Our colleagues Andrew Kerr and Susannah Luthi published a deeply sourced report on Friday about California governor Gavin Newsom’s decision last year to disband a highly trained volunteer firefighting force known as Team Blaze.
As a result, the California National Guard wasn’t able to get a complete firefighting force to Los Angeles—meaning one that included both firefighters putting out the active blaze and others following in their footsteps to prevent the fires from spreading—until 10 days after the L.A. fires began reducing homes to cinders. We’re not the only news outlet that seems to be on to the story.
The governor’s response to our report was telling. With Newsom’s approval rating hovering at 44 percent among California voters before the fires broke out, and 6 in 10 Californians saying the state was heading in the wrong direction, Newsom’s flacks have their jobs cut out for them. So we can almost sympathize with their pathetic, ad hominem response to our report, which they say was written by a “pizzagate peddler”—that’s Kerr, an award-winning reporter whose scrutiny of nonprofits has earned accolades across the political spectrum. It’s a shame Newsom can’t call on the Meta fact checkers to flag this toxic piece of “misinformation.”
The governor’s team also argued that the firefighting unit was “inadequately trained.”
That’s weird, because the Newsom administration tapped the group to help fight the 2021 Dixie Fire, the largest single-source wildfire in California state history, according to the transcript of a September 2021 National Guard press briefing, and the volunteer unit, which was funded by generous donors, met federal standards for combating wildfires set by a little-known federal agency known as the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.
Far from being “inadequately trained,” it wasn’t long ago when the Newsom administration praised Team Blaze as an integral part of California’s ability to respond to the type of out-of-control wildfires that destroyed the Palisades earlier in January.
Back then, members of the Newsom administration praised Team Blaze as a “strike team” that “builds upon the state’s response efforts during times of need.” Former Newsom spokesman Brian Ferguson hailed the unit as a “creative way to increase our firefighting capacity & ability to protect communities.” Were they lying then or are they lying now?
Read the report and decide for yourself.