Line of fire: LA mayor Karen Bass faces scrutiny as historic blazes devour city

As a series of wildfires in the Los Angeles area grew into raging infernos, the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, was halfway around the world – part of the US delegation attending the inauguration of the new president of Ghana.

By the time she returned home on Wednesday, the fires had seared through thousands of acres. They destroyed more than 10,000 structures and killed at least 11. And Bass was facing a barrage of questions and criticism – both from within LA, and outside.

Angelenos, living through one of the worst disasters the region has faced in decades, asked why it had taken the mayor so long to return. Political rivals questioned why she had even embarked on an international trip, given that the National Weather Service in Los Angeles had been warning of “extreme fire weather conditions”. Advocates for the unhoused were flabbergasted when the city announced it had made just 135 hotel vouchers available, given that a staggering 75,000 people in LA lived on the streets, with little protection against noxious wildfire smoke. Some critics charged the city had been ill prepared. Others, including the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times – harped on reports that the city had cut the fire department’s funding in its latest budget. Those reports were incomplete at best inaccurate at worst, but by the time news outlets began reporting on the fiscal nuances, the damage had been done.

At a press conference Thursday, Bass dismissed a question about her leadership – saying the “unprecedented” nature of the fires had stretched the city’s resources to respond. She declined to answer a reporter’s question about her initial absence – saying she was focused on saving lives and homes. When pressed again, she responded: “I just said what I believe is the most important thing for us to do right now and that is going to continue to be my focus.”

Bass became LA’s first female and second Black mayor in 2022, after serving as a US congresswoman for a decade. She took office at a tumultuous moment in the city. Trust in the city’s leadership was at an all time low after racist audio of city councilmembers became public. In the ensuing years, her approach to policing and homelessness drew skepticism both from those hoping for a more hard-handed approach and those hoping for more compassion, but she was broadly credited for her pragmatic leadership, helping stabilise city hall.

Over the past few days that goodwill has begun to fray. “LA is scared, seething and looking for a scapegoat,” wrote the longtime LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano.

But beneath this flood of frustration is an even more dismaying reality – that much of the catastrophe befalling LA is beyond its mayor’s control and instead the result of decades of policy decisions and a climate that is creating conditions for more extreme fires.

Destroyed homes in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on 10 January 2025. Photograph: Allison Dinner/EPA

The horrors that unfolded around US’s second largest city this week were shocking – but they were also, to some extent, expected. The blazes are part of the wildfire crisis that’s been unfolding in the American west for the last decade, from the 2017 fire siege in California’s Bay area to the 2018 blaze that destroyed Paradise and killed 85 people.

The fires that ravaged Los Angeles unfolded on a stunning landscape that is prone to burn, yet dotted with thousands of homes built over the years. Hurricane-force winds barreled through an area that hadn’t seen substantial rain in months, leading to massive conflagrations, fanned by hurricane-force gusts. It created a firestorm that spread at a rate that far exceeded firefighters’ ability to respond.

Firefighting forces across the state are deeply understaffed and have been struggling for years to battle the barrage of extreme wildfires. The 9,000 firefighters in Los Angeles county – including crews with the county’s fire department and 29 other fire agencies – were overwhelmed by the size and ferocity of the wildfires across the region, calling for aid from neighboring counties and states.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris meet with Gavin Newsom, Deanne Criswell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, and Karen Bass. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP

Infrastructure failed, too. “This is like a third world country,” said Rick Caruso, the billionaire real estate developer who lost the mayoral race to Bass, calling into a local radio station. Caruso was referring to reports that water hydrants in the Pacific Palisades, where his daughter lost her home, ran dry. A Los Angeles Times report that a massive reservoir in the Pacific Palisades was closed for repairs and empty at the time of the fire has raised further questions.

The city did, in fact, have enough water, but the system was not built for fighting multiple infernos. The LA department of water and power said that fire crews drew so much water, so fast in the initial hours of the fight, that the tanks that maintain water pressure to help supplies travel uphill to hydrants were strained.

“We pushed the system to the extreme,” the LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.” Crews instead had to rely on water trucks.

Building the infrastructure that could sustain firefighting efforts in this era of megafires would be a massive financial and structural undertaking.

And while more water would have been helpful, it would not have changed the outcome of the fire, said Zeke Lunder, a northern California-based wildfire expert, in a livestream earlier in the week. “The fire was already massive when they started running out of water up here – the fire was already huge and out of control.”

More firefighting resources would have helped as well. LA’s fire department’s budget was increased by $50m in November, in a deal settled after the omnibus budget bill was signed. Still, Kristin Crowley, the LA fire chief, said on Friday that the department needed to be “properly funded” with dozens of new fire stations and twice the number of personnel. Asked repeatedly by a reporter if the city had failed the fire department, she said “yes”.

A firefighter battles the Palisades fire in Los Angeles on 8 January 2025. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AP

But building out a firefighting force sizable enough to take on these conflagrations would require large investments on the local, state and federal level.

“It’s kind of a distraction I think to get mad at the politicians, to get mad at the LA department of water and power,” Lunder said. “We don’t get mad at a city when a hurricane comes in, or a tornado comes in and blows all the houses away. But somehow we treat Santa Anas differently, like somehow we expect we can manage this.”

Still, if megafires are a part of Los Angeles’ future, its response to the fires this week will have to be investigated.

Bass has said as much, arguing her team will examine its response to the fire at the appropriate time.

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, on Friday called for an investigation into the lost water supply and pressure issues and asked the city to look at its “preparation and response procedures”.

A week ago, Jim Newton, a UCLA lecturer and veteran journalist in the region, predicted this would be a pivotal year for Bass. He had no idea just how prescient his analysis would be and the way in which Bass and her leadership would come into the national spotlight.

Her absence felt reminiscent of when the city’s mayor, James Hahn, was out of town on 9/11 and the former governor Pat Brown being in Greece when the 1965 Watts riots began, he said in another CalMatters column this week.

It was unfortunate that Bass was out of the country when the fires began, Newton said, but he argued that is a misstep rather than a failure. “The fact she was out of town when it happened is something she will feel bad about and people will remember but that’s not what I consider her accountability in this.”

She should instead be held to account for her response to the fire. “Nothing looks great while a fire is burning,” he told the Guardian. “People are upset as they have every right to be. They are looking for people to blame.”

“Who was the mayor of San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake? We don’t blame that person for the 1906 earthquake,” he said. “Sometimes there’s just coincidences and accidents and if that’s all this is for her this may not be a terrible black mark on her record.”

The role of mayor will probably be the last political position for Bass, 71, Newton predicted. It’s not a stepping stone for her, but a capstone. She will need to demonstrate she is firmly in charge of the response and that response is being handled as thoroughly and sensibly as possible in order to regain trust, he said.