How L.A. Bureaucracy Made It Harder to Clear Flammable Brush

A mishmash of government agencies failed to keep public lands safe from deadly wildfires, residents say Brush was cleared last weekend in Los Angeles’s Mandeville Canyon as the Palisades fire threatened homes.

By Jim Carlton, Mark Maremont and Dan Frosch of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Impatient with government bureaucracy, including a $150 fee for permission to remove brush from state parkland, some of [Barry] Josephson’s neighbors cleared it on their own.

They might have saved some of their homes. Of 81 houses in the vicinity, Josephson said 54 are still standing amid the wreckage of this month’s Palisades fire, including his. It is particularly remarkable because investigators believe the blaze could have started a few hundred feet away, around a popular hiking destination known as Skull Rock."

"better maintenance of the wild lands could have slowed the fires’ growth, providing critical time to first responders and evacuees. And the lack of preventive work despite pleas from residents and warnings from people inside the government demonstrate how little officials did ahead of a foreseeable disaster.

The delays were caused by a slow-moving tangle of government agencies that own or regulate Los Angeles’s undeveloped land and are tasked with mitigating wildfire risks"

"In the Palisades, the city and county of Los Angeles, the state parks department, the California Coastal Commission, and the National Park Service all have a say in what happens on land surrounding residential areas.

They don’t always work well together. In several instances, the Los Angeles Fire Department has issued citations to the state parks department for not clearing vegetation from its property"

"Los Angeles has some of the toughest vegetation-management rules in the country, requiring property owners in high-fire-hazard zones to clear brush within 200 feet of any structures and 10 feet of roads or combustible fences. City officials frequently cite owners for failure to clear brush and send crews to clear the land of those who fail to comply, with the owners responsible for the cost.

But Palisades residents have long complained local and state governments don’t follow the same rules on their nearby land. 

“They neglect it,” said Bart Young, president of a Palisades neighborhood group that became so fed up with official inaction that it raised $140,000 to fund its own brush cleanup.

"The group hired private contractors to pull out dead trees, rake pine needles and clear vegetation on nearby state park land.

Young said he lost his home in the fire, but about 250 of the 300 houses in his immediate neighborhood survived. “It was a good investment on our part,” he said of the brush clearance."

"a representative from the California State Parks agency said that, for environmental conservation reasons, the state doesn’t typically remove brush."

"The permit application requires property owners to schedule a visit by a state parks representative, takes up to eight weeks to be processed and costs $150."

"After the 2018 Woolsey Fire killed three people and destroyed some 1,600 structures, Los Angeles County commissioned a report with ideas to reduce future wildfire risk.

The report was issued in 2020. More than four years later, many of its recommendations still haven’t been implemented."