Firefighters tasked with fighting the blaze that preceded the deadly Palisades fire in Los Angeles last year said under oath that they were concerned it might reignite, but the fire captain brushed it off.
Firefighter Scott Pike spoke at a Jan. 30 deposition related to a lawsuit against the city by thousands of families affected by the Palisades fire. The fire ultimately killed at least 29 people, destroyed or damaged more than 18,000 structures, and forced approximately tens of thousands of people from their homes.
“I feel like I saw something, I said something, and to the best of my ability, I think we could have done more,” Pike said in a statement.
Attorneys representing residents affected by the Palisades fire released deposition videos as part of the ongoing investigation into the origin of the Lachman fire, which sparked and caused the Palisades fire. This is the first time LAFD personnel have spoken about the events in their own words.
Pike said he was working overtime on Jan. 2, 2025, when he was called to help control the Lachman Fire. He said the fire didn’t have that name at the time and actually only put together the pieces he was working on for that particular fire later.
They said they were following orders in responding to the fire, but noticed a lot of charred ground in the area.
“Sometimes it’s very fire-proof for the cause,” Pike said, according to a transcript of the deposition shared with NBC News by the law firm representing the families in the case. “And I noticed that there seemed to be a relatively fast fire. And there was a lot of unburned fuel in the burn.”
He said he noticed that while working on the fire it was not fully extinguished, recalling at least one ash pit in the containment line.
“I could feel the heat coming off it and I didn’t want to use my gloves because it was hot,” Pike explained. “So I kicked it with my boot to expose it and it was red hot like coal, I believe it was a bush or the base of a branch, it was still smoking and I heard a crackling too.”
But when he brought it to the attention of another firefighter, he said, he was “a little blown away.”
He later warned an on-screen captain — whose name he did not recall — that there were still hotspots in the area, Pike said, “a warning to double-check the whole area, and maybe we need to change our tactics.”
“It’s not my job to step in and tell him what to do,” Pike said, explaining that his job is only to alert the leader that there are problems. “He earned that rank.”
However, he said that he did not listen to him. He said he hasn’t spoken in a long time until now because “it weighs heavily on me that no one listens to me.”
Because days later, the Lachman fire turned into the Palisades fire, which burned for weeks and became the most destructive fire in California history.
An adviser to LA Mayor Karen Bass, who is facing her own lawsuit from the fire chief she fired at the time of the fire, said the revelations from the deposition were “extremely troubling.”
“For more than a year, Mayor Bass has been very public about his demand for transparency and accountability to inform ongoing fire department reforms, and those affected have had nothing less,” the statement said.
The lawsuit includes several defendants, including the state of California and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), said attorney Roger Behle, who represents the families in the case.
California State Parks spokesman Marty Greenstein assigned the Los Angeles City Fire Department to clean up the fire.
He said the LAFD considered containing the Lachman fire just hours after it started, which federal investigators said was “deliberately started on adjacent land.” “The US attorney indicated, firefighters responded and the fire was smoldering underground,” he said.
Behle called Pike’s deposition a game changer in a statement to NBC News.
“The truth is now coming out, and it proves what we all know: The Palisades fire could have been avoided,” Behle said. “The government has failed the people of Pacific Palisades miserably. It will never happen again and we are going to make sure it doesn’t.”
