The Santa Ana winds blew, gale-force, all over Southern California that terrible night of Jan. 7. If fires were to start, they were going to cause havoc, and no amount of human firefighting effort was likely to entirely quell them.

But the people of Los Angeles County still expect best efforts in the face of disaster on the part of the government agencies we hire to keep us safe, and new reporting shows that human and organizational failures led to inaction that likely led to the deaths of far more people than should have died, and the loss of far more homes and businesses.

For the Palisades fire, reporters Paul Pringle and Alene Tchekmedyian of the Los Angeles Times reviewed text messages among firefighters that reveal that some firefighters in the Los Angeles Fire Department had “grave

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