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MY TRUTH -
“Los Angeles remains today, totally unprepared for the next major fire or earthquake.” -Asaad Alnajjar, Candidate for Mayor
Uncomfortable questions. What happens when the government prioritizes plants over people? Why was a gigantic reservoir left empty? Was finding a contractor to repair a hole in the cover of the Santa Ynez Reservoir too hard? What happens when rightful residents file a lawsuit and court proceedings begin to address the damages caused by the presumed negligence of officialdom, leading up to the Pacific Palisades fire?
What happens is you get a lot of gaslighting, misdirection, misinformation, denials, and probably outright lies from State officials. You see officialdom and the controlled MSM closing ranks. Then the LA Times awards the person most responsible for the empty reservoir in Pacific Palisades the title of Most Influential Woman of the Year in L.A. Yes, she is the most influential woman of the year, but only in the most pejorative sense, if you were to ask 3000 former residents of the Pacific Palisades.
State officials have described the January 2025 Pacific Palisades Fire as a natural disaster, an act of God, an unfortunate mix of wind and drought. Gee willikers, who could have known? After all, it was climate change at its most ferocious, and nothing could have prevented it. But the evidence emerging tells a very different story—one that isn’t rooted in nature or climate change but in institutional failure, environmentalism zealotry over common sense, and governmental rigidity.
Over fifty billion dollars in home value, infrastructure, businesses, and personal property were erased—not by an unpredictable act of God, but by a chain of bureaucratic failures so egregious that calling them “negligence” feels trifling.
The sequence of disastrous decisions truly gained momentum, leading to the devastating blaze started on January 1, 2025, when an alleged arsonist set the Lachman Fire in Topanga State Park. The fire was quickly reported, and according to documents obtained exclusively by NewsNation, the Los Angeles Fire Department informed California State Parks shortly after midnight.
The LAFD needed to notify state officials because the Lachman Fire began in Topanga State Park. This notification prompted the state’s involvement. LAFD logs indicate that a parks representative was dispatched to the scene at 1:46 a.m. and arrived around 4 a.m. on January 1. This detail is important because it contradicts repeated claims by Governor Gavin Newsom’s office that “the state was not responsible” and had no operational presence during the initial fire.
Roger Behle, the attorney representing over 3,000 Palisades Fire victims, stated that the state’s court documents and public statements are basically inconsistent with its own internal records. “If the state had no responsibility for this land, why are they sending a state park representative?” Behle asked in a NewsNation interview.
Behle added that “the state is playing hide-the-ball” and has failed to inform the public that not only was a State Parks official present early on January 1, but that the state sent a second representative on January 2 who, according to firefighters, directed their activities and prevented the use of bulldozers or trenching for mop-up. They were shown maps of protected plant species and told they could not trench, bulldoze, or disturb certain areas. So, despite bureaucratic efforts to save these plants, they were likely incinerated in the resulting fire, just as 6800 structures were destroyed. This was stupid, enormously expensive, and futile virtue signaling by State Park Officials.
Additionally, the LAFD leadership failed to perform thermal imaging sweeps, deep cold-trailing, next-day inspections, or dispatch patrol units—despite forecasted wind events. A high-ranking official later omitted firefighter complaints from the department's after-action report. Several firefighters reported that the ground was still smoldering, with heat coming from rocks and underground debris, and warned that pulling back too soon was unsafe. These are not minor mistakes. They are basic violations of wildfire suppression protocol.
Firefighters’ own text messages, later released, were an eerie prophecy:
“Still smoldering.”
“This is a bad idea.” (to leave the scene of the Lachman fire)
Six days later, on January 7, the Pacific Palisades Fire ignited just twenty feet from the Lachman burn scar. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) ultimately confirmed that the second, far more destructive fire was a holdover from the first — meaning underground embers reignited after not being fully extinguished. This confirmation demolishes the narrative that the Palisades Fire was an unforeseeable anomaly. It was a preventable failure of mop-up and oversight.
Compounding this failure was a parallel disaster created not by firefighters but by LADWP. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, which holds 117 million gallons of emergency firefighting water, was empty. LADWP had drained the reservoir months earlier for what its own union described as “minor repairs.” Instead of using in-house personnel, LADWP allegedly sought outside contractor bids, a decision that delayed the reservoir’s refilling well into fire season.
Residents were horrified to learn that during the year’s most dangerous wind event, the reservoir was completely dry. To illustrate the scale: replacing 117 million gallons would have required nearly 39,000 standard 3,000-gallon municipal fire engine tenders. A convoy of that size would stretch more than 312 miles, the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Firefighting experts universally agree that replacing that volume of water during an active wildfire would have been physically impossible.
It was reported that water demand in that part of Pacific Palisades was about 42,500 gallons per minute. At that rate, the water supply decreased very quickly. However, if the reservoir had been full, it could have supplied 42,500 gallons per minute and helped extinguish or at least mitigate the fire for over 45 hours with high-pressure water, since it was directly above the neighborhood.
Yet, in an outrageously misleading public statement that ignored basic firefighting principles and common sense, state fire officials later claimed that “117 million gallons wouldn’t have helped.” This statement directly contradicts firefighting principles. Water stored at elevation creates the pressure needed for hydrants. Firefighters reported that hydrants sputtered, lost pressure, or went dry entirely during the first hours of the Palisades Fire, exactly when the reservoir’s capacity would have been most crucial. As every firefighter knows, fires are fought at the edges. When water pressure drops at the edge, the fire's perimeter collapses along with it. Firefighting strategy targets the critical edge, not the center of the blaze. When the water runs out, a fire can run amok, unchecked, especially during high-wind events.
The human toll of these compounding failures was devastating. Twelve people died directly from the Pacific Palisades Fire, including seniors trapped in their homes and residents overtaken during evacuation. The larger Palisades–Eaton event caused an estimated 28 deaths, a figure widely accepted by community members and officials. The August 2025 JAMA study found that exposure to toxic smoke, inhalation of particulates, cardiovascular stress, and evacuation-related trauma contributed to an additional 440 excess deaths across Los Angeles County. This makes the Palisades Fire the deadliest urban wildfire in U.S. history by total fatalities.
Material losses were on the same scale as a major hurricane. The fire burned 23,713 acres, destroyed 6,837 structures, devastated Pacific Palisades Village, and vaporized more than $50 billion in combined insured and uninsured losses. Entire neighborhoods disappeared. As of today, almost no homeowners have been permitted to rebuild due to regulatory bottlenecks, environmental disputes, insurance market collapse, and conflicting state and local directives.
Instead of facilitating resident recovery, Governor Newsom has proposed imposing high-density, low-income apartment towers across the fire-scarred coastline under state housing mandates. These towers would permanently alter the character of a community destroyed not by nature but by public-sector mismanagement.
The most damning of these failures was the inexplicable and indefensible decision by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to leave the Santa Ynez Reservoir—117 million gallons of critical firefighting water empty for nearly a year. This reservoir was designed precisely for the kind of red-flag Santa Ana wind event that hit the Palisades on January 7. Yet LADWP leadership, under CEO Janisse Quiñones, drained it and never refilled it, even with record Santa Ana winds predicted days in advance.
The final insult and evidence that the whitewashing is in full swing occurred when LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones, the leader who allowed the reservoir to remain empty during peak fire season, was honored by the Los Angeles Times as an “Inspirational Woman” on 11/18/2025.
Does Webster's Dictionary now define inspirational as: procrastinating, inattentive, inept, unprepared, derelict in routine maintenance, lacking foresight, negligent, or cognitively challenged by foreseeable events? For residents who lost everything, this was not recognition; it was an insult—a reward for leadership that failed when it mattered most. As of this writing on 11/22/2025, the reservoir has not been filled, and the cover has not been repaired. Clearly, CEO Quiñones has not learned any lessons and should not be getting a participation trophy.
The Pacific Palisades Fire was not a natural disaster. It was a sequence of preventable errors and misjudgments that began with a smoldering ember and ended with a community reduced to ash. The people of Los Angeles deserve a full accounting of what happened, who knew what and when, and why the state told the public a story that its own documents now contradict.
There must be subpoenas and depositions. An investigation into criminal negligence is necessary at a minimum, but there should also be a wrongful death inquiry. Statutory and sovereign immunity should not be considered in light of such egregious, wanton destruction of property and life. Without accountability, the same failures that destroyed Pacific Palisades will happen again, and next time the damage could be even worse. No resident of Pacific Palisades should accept the lie that this was “just a wildfire.” This was a government failure, avoidable, documented, deadly, and unforgivable. What are the odds of any official being held accountable?
(Eliot Cohen has served on the Neighborhood Council for 12 years, served on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino, and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a featured writer for CityWatchLA.com.)
