Sen. Adam Schiff is asking for an independent commission to look into the response to the devastating wildfires destroying large areas of Los Angeles.
“For now, let’s focus on putting out these fires, saving lives, saving property, and then, let’s do the full analysis of what went wrong,” the California senator said Sunday on ABC’s This Week.
The fires have destroyed more than 12,000 structures and continue to burn across approximately 40,000 acres, resulting in at least 16 deaths. The fires, fueled by drought conditions and Santa Ana winds that are expected to pick up over the coming week, could become one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, according to California Governor Gavin Newsom. The largest of the fires, the Palisades Fire, which began Tuesday, was only 11 percent contained as of Sunday morning.
Newsom has called for an independent investigation into water pressure issues after numerous firefighters said hydrants were running dry in the first days of the disaster. But Schiff wants a more comprehensive review.
“I support that independent review,” Schiff said. “I think we should go further and, frankly, do an independent commission review of all of this.”
“I’m deeply concerned about these erroneous alerts, these erroneous evacuation alerts that have gone out,” he continued. “If people can’t trust when they’re told you need to get out, that they do need to get out, then it not only severely impacts the whole effort, but people ignore the alerts, endangering themselves and endangering the firefighters that have to step between the fires and these civilians.”
On Thursday, an inaccurate emergency evacuation alert meant for people near the Kenneth Fire went out to all 10 million Los Angeles residents, sparking panic, with only some receiving a second message canceling the erroneous alert. Later in the week, some residents received additional erroneous alerts. City officials say they are investigating what happened, and Genasys, the company that runs the technology behind the alerts, said it has “added safeguards into the software to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Schiff said the wildfires’ destruction reminded him of “visiting war zones, seeing that kind of devastation, just house after house, block after block.”
“In talking to residents, so many who lost everything, they’ve told me how their house is gone, their neighbors’ are gone. Their church is gone. Their store is gone. It’s all gone. We haven’t seen that before. Not in Southern California, not like this. And so, the heartbreak is just overwhelming.”
Schiff emphasized the importance of incoming president Donald Trump working with local government to fight the fires if they are still burning and later to support rebuilding efforts: “It’s going to be really important for the incoming president to work with all of us in California to make sure that we get the resources we need to put out these flames, if there are any still burning when he takes office, to get the relief to get back on our feet.”
Trump, meanwhile, has been spreading disinformation about the fires, blaming Newsom for a lack of water supply in a post on Truth Social. Experts and officials dispute his accusation, saying that the city had filled all available water storage tanks before the fires. Instead, they said the issue is that the infrastructure just wasn’t designed to handle multiple disastrous fires this size. Right-winger influencers, including close Trump ally Elon Musk, have latched onto a photo of three women in leadership positions in the L.A. Fire Department, claiming diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are to blame for the fires spreading as far as they have.
“DEI means people DIE,” Musk wrote in a post on X.
Environmental experts have said the fires are actually a product of climate change.
This past October, Trump threatened to hold back wildfire aid from the state. In 2018, as president, Trump reportedly delayed aid to victims of deadly wildfires that hit the state until an advisor showed him that the areas affected were majority Republican.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey told Politico’s E&E News.
