the houses, all these houses that you see, just like disappeared.
We were one of the first ones to see the fire because it started just over that ridge there.
INTERVIEWER: So did you have time to take anything?
RESIDENT (VOICE 2): No, nothing. My wife took our passports and that’s about it.We had everything in the house, memorabilia, family heirlooms, all that stuff, and now it was all gone.
There’s nothing left.
RESIDENT (VOICE 3): I remember the moment very early on the 8th where I was standing in front of my house and I had the garden hose in my hand and the water stopped working. And that was a moment where I was like, oh my gosh, what do I do? moment of panic for sure.
You know, I started just running up and down the streets like looking for firefighters and they were in their trucks and they couldn’t do anything.
They said all the water was out, all the hydrants were out.
So there were firefighters there deployed, but there was no water for them to do anything with. There was no running water anywhere. There was no water in the fire hydrants. I happened to have some Diet Coke in the back of my
So we took Diet Coke and we doused the fire on someone’s fence with Diet Coke.There was no water in the pipes, partly because the one hundred seventeen million gallon reservoir above Pacific Palisades had been empty for maintenance for most of the year.
And as the wildfire spread, with more pipes bursting at destroyed homes, the pressure in the system dropped catastrophically.
This is my house.It’s the only house on the corner that survived.We can’t live in it right now because even though it’s one of the few homes still standing in the neighborhood, it has been damaged by the fire and also has high levels of contaminants.So my family and I had to leave and could not return.I feel like I’m doing the very best I can to report on what’s happening in Pacific Palisades, to give voice to the concerns of the community, but also to help my family return home.
JOEL POLLAK: Mr. President, my name is Joel Pollack, and I am a journalist, but I happen to live in the Pacific Palisades. We should not have to rely on buckets to put out a fire.
PRESIDENT (OFF-CAMERA/UNKNOWN): That’s right.
JOEL POLLAK: You can’t stop an 80 mile per hour wind or a hundred mile per hour wind, but there were many things that went wrong here that are basic and small.
California’s state and local leaders have struggled to manage the recovery.
L.A.’ ‘s hand-picked recoveries are left after 3 months.
Bureaucratic red tape has held up rebuilding permits.
The city council can’t figure out whether to waive permit fees, and residents say there hasn’t been meaningful property tax relief.
RESIDENT (VOICE 1): When it comes to City Hall and Sacramento, negligence is the word I can only come up with about January 7th. I’ve been involved in democratic politics for a long time. And so I’ve been so disappointed to see people not just rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.
I’m a Reagan conservative. And what was it he was famous for saying?
The worst thing you can hear is we’re the government and we’re here to help.
I’ve seen more of that in action.
RESIDENT (VOICE 2): I have so much rage in me against the administration and the government here and not only local in L.A., but statewide.
RESIDENT (VOICE 1): I don’t know how all these so-called leaders and people that are supposed to serve and protect honestly go to bed at night thinking that they’re good humans because we were definitely left to burn.
6 years before the Palisades Fire, there was another fire nearby, the Woolsey Fire.
It burned nearly one hundred thousand acres and destroyed over sixteen hundred structures, killing 3 people.
A year later, LA County produced a twohundredpage after-action report.
The report made a number of recommendations calling for a unified command between all of the emergency services.
Those recommendations were largely ignored.
State and local leaders neglected fire prevention and focused on hot-button social issues instead.
The California state parks even had a secret policy of letting wildfires burn.
and it would not allow firefighters to use heavy machinery in what officials called avoidance areas, places with protected plants or cultural sites.
California required firefighters to have an archaeologist approve fire suppression on the mountains above Pacific Palisades.
California Governor Gavin Newsom denies any responsibility for the fire suppression fiasco on state lands, claiming that firefighting decisions were entirely up to local officials.
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you about Governor Gavin Newsom.He’s going to run for president.
How does it make you feel?
RESIDENT (VOICE 4): It’s amazing the failing up that you can do in this state still.
If Gavin Newsom is becoming the president of the U.S., good luck to all of us.
Come see what he did.His creation.
Mayor Karen Bass was notoriously absent and overseas, attending a presidential inauguration in the West African nation of Ghana when the fires broke out on January 7th.
On her watch, the city spends more on homelessness than on firefighting.
RESIDENT (VOICE 5): I also saw just news that Karen Bass is going to rerun for election and most of the community is completely aghast that this type of A person like this who’s heavily responsible for a lot of the things that happened here and the cascading failures is able to fail up.
And we’ve seen it time and again in California politics.
People just fail up. She wasn’t even here.January first, there was a fire over here.
Everybody knew there was like crazy winds coming over and like she wasn’t even here.
Karen Bass launched her reelection campaign in December, 11 months after the fire.
Days later, she admitted to a podcaster on a hot mic that she had quote-unquote botched the fire.
Her staff made sure that video was erased.
INTERVIEWER: What parts of the response have been good or have impressed you or what leaders have done a good job?
RESIDENT (VOICE 6): I can probably name them on one hand. I think some of the local leaders have done a good job. Tracy Park.
TRACY PARK: My heart is here in Council District 11.
My heart is here with the residents of the Pacific Palisades.
RESIDENT (VOICE 7): Politicians are going to go back to Sacramento. We’re all going to be here, still left to clean this mess up.
This is downtown Pacific Palisades, or as we call it, the village.
And this tells the story of the fire and what could have been done to save the town.
Behind me is the Palisades Village Mall, which was built and is owned by Rick Caruso, a developer who protected his property using private firefighters and private water tankers.
Literally across the street is the business block which is or was the oldest building in Pacific Palisades.
It was built in nineteen twenty four and was completely gutted by the fire because it was not protected by the public fire department and the publicly available water supplies.
RESIDENT (VOICE 8): when it said life-threatening catastrophic winds coming and we knew there was a fire a week before 2 days before firefighters fire trucks water tanks and retardant and we’re there stationed ready to go: think about had the city of la done that in one spot that’s all they had to be was in one spot be pre-deployed and they never were
Caruso’s Mall survived.
That tells you that with enough resources, with enough personnel, with enough water, more could have been saved from the fire if enough had been invested in prevention, in water, and in firefighters.
No one has taken responsibility for the state and local government failures in the fire.
the failure to put out an earlier fire on January first that reignited on January 7th,
the failure to pre-deploy firefighters to the area,
the failure to send police to direct the evacuation,
and the failure to keep the reservoir full.
In fact, the LA Department of Water and Power announced that it plans to empty the reservoir again in 20 26, which could leave the burned out area without a crucial supply of water to fight another wildfire.
I asked my neighbors what would they want to know if I could ask the president a question, and the number one thing was insurance.
Many of my neighbors lost their fire insurance in the days before the blaze.
RESIDENT (VOICE 9): Yeah, so we were ones that got dropped right before.
Not only were we dropped, but we got really bad advice from an insurance broker that actually told us that our home didn’t qualify for the California Fair Plan, which we now know is just misinformation, but that was the information that we were told.
The horrific punchline is a paid-off home with absolutely 0 coverage and 0 recovery.
RESIDENT (VOICE 10): I’m a guy who lost my home who’s trying to figure out a way to go home who’s underinsured.
: To think that my insurance company I paid into for almost 30 years raise the rates, but not the coverage.
That’s been very frustrating.
RESIDENT (VOICE 11): Homeowner’s insurance has still been a total nightmare.
INTERVIEWER: And you’re still fighting with the insurance company?
RESIDENT (VOICE 11): Still fighting.
A year later.
INTERVIEWER: A year later, I’m still fighting.
California has an insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara.
He has spent 163 days out of the country, taking over 30 trips to nearly 2 dozen foreign nations and territories.
Even his Democratic predecessor, Representative John Garamendi, says Lara has failed his obligations to the consumers to hold insurance companies accountable.
RESIDENT (VOICE 12): I remember people were optimistic.
They thought, oh, in a year or 2, we’re going to be back.: I think reality is beginning to set in that this is a long-term haul. It’s going to take at least 5 years for everything to come back to some kind of semblance of normalcy, if not longer.
This is the Marquez Charter Elementary School.
This is where my kids went to school, and it burned down completely during the fire.
Almost everything at this school was completely destroyed, with the exception of the murals that generations of students had built of rainbows, which are part of the symbol of the school.
They survived.
The survival of the rainbow is significant because, of course, we know from the biblical passage about Noah and the flood.
After the disaster that was the flood, Noah emerged from the ark and there was a rainbow in the sky as a promise that such destruction would never happen again.
The fact that the rainbows survived at Marquez is a sign of hope for the
RESIDENT (VOICE 13): We’ve really seen the best of our neighbors.
That’s what gives me hope, is the community is resilient.
We are hardworking.We’re finding out the answers we need, even if our government’s not giving it to us.
Now it’s like, OK, I got to just start over…
RESIDENT (VOICE 14): almost before 50, I’m starting over my life.
INTERVIEWER: You do have hope of reestablishing a business here someday.
RESIDENT (VOICE 14): So my hope is that, yeah, I’ll be back here again and everything will be just like it never, you know, I never left, basically.
RESIDENT (VOICE 15): Bad news is we lost my house.Good news is we stopped the fire at my house.
So my neighbor’s house stayed. The rest of the street, right, you know, stayed.
It stopped at my house.
The house 2 doors down goes up for sale.
We ended up putting an offer, right, on the house.
INTERVIEWER: You’re back on the same street.
RESIDENT (VOICE 15): Yeah.Not the same house, but very similar.
INTERVIEWER: It went from a story where you fought all night and still lost your house to a story where you fought all night and saved
RESIDENT (VOICE 15): The house.The house you would eventually move into.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
RESIDENT (VOICE 15): Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Welcome home.
RESIDENT (VOICE 15): don’t know words. It’s crazy.