One year ago this week, the Palisades Fire erupted in the hills above Los Angeles, killing a dozen people and destroying nearly 7,000 homes and businesses. It became L.A.’s worst urban wildfire catastrophe. Governor Gavin Newsom blamed climate change. But, evidence now emerging from lawsuits filed on behalf of victims tells a different story — one in which California’s own environmental policies helped transform a tiny, containable brush fire into an inferno. Federal investigators have determined that the Palisades Fire was a “holdover fire” — a rekindling of a small brush fire on New Year’s Eve that firefighters quickly contained. For six days, the fire smoldered underground in root systems on state parkland, waiting for the Santa Ana winds to arrive. When they did, the results were catastrophic.
Why wasn’t the fire fully extinguished? And why did no one monitor the burn scar as the National Weather Service issued its most extreme fire-danger warnings? The answer lies in California State Parks’ own policies — policies that, according to court filings, “put plants over people.” Documents obtained through public records requests reveal that just weeks before the fire, California State Parks completed a Wildfire Management Plan for Topanga State Park that designated large zones as “avoidance areas” to protect endangered plant species and Native American archaeological sites…