The Palisades Fire, which started in the Santa Monica Mountains, was the reignition of an earlier blaze allegedly set by an arsonist, which had not been fully extinguished. Left to smolder unattended for nearly a week, it flared up on a gusty day, when firefighters were ill-prepared to battle it and hydrants ran dry. “It’s hard to imagine that a city like Los Angeles would have the ineptitude or gross negligence that would lead to a fire starting at 10:30 A.M. that would then destroy the entire town,” Padawer said. He added that the evacuation plan was also woefully inadequate. “If this had occurred twelve hours earlier, we’d be talking about many more than twelve deaths.”journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter