It was a little odd when Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass abruptly fired L.A. Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley on February 21. The mayor had praised Crowley’s conduct during the wildly destructive Palisades Fire that began on January 7 of this year and eventually consumed over 23,000 acres, taking more than 6,800 structures and twelve lives with it. Bass had even approved a merit-based pay hike for her city’s fire chief just weeks before Crowley got the boot.

Bass’s office claims Crowley declined to call 1,000 firefighters to duty when the fire broke out and refused to conduct an after-action report on the disaster. Crowley fired back, insisting that her dismissal was retaliatory. After all, it coincided with her public admission that the LAFD was “underfunded, understaffed, and ill-equipped to handle the rising demands of a growing city.” Crowley’s attorneys insisted that the mayor’s allegations amounted to a smear campaign, and Bass was attempting to distract the public from her own lethargy.

Crowley’s allegations had a ring of truth to them. Bass and her allies were defensive about the mayor’s decision to attend a diplomatic gathering in Ghana at the height of wildfire season. Crowley’s dismissal did coincide with a bombshell Los Angeles Times report detailing the administrative incompetence that contributed to the Palisades Fire’s destructive force. Those who questioned the Bass administration’s budgetary priorities had been accused of racism — an instinctual gesture that exposes only the existential terror gripping the accuser. But the Los Angeles City Council investigated Crowley’s claims and, by a 13–2 vote, found them meritless. If the onetime fire chief was being scapegoated to shield the city from due censure, the city council would not intervene.

But the scandal surrounding the city’s response to the fire (which is distinct from the city’s scandalously torpid rebuilding efforts) smolders still.

In an October 8 email, the author of a long-delayed debriefing report on the Palisades Fire, LAFD Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, refused to endorse his own report. In an email to Crowley’s replacement, Ronnie Villanueva, which was obtained by the LA Times, Cook alleged that the final product was altered and amended in ways that he found “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”

“The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented,” Cook continued. His warnings are consistent with an LA Times investigative report from December 20 alleging that a behind-the-scenes scramble to “downplay the failures of the city and LAFD leadership” has been ongoing since the report’s first draft was concluded back in August — “possibly earlier,” the dispatch added:

In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available crews and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast “did not align” with the department’s policy and procedures during red flag days.

Instead, the final report said that the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”

Another deleted passage in the report said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire. A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.

The final report, which Villanueva took an active role in crafting, featured handwritten notes in the margins asking to scratch illustrative images of flaming palm trees and replace them with something more “positive,” like “firefighters on the frontline.”

Cook’s October email made its way to Karen Bass’s desk in November, but the city withheld his correspondence from LA Times reporters in response to a records request. “Almost 180 of Cook’s emails were posted on the city’s records portal on Dec. 9, but the one that expressed his concerns about the report was missing,” the paper’s dispatch concludes. “That email was only posted on the portal Tuesday, after The Times asked about it.”

That sure does smell like a cover-up, albeit an incompetent one. The Bass administration has demonstrated — often in writing — that it was more concerned about how it would come across in an after-action report on the fires than in ensuring the mistakes that led to it would never be repeated. “The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise,” read LAFD Assistant Chief Kairi Brown’s July communique to a “crisis management workgroup” established to massage the forthcoming after-action report’s public reception. “The immediate and most pressing crisis,” she wrote, “is the Palisades After Action Report.”

Where there is smoke, as they say, there’s fire. The conflagration that consumed vast swaths of Los Angeles long ago retreated into embers, but the fumes surrounding the mayor’s office are still suffocatingly thick.