Los Angeles Fire Chief Faces Calls for Resignation

As a disastrous fire continues to burn on the city’s west side, some are calling Chief Kristin Crowley to account: Why wasn’t the city better prepared?

Three years ago, when Kristin Crowley became the first female chief in the history of the Los Angeles Fire Department, she was lauded as a force for stability.

“There is no one better equipped to lead the L.A.F.D. at this moment than Kristin,” the mayor at the time, Eric Garcetti, said of the 22-year veteran of the department. “She’s ready to make history.”

Now, as Los Angeles reels under an extended onslaught of wind-driven wildfire, its fire chief is being buffeted by challenges in and outside her ranks, tension with City Hall and questions about her department’s preparedness. The fires, which are still unfolding on the city’s west side and in the community of Altadena outside the city, have so far leveled nearly 40,000 acres and claimed at least 27 lives.

Last week, complaints about funding for her department boiled over into a public dispute between Mayor Karen Bass and Chief Crowley. This week, veteran fire managers charged that she and her staff should have positioned more engines in advance in high-risk areas like Pacific Palisades, where the fires began on Jan. 7.

At a news conference, she struggled to explain why an outgoing shift of about 1,000 firefighters was not ordered to remain at work last Tuesday as a precaution amid extreme red-flag conditions. “We surged where we could surge,” she said.

A Jan. 13 letter signed by unnamed “retired and active L.A.F.D. chief officers” accused her of a host of management failures and called for her to step down. “A large number of chief officers do not believe you are up to the task,” the five-page letter read in part.