Beege wrote about this last month, but today the LA TImes has put together a timeline based upon the testimony of firefighters who were deposed for an ongoing lawsuit by people who lost homes in the Pacific Palisades.
For those who haven’t been following this, the brief backstory is that there was a fire in the brush above the Pacific Palisades on January 1, 2025. It was dubbed the Lachman fire. Six days later, high winds whipped that fire back to life in what became known as the Palisades fire. That fire would eventually kill 12 people and destroy nearly 7,000 structures including lots of multi-million dollar homes.
Over the past year, the city of LA has done everything it can to sidestep the fact that the Lachman fire and the Palisades fire were the same fire. Why? Because they had a chance to put out the Lachman fire, several days in fact, and the city failed. But no one wants to take responsibility for that failure, so instead city officials have repeatedly lied about it. However, there’s a major lawsuit brewing against the city and it’s becoming increasingly clear that poor decision making helped create the Palisades fire.
After crews led by Battalion Chief Martin Mullen spent New Year’s Day cleaning up the Lachman fire, he decided leave hoses out in case the next shift of firefighters led by Battalion Chief Mario Garcia needed them. Instead, Chief Garcia seemed to only see the hoses as something his guys needed to clean up.
At the end of his 24-hour overtime shift, Mullen handed the reins to Battalion Chief Mario Garcia, recommending that the incoming chief scope out the fire perimeter.
“I told him I left him hose lines in place overnight. You need to walk that and make sure there’s nothing going up on there,” said Mullen, whose regular job is managing the LAFD’s 106 fire stations and 30 or so other buildings.
Before Garcia set foot on the burn scar, he put word out to station captains about the plan for the morning: Pick up hoses.
At Fire Station 19 in Brentwood, Capt. Alexander Gonzalez got a text from the chief’s aide, directing him to bring a “plug buggy” — a pickup truck used to carry equipment — “to help pick up hose.”
Captain Michael McIndoe at Fire Station 69 heard the orders from Battalion Chief Garcia but he’d also seen the weather forecast and he was worried they might need those hoses if the fire kicked up again. He told Garcia’s aide and the aide told him to talk to Garcia directly, so he called Garcia that morning.
So McIndoe shared his concerns with Garcia over the phone.
Garcia “said something along the lines of, ‘OK. Let me go check it out, and then I’ll get back to you,’” McIndoe testified.
But the orders for the morning never changed.
Scott Pike was a firefighter who went to the scene around 8 am that morning. There was an engine crew there and they put up a ladder to get over a retaining wall leading to the burn area of the Lachman fire. But then they got another call and they all left, leaving Pike and his partner there.
“We were kind of making jokes, like, ‘It’s on us,’’’ recalled Pike, a firefighter normally assigned to a station in Sunland.
He grabbed his brush jacket, helmet and gloves and climbed over. He decided to hike to the end of the hose line — he was feeling good and thought he’d get a workout in.
He followed the hose lines up the hill about 300 feet and then noticed smoke.
When he got to the end of the line, at about 8:45 a.m., he noticed a handful of smoky areas in heavier brush, and a hand line that wasn’t cut properly.
One ash pit was so hot he didn’t want to touch it, even with gloves. So he kicked it with his boot, exposing red-hot coals. He heard crackling and smelled smoke. He looked around, and there were no other firefighters.
We shouldn’t be picking up hoses, he thought to himself. Instead, we should be filling the hoses with water to do a more thorough mop-up.
Eventually some other firefighters he didn’t know showed up and he suggested to them that the fire wasn’t really out and maybe they should do something about that. But the firefighters didn’t really listen. They were focused on cleaning up the hoses as they’d been told to do.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, I see what you’re saying,’ And then it was like, ‘We’ll tell one of the skippers. We’ll tell one of the captains.’ But, like, in the meantime, people were just very much like, just get the hose picked up,” Pike testified.
He saw a captain and told him directly what he’d seen. The captain suggested using some backpacks filled with what on the hot spots, but the order to clean the hoses stood. Pike thought the Captain he spoke to was McIndoe, the same one who’d expressed concerns about picking up the hoses to the Battalion Chief earlier that morning. But McIndoe said he never spoke to Pike. In fact, he claims he also saw signs the ground was still hot and said so to Battalion Chief Garcia at the scene.
As for Battalion Chief Garcia, he said no one expressed any concerns to him that day.
Garcia testified that at the burn scar, no one raised any concerns with him about the hose pickup. Nor did he see any need to leave the hoses at the site.
At 1:35 p.m. on Jan. 2, Garcia texted two higher-ups: “All hose and equipment has been picked up.”
Around 4:30 p.m., Garcia walked the area again with his aide to see if they had left any equipment behind. He saw no issues.
But by the next day the LAFD got another call saying there was grass on fire in the same area. A captain and two firefighters went to check it out on Jan. 3rd but said they saw no fire or signs of smoke. A second responding engine was called off. But they did not walk the entire perimeter of the burn. After 34 minutes looking, they packed up and left.
Four days later the wind picked up and the Lachman fire reignited and became the Palisades fire. On the day it happened, firefighters recognized this was a rekindle of the Lachman fire meaning a fire near the surface whipped back to life by the winds. But LAFD Chief Ronnie Villanueva later claimed the Palisades fire was a “holdover,” which is firefighter lingo meaning something was burning deep underground where it couldn’t be seen. In other words, it was no one’s fault that they failed to put it out. Very convenient.
A report about the response to the Palisades fire was intentionally watered down, apparently on orders from Mayor Bass. And the worst part is, the report didn’t even delve into the connection between the Lachman fire and the Palisades fire. Somehow, the one area where it appears mistakes were made was simply left out of the report entirely.
The city is going to lose this lawsuit and wind up paying tens of millions of dollars to the plaintiffs. That will put the taxpayers on the hook, but so far none of the people who made the mistakes or tried to cover them up are being held accountable. This is, unfortunately, how things work in the big city where all the elected officials are on the same team and no one wants to place any blame on team blue.
Beege posted this earlier, but if you haven’t seen it it’s worth a watch all the way to the end.
Last December we obtained a court order allowing us to depose a dozen LAFD firefighters who participated in the mop-up of the New Year’s Eve Lachman Fire. Those depositions confirmed the ugly truth which we have suspected for the past year – that firefighters left red hot coals,… pic.twitter.com/kRCCxH2P28
— 415FirePhoto (@415FirePhoto) February 27, 2026
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