LOS ANGELES (AP) — Earlier this week, as hurricane-strength winds blew through bone-dry hillside subdivisions, Los Angeles saw its worst nightmare realized as long-predicted firestorms engulfed wide swaths of the nation's second-largest city.
For Mayor Karen Bass, the horror show was compounded by every chief executive's worst nightmare. She was halfway around the globe, on a trip to Ghana as part of a presidential delegation.
As her city faced its greatest crisis in decades, the first-term mayor confronted a critical test of her leadership two years after taking office. After rushing home to help manage the city's response, she pushed back against a loud chorus of critics from near and far.
“LA has to be strong, united,” Bass said at a press conference Thursday evening. “We will reject those who seek to divide us and seek to misinform.”
Bass eventually made it back to Los Angeles by military transport, but only after a more than 24-hour absence, during which critics assailed her for not being better prepared. More than 5,000 homes burned as fire hydrants ran dry because water demand was so high it drained the city's reserve tanks.
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation Friday into the city's Department of Water and Power over the loss of water pressure. An online petition demanding Bass' resignation garnered 33,000 signatures.
"We have got a mayor that is out of the country, and we have got a city that is burning,” said Rick Caruso, a developer who ran against Bass in the 2022 mayoral race, on local television Tuesday night, adding that two of his children's houses were destroyed. “It looks like we’re in a third-world country here.”
Elon Musk called the mayor “utterly incompetent” in a post on his social media site X, leading a charge of conservatives slamming Bass for a cut to the city fire department's budget in July — even though it was later boosted with additional money and officials say it now has more funding than last year. Some conservatives also claimed that the shortcomings of the response were connected to a focus on diversity at the agency.
A low-key, longtime legislator and coalition-builder, Bass, a 71-year-old Democrat, is now caught between the fires threatening her city and the white-hot spotlight trained on an executive struggling to get a spiraling natural disaster under control.
"She will be defined by this crisis,” said Fernando Guerra, founder of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola-Marymount University. “She needs to be very proactive, not for the sake of her political career but for the sake of the city.”
The fires were not caused by Los Angeles' policies or flaws in its response, and it’s not just the city staring down the devastation. One of the worst blazes has raced through communities entirely outside city limits, showing how dry brush, steep hillsides, high winds and dense neighborhoods can be a lethal combination regardless of the local response. Experts for decades have warned about the risks of building and living in hillside neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood that was largely incinerated in one of the blazes. Los Angeles County officials have not been targeted with such intense criticism.
Bass became more forceful after a series of initial stumbles after returning from Ghana, where she was part of an official White House delegation to the inauguration of that country's president. Bass was silent while intercepted on camera by a reporter at the airport, asking why she'd been gone and if she had regrets. At an earlier press conference, she read haltingly from prepared remarks, directing people to “url” to find information online.
