The fire chief said that staffing shortages and lack of resources have been pressing issues facing the department for years
Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley said that the City of Los Angeles failed its over 100,000 displaced residents who were forced to evacuate from the ongoing wildfire siege.
When asked by Fox News’ affiliate, KTTV, if the City of Los Angeles, and its Mayor Karen Bass failed the city, Crowley replied: “Yes.”
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Crowley said that pressing staffing shortages impacted the department’s response time when the blaze began tearing across Los Angeles.
“Any budget cut is going to impact our ability to provide service,” she said. “That is a ground truth in regard to our ability. If there’s a budget cut, we had to pull from somewhere else. What does that mean? That doesn’t get done or that there are delays.”
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Crowley said that staffing shortages and lack of resources has been a pressing issue facing the department for years. She pointed to a series of memos she sent to the city identifying in detail the needs of the department.
“Since day one, we’ve identified huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability of our firefighters’ boots on the ground to do their jobs since day one,” she said. “This is my third budget as we’re going into 2025-2026, and what I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we’re still under-resourced and we’re still underfunded.”
CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES DEVASTATE LOS ANGELES COUNTY, KILLING 5 AND THREATENING THOUSANDS OF HOMES
When asked about how the budget cuts, which slashed the budget by $17,553,814 from $837,191,237 to $819,637,423, Crowley said that they “did impact our ability to provide service.”
“On a normal day, our firefighters are running over 1,500 calls, and they’re transporting 650 patients a day – let alone the last three days of what we’ve had,” she said.
There is no amount of money that you could give to any government agency to fix anything-ever. I saw a very short clip on the news that showed some fire men standing around a fire truck in front of the Pacific Palisades Fire Station. Visualize this- Every single structure adjoining the station, across the street from the station were burned down in a smoldering heap. Only the fire station was untouched.
What does that tell you? It should tell you everything you need to know about the entire conflagration event.
The fire Department made it their top priority to save their fire station and the building that there paychecks come from.
That footage news clip should be made into an Andrew Breitbart expose’.
So throw a couple billion$ at the problem and nothing will change and I mean nothing..
The next funnie thing I saw was a cartoon meme showing Newsom from his back as he is taking a pee on a burnt home. A lady was standing alongside and in front of him proclaiming, ” Is this all we get for our tax dollars?’ Newsom replies while peeing, “You can’t get Fire Insurance either.”