Oct. 14, 2025 6 AM PT
To the editor: When catastrophe strikes, our intuition is to assign blame — and in Pacific Palisades, that blame has landed on Metropolis Corridor (“In fire-scorched Palisades, a library and rec center become linchpins of fury with City Hall,” Oct. 11). However searing mockery of our mayor doesn’t assist. She didn’t trigger the fireplace — although she’s going to lead the restoration.
Months later, Palisadians are nonetheless in shock and on the lookout for solutions. Many are additionally wanting up and rebuilding. The mayor’s government orders directing metropolis departments to behave with pace and coordination are good and welcome steps. The consultants she’s engaged are fulfilling the work assigned to them. All of this have to be matched with measurable reduction, seen to a group thirsty for outcomes.
Our group is motivated and united to rebuild. What we’d like are elected leaders and businesses directed by them to match our urgency and work with us to focus assets that drive actual progress for restoration.
The wheels of Metropolis Corridor are turning — so are ours. Let’s do that, collectively.
Maryam Zar, Pacific Palisades
This author is the founding father of the Palisades Restoration Coalition.
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To the editor: We misplaced our residence within the Woolsey hearth in November 2018. Now, one month in need of seven years later, our authorities hasn’t discovered the lesson — or classes (“After Palisades fire hydrants went dry, LAFD faced costly delays in getting more water,” Oct. 11).
On that Friday, Nov. 8, many people noticed our properties burn whereas not insubstantial components of the fireplace division stood on the prepared half a mile away, awaiting orders from their superiors within the chain of command to enter the fray.
So, a breakdown in clear, coherent, constant management. Due to this, so many misplaced their properties and all their possessions that day.
I’m not going to get into that fashionable buzz phrase, “accountability.” However efficient governance requires that we be taught from our errors. The Palisades/Eaton fires, 6½ years later, would seem to point in any other case.
So we now have right here a possibility to be taught from our errors, to make sure such management failures don’t happen once more. On this, we ought to be concentrating on the repair, not the failures.
Jeff Denker, Malibu
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To the editor: Kristin Crowley was completely right in her assertion that, within the article’s phrases, “extra [budget and resources] wouldn’t have made a distinction towards such a ferocious, wind-fueled hearth” (“After Palisades fire failures, L.A. promises to beef up staffing during high-risk fire weather,” Oct. 8). Casting gentle on all that occurred in these essential days is definitely welcome. Nonetheless, there may be one ineluctable conclusion to be drawn from the complete expertise: The centralized response to threats of main fires on the urban-rural interface can’t present us with any assurance of success sooner or later. The historical past of failure has been too constant, going all the best way again to the 1961 Bel Air hearth.
We merely should transfer towards a distributed, civil-defense sort of response that spreads the burden of safety of life and property broadly throughout the inhabitants in danger. Evacuation shouldn’t be our default response, however reasonably defense-in-place, with the help of a ready core of our citizenry. The identical holds for post-earthquake and post-flood conditions.
The payoff of this technique is obvious from the person tales which were lined by the Los Angeles Occasions. However on the stage of the person, the technique is high-risk. It turns into low danger by the use of making this our default strategy, in order that it’s deliberate for and actively applied. We succeed by cooperation.
This can be an enormous attain in our atomized tradition, and it might be massively resisted by the general public businesses, however it might be a thrust towards a extra communitarian future that we very a lot want.
Siegfried Othmer, Woodland Hills
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To the editor: If Ronnie Villanueva, the interim hearth chief, has by no means heard of a holdover hearth, we’d like a brand new chief ASAP (“A ‘reignition’ led to the Palisades fire, a finding sure to enrage thousands of victims,” Oct. 9). Additional, why has the pinnacle of the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy been allowed to maintain her job when the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty during the fire?
Jill Smith, Pacific Palisades
