Torched - What really happened with the Palisades Fires with Jonathan Vigliotti

A wildfire can look sudden on the evening news, but the real story often starts days or decades earlier. We sit down with CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti to talk about his book Torch and what he learned reporting from evacuation zones, burned communities, and alongside first responders during some of the worst fires in the American West. The Palisades Fire and the destruction tied to January 7, 2025 become a case study in how climate-driven extremes collide with policy failures and everyday human decisions.

We dig into the uncomfortable mechanics behind catastrophe: the role of controlled burns and fuel buildup, how “contained” fires can smolder underground, and why National Weather Service warnings about historic Santa Ana winds should trigger urgent, visible action. We also unpack leadership and emergency management questions that still hang over Los Angeles: unclear handoffs of authority, delayed coordination, and the kind of normalcy bias that makes even “bright red” forecasts feel optional.

Then we get personal about what these failures cost. Jonathan shares what it looked like on the ground as evacuation routes jammed, vulnerable residents struggled to move, and help arrived too late in too many places. He also tells the unforgettable story of turning back into the danger to rescue three trapped dogs, a moment that reframes “service” as a simple decision to say yes when it matters.

If you care about California wildfires, disaster preparedness, public records transparency, and accountability in government, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with someone who lives in a fire zone, and leave a review with the question you want answered next.

Stories of Service presents guests’ stories and opinions in their own words, reflecting their personal experiences and perspectives. While shared respectfully and authentically, the podcast does not independently verify all statements. Views expressed are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the host, producers, government agencies, or podcast affiliates.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:01

What if the fires we're told are natural that we are told where natural disasters are anything but predictable? What if the real story isn't just about flames, but about power, failure, and the systems that quietly allow devastation to repeat itself? In this episode, I sit down with CVS correspondent Jonathan Vigiliati. I probably messed that up a little bit, to unpack his gripping new boat torch. This is not just a story about wildfires. It is an investigation into how policy failures, climate realities, and human decisions collide with deadly consequences. And he's not coming at this from a distance. As an award-winning journalist for CBS News, he has spent years reporting from the front lines of some of the most devastating wildfires across the American West and beyond. His work was taking him into evacuation zones, burned communities, and directly alongside first responders and survivors. That first hand access shaped Torch, which we will be talking about today. I read the book I just finished it. It is outstanding. Into something deeper than recording. It is a lived observation layered with investigation and accountability. And today we're going to be talking about those uncomfortable questions. Who is accountable? Why do some of the same patterns in government keep repeating? And what are we missing when we reduce those disasters to sap bites? Welcome again, Jonathan.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.

SPEAKER_04 1:24

Well, thank you. First off, as I always ask all my guests, where were you born? And oh, first off, as I always do to introduce these calls, it's an intro from my father, Charlie.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

From the moment we're born and lock eyes with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to SOS Stories of Service, hosted by Teresa Carpenter, here from ordinary people from all walks of life who had transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.

SPEAKER_04 2:00

As I was saying, where were you born and raised? And what inspired you to go down the road in a career in journalism?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

I was raised in Mount Kisco, New York. For anyone familiar with that area, it's Westchester County, so just outside of the city, about an hour on the Metro North into the city. What inspired me to get into journalism? I always loved and found fascination with other people's worlds. And always wanted to connect and live vicariously through others. I love my life, but that curiosity. That curiosity was something that from a young age I always recognized. And I always tried to pursue. Initially, it was through photography. And then I went to Fordham University and 9-11 happened. I I was a week or two into my freshman year, and the local MPR affiliate, WFUV on campus, was in desperate need of reporters to assist with the coverage. And I raised my hand. And that began the journey. It began through tragedy. And then eventually I found my way back to not just covering those kinds of stories, but the stories of others through all walks of life. And it's been a career that I've I've been doing now, what, for 20 plus years? And I love it. I love it. Every day is new. Every day is a window into other worlds. And I can't think of another career that I would pursue that could provide that for me. And it's, you know, to tell these stories. And you're you're a journalist by by having people like me on tell my story. It's it is an honor to be able to do that. And it's and now I'm on the flip side of this, but you know, because of this book, I've been doing interviews like this, and it it's it's an honor I realize too to have someone like yourself want to, you know, open that window and and see through my perspective. So that's why I say it's an honor to be here because I I really intimately appreciate and and know that.

SPEAKER_04 4:02

Thank you. I I I absolutely do love all this work, and I'm so passionate. I started this podcast five years ago while I'm still on active duty. And it was born out of this curiosity about the stories that I was covering for the Navy and just wanted to know more. And I wanted more detail, and I wanted the behind the scenes, and I wanted those untold pieces of the narrative that sometimes the military isn't as comfortable putting out, but that the public needs to know. And that was how how this show got started for me. I'm curious on your end, for your career trajectory, what many reporters and journalists start off at the local level and they stay look their whole career. What made you decide that you said, you know what, I really want to look at all these issues from a national perspective instead of just locally?

Controlled Burns And Fuel Buildup

SPEAKER_01 4:52

We talk about, you know, that window, right? Maybe what when talking about this broader desire to go network, because it was something I always desired. It was something I always wanted to do. I wanted to focus not just so much on my local neighborhood or community, but beyond. And I think that's because, you know, while I like a small fish tank, I really want to see the whole aquarium. And and in the case of here, I feel like I've been able to really like dive into the ocean. It just the kinds of stories, the variety of stories, the diversity of them and the people that you meet. I always craved not necessarily more, but just different places and different perspectives outside of my own world. You know, the town I grew up in, Maltchisko, I think at the time, 20,000 people lived there. You know, that was a that was a small fish tank. And you know, when I when I graduated college, the first place I worked, I did work in you know, small town local news, Grand Junction, Colorado. I think it was like Mark 180, 190, which is like a direct correlation to how small that city was. And those were great places to find my voice, to find my footing, to understand and really hone journalism, what it means for me and how I deliver the stories I tell. And from that, I just, you know, I could have found comfort and passion and inspiration from just Grand Junction alone. Except I always just had this desire to go to places that were foreign to me, you know, the next neighbor over the next country. And, you know, CBS has really given me an opportunity because it was the first network job, the only network job I've had. I started working at CBS back in 2015. And I was hired as a foreign correspondent. So I was sent over to London, where I was stationed for five years before then being launched to Los Angeles, which, you know, wildfire capital of really the world. And that became, you know, a lot of the focus of my reporting. I do other things, but wildfires, you know, the intensity of them, how how extreme our weather has grown, it that that's really something we're seeing in California. And I'm certainly on the front lines of it quite regularly these days.

SPEAKER_04 7:14

You sure are. And it was interesting to me as I did some background research for this book. I even watched a documentary. It's called Hotshots, if you're familiar with it. But it's about the wildfire industry and the people that are cold fire technicians, but they're really the people that go deep into the forest and fight the fires. And one of the central themes of the book, and I guess it should just maybe starve there, is fire suppression versus fire debt. I don't know if you've heard of that, where basically there is allegations or there was insinuations that California has not done a good job historically of conducting controlled burns. And by not conducting those controlled burns, as they do, by the way, in Mississippi, it was so funny. As I was reading the book, I saw that Ocean Springs, even where I'm from here in Mississippi, just did a controlled burn the other day. And I'm curious if because you didn't you didn't talk about it in your book. And so I was curious, like, did that play into some of the research as you went into this? Was if they had been doing more controlled burns, they could have they could have prevented some of this from happening, or some of the frequency at which we are seeing the wildfires in California.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

And certainly so. And you know, and I should have included that more in this book. I wrote a another book two years ago called Before It's Gone that dove into that subject actually very directly, but it was one that should have probably been carried over because it's a very natural fit for what happened in the Palisades in Altadena, because yes, you're right, it was one element of several that I think led to this cascading tragedy. You know, when you say control burns, also prescribe burns, they're one in the same. It's when local officials, local leaders, state leaders come together and they get teens out into areas that haven't burned in years, sometimes decades. And why haven't they burned? They haven't burned because we have a housing stock that is going up. We have a population that's growing in some areas where obviously you want to prevent fire from happening. But in that prevention, you have vegetation that grows, accumulates, and through the seasons, it can really grow fast when it's rainy. And then, of course, you get these droughts where it all dries out and it becomes that perfect fuel for fire. That should be a priority, trying to eliminate in a safe way those fuels. And for a number of different reasons, we as a state in California are failing to catch up with the sheer volume of vegetation we have that is posing this risk. Now, a lot of it is really difficult to keep on top of, specifically because we're talking millions of acres of this kind of fuel. There simply aren't enough people to be able to get to these areas. Funding is an issue. It is always an issue with budgets, manpower, an issue, as I mentioned. And then you also have the people that live in these areas that contest and protest these fires happening. A lot of lawsuits stall these control burns from happening. And that comes an anxiety. And we've seen this happen in other places, including in California, where a control burn will go out of control, and firefighters will then be suddenly, instead of responding to a control fire, a full full-blown wildfire. And so there is a lot of anxiety whenever control burn is presented. And so you've got all of these factors coming together, which makes it very difficult. I wish it was as easy, and I think when you talk to politicians about this too, and Governor Newsome has certainly spoken to this, if it was as easy as send somebody here and remove that vegetation, it would be done. Right. So many factors. And when you're running a state with as diverse needs as California is and has, there is priorities. And I just like endangered plants.

SPEAKER_04 11:06

I agree. That's one of the priorities. Again, Spencer Frat, milk, veg, you need to talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

That hair amount that I'm removing from my from my guns. So hey, you know, there are priorities. I think what happened, I know what happened January 7th, 2025. Certainly is highlighted that this needs to be a priority. Controlled burns need to be a priority, fast tracking them in a way that provides that safety and peace of mind for residents that live nearby need to be a priority because what happened on January 7th, the ground was primed. It was primed because that area hadn't burned in decades. And sure enough, when the fire sparked, it grew exponentially. And if that fuel load wasn't there, it could have perhaps, even without firefire intervention, snuffed itself out instead of really almost like a live wire burning down to neighborhoods where the fire has been turned into a full-blown conflagration.

SPEAKER_04 12:10

Right. And for people that aren't familiar with the Palestinians fire, which I think most everyone is, is I think it's like the third large, like biggest disaster in the United States history as for when it comes to wildfires, is that there was originally a fireworks or maybe somebody dropping a cigarette around the first of January. And then this whole entire area was smoldered. And people saw the smoke and they saw the smoldering. But and Mrs. Where you could help me fill in the blakes, but for some reason there was no action taken during those six or seven days to control that smoldering. Isn't that correct?

National Weather Service Warnings Escalate

SPEAKER_01 12:48

That's correct. And I'm so glad you said that because when I I was being very figurative when I said, you know, a spark, this really wasn't literally a spark. So the Palisades fire started January 7th, and it was really from a fire that happened a week earlier on January 1st, early morning hours, New Year's Eve. You had fireworks going off at the same time that you had people that were hanging out in this kind of remote wildland. It's called the Wii Wildland Urban Interface, where you do have homes in the hills, and then you have this just area of wide open space that then leads down to other neighborhoods. And it was either a firework that sparked this, or according to investigators, and and there is an active case right now as the investigation continues, and and there are charges that have been brought against Jonathan Reindernett, the man that is accused of sparking this fire with a cigarette. That fire started. Whatever happened, whatever the intention was, we know that a fire known as the Lochman fire started on January 1st. Firefighters responded swiftly, getting there within minutes. And they were able to get the upper hand on this fire within about an hour. It was declared fully contained within hours. Really a fast-paced response. It worked out methodically and exactly as planned, and it was declared contained. The one hole in all of this, crews are supposed to stay and mop up. That's the term in wildfire cleanup, which is really you're patrolling the area looking for hot spots, making sure there aren't any other embers that were left behind that the wind could then turn into more flame. They stayed for a few hours, but then they eventually were told to leave. Why that is is still not a hundred percent clear. Depending on who you talk to, the belief was it was fully mopped up. When you talk to other firefighters as I have, they say that they did see smoke lingering, that they warned the appropriate officials about this, their supervisors who brought it up the chain, but ultimately no action was taken. Why that is, I think that is part of this open conversation and part of the ongoing investigation. But what is clear, and what we now know as part of the phase one of this investigation being conducted, the ATF coming out with their findings, that fire wasn't fully put out. Those embers, some of those hot spots, they were burning underground. And fires, after they are put out, they have the ability to smolder and burn underground through the roots, feeding on roots of vegetation for some cases weeks. So what happens in that period of time, this lull? If you have no wind, then eventually there won't be any oxygen that enters that subterranean area, you won't be able to give breath to these flames to the fire. But unfortunately, exactly. But unfortunately, on January 7th, and you had this week-long buildup with the National Weather Service warning of this wind event. Wind entered the equation. Right.

SPEAKER_04 15:43

And that's so clearly described in your book. And that's why everyone, like I said, needs to read the book. The book is amazing. And you describe in detail these guys at the National Weather Service, like experts in this field of warred. How dire this is going to be.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

They're incredible. So the National Weather Service, they follow the science. They're the meteorologists that pay attention to things that we're not paying attention to, that we take for granted when we get a push notification to our phone, when we look at the weather apps on our phones. That information is derived in large part from the National Weather Service. The National Weather Service, since January 1st, had been tracking what looked like a Santa Ana event. And I say look like because it was early rippling, January 1st, but then you get into January 2nd and January 3rd, and the models really started to align. And in that alignment, they were very concerning. Already they were seeing 30 to 40 mile per hour gusts. By January 3rd, significantly stronger gusts. By January 4th and 5th, we're now talking reaching historic levels, 80 miles per hour. On January 6th, January 5th, actually, and I'm being very specific with the dates here, because that was two days before this fire started. January 5th, 100 mile per hour wing gusts were being uh were being advertised and forecasted, and we're talking bright purple graphics going out on all forms of social media from the National Weather Service warning about this threat. And it was almost like it was just going into you know a black hole. Because when it came to our elected leaders paying attention to this, it appeared it seemingly, and and as I document very clearly in this book, action action was not taken when it needed to be uh taken.

SPEAKER_04 17:35

There was they were predicting guests of over a hundred miles per hour. I just want to kind of bring in some of the notes from the book. On page 120, two days before, Bass tweeted on veteran homelessness, then the next day a tweet on Inspire LA. So this was where the mayor's office was putting their public attention on during the days leading up to this. And then, of course, the most controversial thing that we all that we all hear about is the fact that she was not even in the country when that happened.

The Mayor’s Absence And Command Confusion

SPEAKER_01 18:07

You know, and we all found out, and by we, uh, you know, myself, my team that I was reporting with as this fire was happening, my bureau, who they're on top of every editorial note, any piece of news, any information on the whereabouts of the mayor, of any elected official, we know this typically. It was news on January 7th as this fire was growing that the mayor was out of the country in Ghana. At the time when I first heard that on January 7th, I assumed that this had been broadcasted. Everyone knew this, I just somehow had missed it. But actually, no, when you mentioned those tweets posting about, you know, inspire LA, you know, inside LA and the homeless veterans, those were tweets that, according to my sources, were put out by Bass's office to make it appear like she was in Los Angeles in the lead up to this fire, when in fact she was on this presidential delegation that she was named for just 24 hours before she left. And this was on January 3rd, she found out that she was being sent as part of this delegation. My sources make it very clear that the mayor knew about the weather warnings. I've spoken with a number of people at the National Weather Service, also making it very clear that the mayor's office was on all of the calls where these warnings were discussed. But unfortunately, the event itself in Ghana, the day, January 7th, aligned with the forecast of the wind hitting on January 7th. According to my sources, the mayor made the decision, really believing that the weather would not materialize, that it was okay for her to go to this high-profile assignment. And so 24 hours later, she did. And just before she left, she sent an email to all of the top emergency management aid, you know, agencies, which is typical protocol for when you're leaving and you know that there is a weather event in the forecast. And she didn't make it clear to even those leaders where specifically she was or who was even going to be in control. City Council President Marquise Harris Dawson, who takes over when the mayor is out of town, was on that email, but nowhere was it specifically stated he will be taking over all duties. There was no handover note. And inside the body of an email, when saying where the mayor was going to be, it just said out of state.

SPEAKER_03 20:36

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

So when the fire finally did happen on January 7th, you get this impression that the mayor is close by because you have these videos being posted. No one knows in you know outside her inner circle that she is in Ghana. You have the fire chief, then fire chief Chris and Crowley, now needing to figure out what to do to get the pieces moving. And the mayor is a critical component of this. During an emergency, she is the commander-in-chief. She is the conductor of an orchestra trying to bring everybody into tune. You had the fire chief calling the mayor at the time, not even knowing that she was in Ghana until moments before that call when the mayor's aide made it clear to the fire chief where she was. And you had other officials going to the mayor, wasting a lot of time trying to track down the mayor who was not physically in Los Angeles when they should have been going elsewhere. And that breakdown also really indicates a breakdown in the lead up to properly preparing, because there was no conductor in Los Angeles, getting everybody into everyone was doing their own thing. Right.

SPEAKER_04 21:42

And there were duplicative efforts going on too.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

And not a lot of weight being placed in those messages from the National Weather Service. Because there's this, you know, when it's it's almost normalcy bias when you you think, okay, everything's gonna be fine, it's gonna happen exactly. As it normally does. And that came from this diffusion of responsibility because when you don't have your boss telling you, you got to be ready, you think to yourself, okay, this isn't going to be, this isn't the big one. If my boss isn't, you know, knocking on my door saying, let's get together, let's talk about this thing, that ultimately leads to a more relaxed positioning leading up to a disaster like this. And that is exactly as my reporting indicates, and as I saw firsthand in the field, what unfolded. Right. Everyone was playing catch up from the very beginning. Nothing was primed. No one was ready. This machine to respond to this disaster hadn't even been turned on. The engine wasn't warmed up.

SPEAKER_04 22:48

Well, what is interesting to me, Jonathan, is they've had California, that is, tons of these wildfires. You've mentioned these other previous fires. What, in your opinion, made the Karen Bass and her in her small inner circle think that this one was going to pass? Had there been other ones recently that had the same amount of dire warnings, or did you find any that were similar in scope, but that passed over to give her the impression that she didn't have to step up to lead?

SPEAKER_01 23:24

It's a great question. So the Woolsey fire in 2019 is perhaps the best example in terms of the scale, how it blew out of control, how elected officials didn't give the warnings enough weight. Mayor Bass at the time was a congresswoman. So she was not in control of the city at that point, but she certainly was in control of the city months before January 7th, 2025, when you had what was known as the Camarillo Fire in Ventura County under very similar weather conditions, extreme wind, drought, you had a fire that wiped out hundreds upon hundreds of homes across multiple different neighborhoods. And then in December, so a month now before you had the January 7th LA fires in 2025, you had a fire in Malibu that took place. The Franklin fire, I believe is the name. And I responded to that fire as well. And because crews were prepared, were on standby in the right zones, that fire was ultimately contained rather quickly. Dozens of homes were still lost, but the fire was contained because of a rapid response. That fire broke out under the same exact conditions, lesser so than what was being forecasted for January 7th, 2025. So there were certainly examples of the worst case scenario. There were certainly examples and recent ones that the mayor could have looked back to only a month or two in her memory to understand how quickly things could get out of control if you don't have the right kind of managers in place taking these calls and taking these forecasts seriously. What exactly gave her the confidence to leave in the way that she did? Every source I've spoken with, familiar with her thinking, was not able to go that far into her thinking, except to say that was this belief, wherever this belief came from, and it may have been heavily biased due to the desire to just attend this event. And we have probably all experienced this to some degree. We'll rationalize something as okay, we don't need to focus on that because something better comes up. We've all, I will speak for myself, I have sure, but it's not my job. My job is not to, you know, protect the public, especially in a moment of an emergency. And from the sourcing that that I have, and those very familiar with the conversations and the dialogue behind closed doors, there were conversations that made it appear that the mayor didn't think the worst case scenario was going to happen. She thought she could leave and return with little notice. Now she thought she exactly why is anxiety when she was in Ghana, and I didn't go into all of this detail in the book, but there was some anxiety in Ghana that the fire weather was getting more extreme in its forecasts. And perhaps that speaks to, although I do not know the direct thinking of the powers that be, why we saw some of those tweets, you know, really projecting confidence, stability, the mayor in LA, a walking down the streets with garbage men in one in one case, another one that would find this effort to get homeless veterans in sight, very noble causes, of course, but perhaps deceptive in the fact that the mayor wasn't actually on the ground in LA as these conditions are getting worse. And not only that, there was no press conference. There was no five press conference where, and we have seen this time and time again in Los Angeles, ahead of big events. In the book, I make a point of really drawing a connection to Hurricane Hillary. And this was two years ago, so 2023, the summer of 23, we had a hurricane approach and a rare hurricane approach the California coast in Southern California. It was projected to hit California as a tropical storm, 43 mile per hour gusts. So a much weaker threat than what was forecast to hit on January 7th, 2025, with this fire weather. And even so, you had the mayor, you had the fire chief, every emergency official standing, you know, side by side in front of a score of dozens going live on every local news station around the clock talking about the threats. Parallel to that, you also had the governor. Governor Newsome did a very similar live press conference, wall-to-wall coverage, really warning of this oncoming and incoming storm. And that storm, again, it hit 45 miles per hour, didn't cause a lot of funding. But even before that storm arrived, not only did you have the pre-positioning of thousands of crews, you also had an emergency declaration in the event things got really bad. The point of having that declaration, it opens up funding. It also opens up access to more resources in state and out of state. So if the worst case scenario happens, they launch immediately. That was two years ago. That was that was 2023, a tropical storm, 43 mile per hour gusts. That was what was threatened at the time. Compare that to January 7, 2025, 100 mile per hour gusts. Historic. It's never happened in Los Angeles. Hadn't had any rainfall, measurable rainfall in eight months. It was the perfect storm for a massive fire, and yet you didn't have any kind of front-facing moment with the public, sounding the alarms, you know, priming crews from across the state and nationwide. None of that. And so when that fire weather hit, when the fire sparked, and when that fire grew into a monster, everyone was playing catch up and no one could get there fast enough.

System Breakdowns And Auto Delete Records

SPEAKER_04 29:15

The whole thing is just crazy to me. I mean, things like, and there were so many mistakes like little mistakes because of that lack of coordination. Like the incident command center was initially set up in a well in the wrong location. Then there was the fact that there was that emergency operations center that has those three levels, I believe. And they weren't even manned. They were minimally manned for many, many days, and then finally came up for Manning. But then they couldn't even reach Karen Bass to get their permission to go up to the next level because the deputy mayor was just not prepared to make those tough calls. And then, oh, by the way, there was someone else, I think, on the mayor's staff who's supposed to do like the safety, but that person was on some administrative leave because he had a bit of bomb threat. And so there was somebody else filling in. So it was just this perfect recipe of disaster. And then on top of that, we don't even really know all the different communications that were taking place in the mayor's office because, oh, by the way, supposedly her phone was set to auto-delete every 30 days. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 30:26

That's correct. And what you have just detailed there, you know, I I go into the deep nuance of it in the book. I think it's we could have an hours-long conversation about how each and every step there led to failure. But to just pick up right at the end point there, I think those texts really became a critical moment for Mayor Bass, for her career, and for the trust that she was really trying to earn from the public. Because you had mounting questions at this point. This is now a month after the fire. People want to know what was known, what wasn't known, what led to what is very clearly a failed response, as the book outlines and as we've already made very clear just in this brief conversation so far. And in the effort to get those answers, there are what's known as public records requests. And journalists can put in these requests to gain access to emails.

SPEAKER_04 31:29

And the public can too.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

And that is true as well. Although it is much easier when you've got a team of people at the network level. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:48

Sometimes you do get stopped.

unknown 31:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Even putting in the wrong kind of dates, every little tiny thing can lead to a delay or can ultimately lead to officials responding saying, I'm sorry, that that request we can't we can't fulfill based on how you filled out the form. So we're filling out these forms like we have done hundreds of times before for other disasters, for other stories. Everything's being done correctly. Every major organization, local and statewide and nationwide, is doing the same thing. And what comes back is unresponsive records, meaning that the text messages, the emails can't be found. And that had a lot of us shaking our head, scratching our head. Why not? Where are they? And the LA Times eventually came out with their reporting saying that the mayor's office claimed that they were all deleted. Deleted. I remember hearing that and thinking to myself, how do you delete messages? The mayor's office then clarified, because there was so much frustration that followed, not just from journalists trying to get to the you know bottom of all of this, but also the public wanting to know what happened. The mayor's office clarifies that her phone, the mayor's phone, was set to auto-delete every 30.

SPEAKER_04 33:04

It's laughable, Johnson. It's laughable.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

I didn't know that this was a feature. I didn't know that as a public official you could do that. There is some technicality where you're supposed to, as a public official, hold on to and preserve all of your records, even if there was any murkiness or confusion in that. But was very and I make the point in this book. Within the second or third day into this fire, as it is still burning, there are still lives that have yet to be lost. The governor, Governor Newsom, announced that there was going to be an independent investigation. The mayor acknowledged there was going to be this independent investigation, confirmed that everybody was going to work together to get to the bottom of what happened. And recognizing that the mayor should have known that preserving all records was critical for that investigation. This phone was set to auto-delete every 30 days. That gave her, if we're day three into the fire, what, 27 days to change that feature to save those messages? And instead, that never happened.

SPEAKER_04 34:08

And that's why it's it's stick, yeah, the public and and we're not we're not dummies. I mean, that that is obviously what the public. I know as a reporter, you've got to be pretty unbiased and just say this is what happened, but I will be biased and say that that doesn't pass the stiff test. It really doesn't. If you're a member of the public, you're gonna go. I mean, I can tell you, even my text metagens that I do day to day with my friends, I I I take care to make sure that my my words and and I always think to myself, what if something goes? I hate to be this way, but I'm kind of this way. What if something goes south of this person one day and they want to use my screenshots? I mean, I I hate to say it, but I do that. I think a lot of people do that. So for her to say she sets her phone to auto-delete, and what does this mean going forward? Does this mean any public official can now set their phone to auto-delete and we'll never know what the thinking was or found someone who was really leaning behind the scenes? That's not right. Well we elect these people.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

It definitely you know sets a precedent and and allows a pattern like this to repeat itself.

SPEAKER_04 35:16

It does.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Without as much scrutiny moving forward. And I will say from those that I've spoken with, and these are people that are both supporters and critics of Mayor Bass and her administration, a lot of frustration with that disclosure, I will say. The fact that these text messages were set to auto-delete, that that auto-deletion was never reversed in time. The the people that I've spoken with say it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up. And I I think when you read this book, you start to understand maybe why things didn't add up and why maybe missing documents and records were better than those existing. And I won't, I I won't make those leaps. The leaps are made by those that I spoke to. They are documents in the book. I only go as far as my sourcing would allow me to go in characterizing what unfolded, but there are still so many questions. And the mayor and me trying to sit down with an interview with her specifically for this book over the course of many months, many phone calls and emails requesting interviews every time I was told no, or my requests were just unresponded to. No one got back to me.

Lawsuits And The Fight For Accountability

SPEAKER_04 36:33

Yeah. I think that's unfortunate. Did you have any luck? And I'm just curious because you didn't mention it in the book. The fam, the people who were impacted by the Palisades fire, they, in my understanding, and I know that Spencer Pratt is a lead play tip, they have a lawsuit that is, I believe, still pending. I I'm I'm not 100% sure. And I think that's also where they alleged that there were even changes to the official investigation. And they also got depositions from the firefighters. So before I was even your your publisher pitched me this book, it was really funny because the timing was just absolutely just very interesting because I didn't I was starting to follow the mayor incredibly closely, and I had already was a little bit familiar with this issue. And so when they reached out to me, I was like, oh heck yeah, I want to read this book because it was giving me that chance to really deepen into this situation. So back to the question, did you did you have any chats with the family's attorney and and then where that's going, or do you know where that's going at this time?

SPEAKER_01 37:40

I have spoken with some attorneys. There are a number of lawsuits right now in in varied stages. Some are trying to focus on the mayor's office, the the acknowledgement I've gotten from those lawyers representing some of those cases. That's going to be a steeper hill to climb at this point, depending on the outcome of other investigations that at this point are still open-ended. We know that or the LAFD did their own internal after-action review, and it was it was made very clear in reporting by the LA Times initially that the mayor played a significant role in watering down the findings of that report because they didn't reflect positively in the mayor's office. So depending on what happens, what comes from what is now being another review of that after action report, that could that could create some momentum for some of these lawsuits. Another lawsuit that is underway right now is with LA DWP because of the Santa Inez reservoir. I'm not familiar with where we stand with the latest on that. There is also focus on the state. Because, and this goes back to how we kind of started talking about this with all of the brush that was allowed to build up, a lot of that was on state land. And a lot of there's a lot of anger, as you can imagine and know very well just from all of the research that you've done from the community and from residents, that not enough was done in that state-owned land to cut back this vegetation before the worst happened. So it's going to be interesting to see. I spoke to Erin Brokovich, who I have become friendly with now, and she has always been an icon of mine. Sure. It was very nice to read this book early on and to write a blurb on it. And she was talking about the uphill battle that exists with a fire that starts in this nature. There's a gray area here. It's not like you have a power line from a fault, you know, from a faulty transmitter that has been known about for a long time as an issue, and you can blame the power company. So it's a little bit more dynamic in how you can pin the tail on any donkey, so to speak. And there are going to be challenges. And she acknowledged that. And that's certainly what we're seeing here on the ground in LA, there are challenges. Even, even, you know, the fire chief Kristen Crowley, she has her own lawsuit. And I think we're going to start to hear some more momentum on that and see more movement in the next few months. But she alleges in her complaint, she's been very vocal, that the mayor lied and was deceiving about where she was. And ultimately that played a role in this disaster. And depending on what happens with a lawsuit like that, that could open the door to really focusing in and narrowing down future lawsuits to City Hall potentially.

SPEAKER_04 40:39

Okay. And I think some of the things that I was struck by in your book, one example in terms of leadership and what did that say about priorities is that during this incident, like I think it was just maybe a day or two after January 7th, Mayor Vass takes time to respond to Sidney Poitiers immediately. And this was during a period because I do believe some of the text messages have been released, and this is obviously how you know about this one's particular story. And so there were text messages that were she was responding to the White House recently.

SPEAKER_01 41:20

Because it's sorry, I cut you off though.

SPEAKER_04 41:22

No, no, I was just gonna say, like, part of me is understandable. Like I've been a leader myself and I've been in charge, and I know that when my boss asks me questions, uh sometimes I will immediately respond. And then sometimes if my people are asking me questions, I might not prioritize that as quickly. And and that's just a it's not the best behavior, but it is human behavior. So that one I was kind of like, okay, I'll give her a pass on that. But then when a celebrity reaches out to her, I was kind of like, are you are you serious?

SPEAKER_01 41:53

So tell me it's tell me the next So this all happened on the day of the fire on January 7th. And thank you for for that clarification because while messages were deleted because of this auto-delete feature, ultimately the mayor's office did come out with about 125 text messages from the mayor herself uh to and from. And we've got public records of other text messages from other officials, so I was able to piece this all together. Piece things together. Really by you know, taping things up on a wall and connecting the dots. Quite literally. And this is what happened. So shortly after the fire starts, you have the fire chief Kristen Crowley call the mayor. This is when the chief finds out that the mayor is in Ghana. The chief talks to the mayor, lets the mayor know about this fire, how it is growing rapidly, the concern for lives and property. The mayor promises her full support, reminds the fire chief that there is an acting mayor, Marquise Harris Dawson, there on the ground in Los Angeles. At the time, though, he was at a city council hearing, stuck there for about an hour and a half. The mayor's office would later go on to say that after that phone call with the fire chief, the mayor was tapped in, was basically in her own situation room, paying attention to every development, directing this from afar. That is how it was made to sound. But from those that I spoke with, and this has become very clear looking also at the text messages that I've received, that I have reviewed, after that phone call, the mayor went to a cocktail reception at the ambassador's residence, the U.S. ambassador's residence in Ghana, where she was for more than an hour. And where she was receiving messages, people asking for help, and these are city leaders asking for help, county leaders offering help, and not a single response. So for more than an hour, the mayor was unplugged from her phone. She then leaves this party and And looks at her phone and has all these messages. Some she responds to, others she doesn't. She had messages from leaders saying, we are failing the evacuation right now. We need help. Those messages were not responded to. But then you have Sidney Poitiers, the daughter, the daughter of the famous Oscar-winning Sidney Poitiers, who lives in the Hollywood Hills in an area very removed from the crisis that's unfolding in the Palisades. And Sidney Poitiers, the daughter, is expressing concern and worry that what's happening in the Palisades could also happen in the Hollywood Hills because there's a brush issue there. A lot of tourists go there and look at the Hollywood signs to trying to get out in time in case there was an emergency. That was also a concern of Sidney Poitiers. And of all the messages that the mayor did not respond to, ones that were pretty critical in nature to respond to, she responded to very quickly Sidney Poitiers' message saying that she is sorry for the worry that she is going to have one of her, one of her aides get in touch with her immediately. And that's exactly what happened. Now, if only that urgency existed for those that were asking for help in the Palisades and those offering help to be sent to the Palisades. But that wasn't the case as other people with more notable names were prioritized.

Human Cost And Evacuation Chaos

SPEAKER_04 45:34

And as I as we start to wind down, Nicole, and I transition, the one thing that we haven't touched upon is the human cost of this fire. And to really illustrate that, I'm going to play probably just maybe about a minute and a half of a clip. By the way, I searched high and low on the internet for citizen footage. And here's what I mean by that. Whenever there's a catastrophe, there are usually you can go on X and you can put in Pacific Palace. And what I want to see as a conserved citizen is I don't want to see the poll. I love what the journalists do. I mean, this is you guys are the you know you you're the Navy SEALs of the journalist community, but I just want to see what the average citizen is looking at. And so I want to get all those raw videos. I want, I want, you know, just messy everything. Couldn't find. And I attribute that to the algorithms. Uh the algorithms are set up in a place to where uh unfortunately citizens footage, you'll see it immediately following a disaster, but then it gets buried under underneath all the mainstream media press lapory. And that's what happened. So I couldn't find anything. But I was I was I was a digger. Oh I was a digger last night, and so I dubbed high low and I found this clip and it broke my heart. So it was on YouTube, it had like 50 views, and I'll play about a minute and a half of it, and then we'll talk about this because you describe so this is what was happening as I was reading the book. I would read your your your your book and I'd read these just poignant scenes where you just by the way, you're you're just your your to your grasp of language. I know I'm probably just maybe feeling, you know, I just really mean this. Like there's one part where like this is Cohen's bulletin was the first work in a bureaucratic engine that would take days to fully order my you're you're speaking poetry, and I love it. It was it was beautiful, but then I also wanted to picture it in my head, so that's what I did. I wanted to find where people were just escaping from their cars because you describe those those big giant not cranes, but the things that would put the cars out of the way. And I was like, because yeah, and I was like, I gotta see what this really looked like and what this was like for the people who had to do this. So I found this clip, and I'm just gonna play about a minute and a half of it, and then we're gonna talk a little bit because a lot of your book is not just about the failures of the leadership, you do a lot of talking about particular people who were impacted by this fire. So I'll play this.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

We've just been evacuated. We've just been evacuated from this good Samaritan's car. You got it, Dad. We're having to walk. This is crazy. There's a fire right right outside our car. We gotta no not that way, Dad, Dad. Okay, Dad. Okay, I gotcha. He's very wobbling. Here, let me try. Which way do I go? Which way, Dad? To the sidewalk. Let me guess you're cool. To the sidewalk, Dad. No, no, I'll get the walker, Dad. Just get to the sidewalk. Over here, Dad. No, no, this is a car. Come here, Dad. They're just kicked us out of our car. Okay, just walk alongside the car. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna get you a walker down. Hold on to that, okay? We got this. We got the video for you. Come on down. We got this, we got this, come on, turn around. We got it, you walk in the hill. We got it, Jack, we got it. You're running.

SPEAKER_04 49:54

And I just I I can't even imagine being in that condition. I really can't. And and just knowing like there's fire all around you, you're now gonna have to just not only leave the things that you packed in your car and then, oh by the way, you're gonna have somebody with you maybe who who can't who can't move. And and you had stories like that throughout the book. The the time when somebody on Instagram contacted you and said, Remember the dogs. And I was like, how sad is that that's that what that person had to resort to doing.

A Dog Rescue And The Lesson Of Yes

SPEAKER_01 50:29

I if but I mean, I remember that clip actually, and I and I remember the helplessness of the son, who is his father is clearly struggling to move, needs help, needs help. Almost looks like he's also confused about what's going on. A lot of the people that were lost in the fire, and not just the Palisades fire, but the fire in Altadena, uh, they were senior citizens, didn't have family that could get to them in time, relied on nurses to come in and help them, you know, over the course of their time in their homes. And when this disaster strikes, can you just imagine if you don't have the help of your son or your daughter or a neighbor, the confusion that you're sitting with as those flames bear down, like we saw in that video. Also the chaos from the sheer panic. You know, there was the chaos that obviously you see, you get the sense of it not only with the people that are leaving their cars and the but the cars that are there. That was a traffic jam that was sparked by the lack of communication from officials about any kind of evacuation. So people evacuated on their own, it turned into chaos. That location, because I went there, that location was right outside Fire Station 23, which was used initially as incident command. And because you had first responders trying to get to incident command from one end and you had people trying to evacuate as you see there on the road from the other end, you had this bottleneck that led to really just a total blockade. And that woman that you heard crying there, I I heard that that kind of shouting throughout those first few days reporting. People who could not process what they were seeing who were truly panicked because there was so much panic. And you could really imagine when you hear her, the panic that everybody else was going through because it was a pretty empty street when you saw it there with the cars. There were a lot of people that had left earlier before I think that gentleman started filming. There was a lot of chaos on that street. You mentioned the dogs, and I'll try to tell this story quickly to keep to time, but I was so I was reporting from basically the first hour of this fire and throughout its duration. The first day I was struggling to process what exactly was going on, how disastrous this thing was going to be. Even as I saw neighbors go up in flames, I saw high school catch fire, palisades high school, I saw theater palisades across the street go up in flames. I didn't see any firefighters around. I'm still thinking of myself. The church. And I'm still thinking to myself, maybe I'm just not in the right position. Maybe there are firefighters elsewhere in this community. It's a big community. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe this isn't as bad as I think. But I will say I started to wake up more and more to this and the reality of what I was living through and reporting through when I get a message. This is late at night now on the 7th, like nine or 10 o'clock. My producer and I are heading back to try to get an hour or two of sleep before we have to wake up and do all of this for the morning show the following morning. And I look at my phone, I finally get cell service after about an hour of not having it. And I believe I got um an Instagram message, a direct message from my uh from my colleague, Jolene Kent. She's a correspondent at CBS News as well. And I opened it up. It was it was a direct message through Instagram. I opened it up and she was like, hey, my, and I'm paraphrasing here. My my friend saw that you were reporting your policy to high school. Uh her home is nearby. She has three dogs that are inside and they're trapped. As the message made clear, this woman was traveling overseas, so she was nowhere near the scene. Her husband had been at work unaware of the fire threat. By the time he tried to get back, there was a blockade. He wasn't allowed through to get these dogs. We were the only ones that were anywhere around to potentially save these dogs. And my first thought was not one I'm proud of, but it's a realistic one. And and because of all of this and everything that unfolded, it changed the way I now think about life and saying yes, because my first thought was, oh my God, I'm so tired. Sure. And now I and now I just opened up this direct message and it says red, and I I have to respond.

SPEAKER_04 55:01

And oh God, that's true.

SPEAKER_01 55:03

Yeah, you know, and it's like and it's like it was so selfish. It was so selfish. And I'm there with my producer, and I'm reading this thing to my producer too, and we're both so exhausted, and we're both just like not thinking, and we're both saying, firefighters will be able to go and get these dogs. Like they'll they're the ones that know what they're doing. I'm a journalist, like, what do I know? But I remember looking through the window of the car, looking through the rearview mirror behind us, you see just a world of orange and smoke, but not a single first responder. And so we said, you know what, we've got to turn around. And we did. And we drove, it was four miles, and we drove through a significant portion of the Palisades that we actually hadn't really seen during the hours and hours of our coverage. This was new ground that we were now covering, and still not a single firefighter. As we're driving to this home, I messaged my colleague, what do we do when we get there? Is there a key somewhere? She said, just break in, like break the window. So we get to this neighborhood on one side of the street, homes are already on fire, embers flying everywhere. On the other side of the street where the home is, the fire hasn't reached, but there are flames in the backyard. So the home the home is really being surrounded by these flames. And we're like, okay, we have we have a game plan here. We're gonna go in. We were told where the dogs typically are in the house. One usually hangs out by the front door. We I took a stool, broke right through the this this tall narrow glass window by the door. We we worked our way through, grabbed the dog, brought the dog immediately into the SUV, went back. There was a second dog that was hiding under the bed in the main bedroom and would not come out. We lifted, this is Christian Duran, my producer and I lifted the bed and grabbed the dog and then there and put it put the dog in the SUV. And then we find the third and last dog hiding under like near the dining room table, could not be coaxed, was growling. I tried to get some some leftover food from the refrigerator, still not coming. I remember that there was a flanket in the bedroom. I go grab this blanket, I throw it over the dog. We got the dog, like eat tea, rushing this dog into the SUV, and we make our way back down. You know, the the at this point, the the house like flames at home, like they're almost one. The house is still not on fire, though. And we and we drive away. And I call the the dog's owner, not the woman, but the but her husband, Andrea Pesov. And it's the first time I've the first time I'm making contact with him, and I say, We have the dogs. And he just broke down crying. And we finally make it to him at this location, this this roadblock. He's the only person at this roadblock. It's him and the police. And we bring the dogs out to him again, crying. He hugs me and he said, We could lose everything. We could lose this home, we could lose everything inside of it. But if we lost those dogs, our lives would be changed forever. And in that, and I knew exactly what he meant. I knew that there was this, you know, there is this line in life that tragedy makes so clear the before and the after. And there are those things that we are able and willing to negotiate to lose. You don't even need to negotiate, it's like take it. And then there are those things that are non-negotiable and that change your life forever. And people who don't own pets may not understand the non-negotiables own a pet. So I do too. I love animals, so even if I didn't, I would always understand this. But like I but in that moment, I immediately reflected back to the beginning of this whole thing, which was, oh God, I'm so tired. And so it was, and almost said no, or made some excuse up. And I it it taught me the power of saying yes, how important it is. It was the most life-affirming moment I can think of. You know, I'm 43 years old, certainly one of the most life-affirming moments for me, and a reminder of how important it is to step up and do good when you can. And it also became to circle this all back to just the chaos, it became a clear example of how much was needlessly lost. There were hundreds, if not more, animals, pets, you know, dogs, cats, you name it, that were lost in these fires. There were dozens of people lost in these fires. I didn't see any firefighters in these places. And if I, as a journalist, could go in and get these dogs, so could first responders. And this is not a criticism, by the way, of first responders. I dedicate my book to them, and I think it's important to do so because they are truly heroes. But as you know so intimately, and as many people listening to your podcast know so intimately, there is a chain of command structure. And when you're on the front lines, you have to live by that or you could die by it. You make decisions in the moment, you make unique decisions in the moment, assessments that you're not gonna radio it in and wait for things, of course. But to do that, you have to be in the right place. And to be in the right place, you need that chain of command to work. These firefighters weren't even in a position to make those assessments on their own because the chain of command failed them, didn't send them to the right places, and they never had the opportunity to do their work that they so desperately wanted to do. I did see a handful of firefighters on that first night. And let me tell you, it was a fight against a monster. They were never gonna win. They knew it, but they continued on anyway. Their water that was running out. At that point, the pressure at Paul But just dropped because when you have home after home going up, that's water pouring out from each waterline. You can't keep up with that water pressure after a certain number of homes are lost. But these firefighters, against all odds, stayed there and tried to do their best. And had they had the support and the dedication from those above them, they would have had a much different outcome. One that they would have felt so much more prouder of because I've spoken with so many firefighters that just feel to this day so defeated by what happened that day. So defeated.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:17

Yeah. Well, what I do hope is that a lot of people are gonna read this book, Torch, is going to go officially. When does it officially drop?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:28

May 12th. I should know this. May 12th.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:31

So on May 12th, ladies get your copy. I was very blessed to get an advanced copy, which is very thankful. I have a chance to not only read the book, but get a chance to interview you, Jonathan. It's been quite the honor to talk to you. I usually cover military topics, slows and failures and leadership is my sweet spot and speaking truth to power. So I really appreciate the opportunity I had today to talk to you about this important issue. And I really hope that this book will lead to other things too, maybe even a documentary one day. I can see it happening because this issue really needs to be front and center in every city planner's mind. Anyone who lives in a an area that is prone to fires, prone to urgently, prone to whatever, they need to understand how their city government works. They need to understand how their state government works, and they need to be a concerned citizen, and they need to understand that these people are elected by ups. And when they are not doing the job, we have the right to get them out of office. And that that's what we're seeing playing out. I didn't really touch on it during this call, but we even see now that the mayor's race is is is getting to a point where it might actually be contested. And maybe that's a good thing because we really do need to step up, know our neighbors, help each other out, and be involved. So, Jonathan, thank you so much for coming in Stories of Series podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:57

Thank you, Teresa. Again, my honor. I really appreciate you reading the book and having me on.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:02

Awesome.