TORCHED

A CBS News national correspondent condemns the unforced errors that made the destructive L.A. fires of 2025 all the worse.

It takes time, Barack Obama warned, for a community to recover from disaster, discarding poor prior practices and experimenting with new ones. Vigliotti’s on-the-ground account suggests that at least some of the Los Angeles fire disaster of 2025 was the result of a rush to rebuild in the same old ways and in the same dangerous places after the previous devastating fire of 2018. That hurry, he writes, has certainly been at play in the aftermath of the 2025 fire and its demand for speedy recovery, because the 2028 Olympics are slated to be held in Los Angeles, and politicians will pay a price if the venue has to be changed for lack of that recovery—especially L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, but also Governor Gavin Newsom. Preparing for the Olympics has included a costly and ineffective effort to remove homeless people from the city’s streets, which, among other programs, diverted significant funds from the L.A. Fire Department—and, as one firefighter said, “we still have nearly 100 broken-down fire engines, trucks and ambulances sitting in the maintenance yard because of those cuts.” Those vehicles could have come in handy amid cascading failures that, the author writes, included lack of leadership (Bass was in Ghana when the fire that ravaged the Palisades neighborhood broke out, though she had ample warning of its likelihood), lack of coordinated communications, lack of firefighters and equipment in the face of ever-worsening climate change and the blazes it fuels. That chain of failures, Vigliotti writes, instantly took on a political dimension, with firefighters rendered as “collateral in a political war.” The fire is now out, but the gold rush is on: Even as future conflagrations loom, speculators have bought up the ash-covered lots, “cashing in on ruin.”

A fittingly fiery exposé of a disaster that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated.