When the Lachman Fire was considered extinguished near the Skull Rock area along the Temescal Ridge Trail in the Pacific Palisades on Jan. 1, 2025, California State Parks employees saw the fire site was still smoldering but did not report to fire authorities, according to deposition video exclusively obtained by NBC Los Angeles.
When State Parks employees were deposed last year, one admitted that when she hiked up to the fire site and took photos, she saw “evidence of smoldering” still occurring and did not think it was “necessary to close the park.”
That ranger also said she did not communicate her observations of smoldering with anyone else.
An after-action report from the LA Fire Department said embers from the Lachman Fire continued to burn underground before reigniting and growing into the Palisades Fires six days later.
The testimony is part of a lawsuit of more than 10,000 people suing government agencies, including the State Parks Department.
“I joined this lawsuit because the people that are responsible for public safety need to be held accountable, and public safety did not happen in the Palisades,” said David Howard, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Howard and his family lost their home of more than 30 years on Jan. 7, 2025, just two hours after he evacuated.
When asked about what went wrong in the handling of the Lachman Fire on Jan. 1, Howard told NBCLA that he thinks nothing “went right.”
“I joined this lawsuit because the people that are responsible for public safety need to be held accountable, and public safety did not happen in the Palisades,” said David Howard, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Attorney Roger Behle and his firm represent Howard and 3,000 other clients in the lawsuit. He said because the Temescal Ridge Trail is State Parks’ land, agency officials were supposed to be monitoring the land even after the Lachman Fire was deemed a knockdown.
“If they see something, they could call CAL FIRE or they could call LAFD back. It’s their obligation because it’s their land,” Behle said. “Which is why their own operations manual says, after a fire has burned on State Parks land, the area that’s burned shall remain closed until department staff have gone up and inspected it, making sure there’s no public safety issues.”
The broader Temescal Ridge Trail system is connected to the Topanga State Park, putting California State Parks in charge of managing the public parkland.
In a statement to NBCLA, a spokesperson for the States Park Department said Behle and his legal team “misinterpreted” the agency’s policy.
“It’s up to the park’s discretion with visitor safety in mind,” the spokesperson said.
Also at issue is the state’s “avoidance maps,” which it shares with firefighters. The planning and management maps are used to show environmentally sensitive areas to be avoided during fire mitigation. On the maps, red circles indicate protected plant species in the area.
Although the state said “the Lachman Fire was not in the area marked as an avoidance area, nor even that close to those areas,” the map from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) shows the Lachman Fire burn scar does appear to contain those avoidance areas.
Text messages exchanged between State Parks employees on Jan. 1 also indicate environmentally sensitive plants were a concern.
“There is an endangered plant population and a cultural site in the immediate area,” one message showed. “So I imagine they are cutting at least one astragalus with those hand crews.”
In the same conversation, one of the employees said, “We will hold for now until I hear heavy equipment is being deployed.”
Despite the text exchange, the state maintained “no one from State Parks interfered with any firefighting activity (suppression or mop-up) nor influenced LAFD’s decision to not use bulldozers as part of the firefighting response to the Lachman Fire.”
“California State Parks is not a firefighting agency and does not direct the fire response,” the department told NBCLA in a statement.
Behle disputed the state’s claims, presenting photographs, which show a State Parks environmental scientist talking with firefighters.
In recent testimony, that biologist explained that he had spoken with an LAFD chief on Jan. 1 and requested fire crews put back some of the cut vegetation on a hand line. He wanted to ensure people hiking in the area wouldn’t be confused, mistaking that line for part of the trail.
When asked whether he took the firefighters to the location and pointed it out to them, he said, “Yes.”
“There’s still smoke coming out of the ground. And he goes and finds firefighters and a battalion chief, and says, ‘Please come up here with your hand tools and return to the containment line you just dug, all of the dry brush, all the fuel you just took out,’” Behle said. “To me, that’s influencing or interfering with what the firefighters did.”
The plaintiffs legal team has also analyzed drone footage, shot by a Palisades resident at the southern end of the Lachman Fire burn scar.
“The location that this drone video captured on Jan. 1 is the exact location that has been determined by ATF to be the point of origin for the Palisades fire, and that’s been confirmed by what we call photogrammetry results,” Behle said.
The attorney described the smoke visible in the video, something he said state employees should have noticed and reported.
But the state reiterated that “California State Parks is not a firefighting agency and does not direct the fire response.”
“The case against the state has nothing to do with firefighting. That’s not the focus. It has to do with the state’s duties to the public as a landowner, to go up and inspect their property, to go and make sure there is nothing dangerous on their property,” Behle said,.
Howard said the goal of joining the lawsuit is holding government officials accountable and making sure disasters like the Palisades Fire never happen again.
“We lost 12 lives here,” Howard said.”The truth of the matter is, (fire) is going to happen again. The question is, how bad will it be?”
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