Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage Magazine
We’re a year in from the devastating LA wildfires with no accountability and no justice in sight. But at least we have one answer. We know who ordered the cover-up.
“The author of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report on the Palisades fire declined to endorse it because of substantial deletions that altered his findings, calling the edited version “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”
Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook emailed then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva and other LAFD officials with the subject line “Palisades AARR Non-Endorsement,” about an hour after the highly anticipated report was made public Oct. 8.
“Having reviewed the revised version submitted by your office, I must respectfully decline to endorse it in its current form,” Cook wrote in the email obtained by The Times. “The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented.”
Who ordered the cover-up? Much as in Denmark, a fish rots from the head, so does a city.
“Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass secretly altered the official Palisades Fire response report to downplay the failures made by the city and fire department when the deadly blaze erupted, a new report said.
Bass, after seeing an early draft of the after-action report, wanted key findings of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s shortcomings scrubbed or watered down — and even warned then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva the unedited conclusions could expose the city to legal liability, sources close to the Democrat’s staff told the Los Angeles Times.
Bass was cautioned that the self-serving tweaks in with the report was a “bad idea” that could torpedo her political career, but still withheld the working draft until after changes were made, insiders told the Times.”
It doesn’t just look bad, it is bad, because this wasn’t just incompetence, it was a pattern of negligence that prioritized woke agendas over public safety.
Now, it’s not just the crime, it’s also the cover-up.
This latest fire was set by a leftwing terrorist, but that being said, wild fires are a yearly thing in California. They can be contained if the resources are managed properly. Dems always manage to make a bad situation worse.
This is the rank incompetence and stupidity that caused the current hellscape.
24 DEAD. $135-$150 billion in damage. 10,000 homes and businesses destroyed.
But no water.
Instead of cleaning the forest floors, removing dead trees, capturing rain runoff, and making sure California has water in the hydrants, Dems deflect and blame “climate change”.
Gavin Newsom cut more than $100 million from California’s fire budgets. Instead, he spent it on things like tranny cafes, ‘social justice’ art, gay choirs, illegals, and the NAACP. There is no water in the reservoirs because California’s leftist regime returned it to the ocean, to ‘save a fish’, which hasn’t been seen in over a decade.
BTW: $100 million raised for Los Angeles fire victims was funneled to over 188 NGOs, many unrelated to the fire, including a musicians’ charity and an NGO whose whole entire job is to raise money for other NGOs.
As California homeowners watch their lives go up in flames, they may want to pause a moment and credit the assclowns in their own state and local governments for creating obstacles to wildfire prevention.
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