Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears to be deleting her text messages in an attempt to hide crucial communications from the early days of January’s devastating wildfires.
The Los Angeles Times reports that it made public-access requests to obtain the mayor’s text messages concerning her trip to Ghana in January. The mayor was in the West African nation when the wildfires broke out and was forced to return to the US. She was subject to intense criticism for the trip, which many believed served no obvious official purpose.
According to The Times, “She and her office have said she was in constant communication during that period. But it’s impossible to know exactly what she was communicating, because her messages were not saved, according to a city lawyer.”
Mayor Bass’s lawyer told the newspaper, “Her phone is not set to save text messages.”
The lawyer went on to say there is “no requirement that a city official or employee save text messages,” even though the city’s own policies clearly state that most records should be kept for at least two years.
The Times claims that Mayor Bass is breaking state law and the Los Angeles administrative code.
Mayor Bass has faced probing questions about her role in the January wildfires, which claimed dozens of lives and are predicted to rank among the most expensive natural disasters in US history, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Bass cut $20 million from the city’s budget for fire services this year, and was looking to close dozens of fire stations in the week before the fires broke out.
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition demanding her resignation.
Official incompetence and funding cuts have been blamed for hampering the response to the fires, allowing them to burn out of control.
It’s claimed that Los Angeles water chief Janisse Quiñones knew the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty when the fires broke out and that many fire hydrants in the city were broken.
It’s also been revealed that Newsom slashed the state firefighting budget by $100 million just months before the wildfires.
According to Newsweek, Newsom approved cuts totalling $101 million from seven “wildfire and forest resilience” programs.
The reductions were part of last year’s state budget, and were signed into law by Newsom in June.
The cuts included $28 million from state conservancies that increase resilience to wildfires; $12 million from a project to protect homes from wildfires; $8 million from wildfire monitoring and research; $4 million from a forest legacy program that encourages landowners to protect their properties; and $5 million from programs for vegetation management.
In recent days, Los Angeles County has filed a lawsuit against Southern California Edison (SCE) and its parent company alleging the company is responsible for the massive Eaton fire that claimed more than a dozen lives and has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup and recovery efforts.
The Eaton fire burned over 14,000 acres, destroyed nearly 10,000 structures and claimed the lives of 17 people, as well as injuring dozens of firefighters.
The plaintiffs in the case allege, on the basis of witnesses, photographs and video evidence, that the Eaton fire began when an SCE transmission line in Eaton Canyon sparked a fire in surrounding vegetation. SCE had failed to turn off its electrical circuits, despite there being a red-flag warning.
Back in January, in the days after the fires began, an increase in power-grid faults was reported to have taken place in the hours before the three major fires that ravaged the Los Angeles area.