A Los Angeles, California, firefighter testified in a lawsuit in January that fire crews were ordered to leave the Lachman fire, which later spread and caused the Palisades fire, before it was fully extinguished.
Scott Pike testified in January in a lawsuit brought by Palisades fire victims against the city and the California state government. A 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), Pike worked an overtime shift on January 2 when he was assigned to pick up hoses from the Lachman fire. However, he said he saw about five areas that were still smoking.
“I didn’t even want to use my gloved hand because it was hot. So I just kicked it with my boot to kind of expose it, and there was, like red hot, like, coals … that was still smoldering. And I even heard crackling,” he said.
The Los Angeles Times continued:
Pike’s dramatic retelling, which city attorneys initially blocked from release along with transcripts of deposition testimony from 11 other firefighters, corroborates previous reporting by The Times that a battalion chief ordered crews to pack up their hoses and leave, despite signs that the earlier fire was not completely extinguished.
Pike testified that when he reported his observations to other firefighters at the scene, “I felt like I kind of got blown off a little bit.”
He then tried to warn the captain, recounting, “That’s how I approached him, is like, ‘Hey, Cap … We have hot spots in general. We have some ash pits,’” Pike said of the captain on the scene, whose name he did not know. “That’s an alert to double-check the whole area and maybe we need to switch our tactics.”
But the captain did not change tactics.
“It kind of sits heavy with me that nobody listened to me,” Pike added.
LAFD officials have stated that “the Lachman fire was completely extinguished by January 2,” the New York Post reported, and was barely mentioned in an after-action report on the subsequent Palisades fire, which erupted days later on January 6, wiped out thousands of homes, and left 12 dead. Pike said he was never interviewed for the after-action report.
“Only one of the firefighters we deposed had the courage to tell the truth — that his fellow firefighters and captain ignored his warnings that the [Lachman] fire had not been fully extinguished,” Alex Robertson, an attorney representing the Palisades fire victims, said.
