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The arrest of a suspected arsonist did little to assuage the fury of Pacific Palisades residents who continue to grapple with insurance company stonewalling and other issues connected to their devastating losses that came with LAFD missteps
The announcement that an arsonist was responsible for starting a fire a full seven days before her home – and nearly 6000 others – were destroyed in the Pacific Palisades, the coastal neighborhood where Allison Polhill has lived for three decades, did little to bring her any answers about why her house burned.
“It gave me a pit in my stomach,” Polhill told Los Angeles on Wednesday, the day that federal prosecutors announced charges against a 29-year-old former short-term Pacific Palisades resident who “maliciously” set brush ablaze in Topanga State Park in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day. “It didn’t bring peace, it opened a wound because him setting that fire is not an explanation as to why my house burned down.”
Those answers, Polhill and other residents who surrounded City Councilwoman Traci Park at the Palisades Village Green, the eerie hull of a smoke-stained foundation of a Romanesque building that anchored the downtown area behind them a stark reminder of the devastation the community suffered, lie with the city of Los Angeles and missteps, the LAFD has now acknowledged in an After-Action Review Report released hours after the arrest of Jonathan Rinderknecht was announced.
The report details the department’s challenges with staffing and communication — and acknowledges a lack of readiness among the seasoned veterans of the LAFD. The report found that inadequate resources were dedicated to the initial firefight and that evacuation orders were delayed, causing roads to be clogged with abandoned vehicles left behind by fleeing, panicked residents.
Mayor Karen Bass – who was criticized for being on an overseas junket on behalf of former President Biden when the inferno began to rage, leveling 6800 homes in one of L.A.’s toniest zip codes and killing twelve – said the LAFD has begun to implement changes for the department, while highlighting the “relentless heroism of firefighters responding to the blaze.”
Among those changes, Bass says, is “strengthened interagency coordination, upgraded communications technology, enhanced wildfire training and evacuation drills and improved pre-deployment protocols.”
Still, thousands of families are still displaced, like Polhill’s. Park said “It’s a start, but not closure,” adding that the report raises even more questions. The LAFD After Action Report released this afternoon raises more questions.
“I intend to get those answers,” Park said. “I’ll keep fighting for every resident to have a path back home.”
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Michele McPhee
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