LAFD team tasked with preventing wildfires accused of corruption, laziness before blazes devastated city

The arm of the Los Angeles Fire Department in charge of preventing wildfires faced years of allegations of corruption, laziness, harassment and discrimination before the blazes that have devastated the city.

It’s just one of the black marks against the LAFD — which include allegations that a deputy chief was drunk while overseeing a 2021 wildfire in the Pacific Palisades, the very same area devastated by the most destructive blaze in LA history this month.

That firefighter was later cleared of wrongdoing by the department and given a $1.4 million payout.

LAFD’s Fire Prevention Bureau is in charge of inspecting buildings, clearing brush and other measures to stop blazes before they start.

But the bureau has a long history of faking inspections, lazy code enforcement and incompetent, untrained recruits — coupled with harsh retaliation for anyone who spoke up, a lawsuit settled in 2022 alleged.

A 2015 LA Times investigation found that thousands of high-rise apartments, schools, churches, and other buildings had not been inspected for years.

The following year, CBS2 caught inspectors filing fake, “phantom inspections” on an elementary school and a daycare center that had already closed down.

LAFD fired Fire Prevention Bureau chief John Vidovich – only for him to slap his former employer with a retaliation lawsuit, claiming he was forced out after exposing a top-down culture of fraud and corner-cutting, according to the Times.

The city eventually settled the suit for $800,000.

Facing public outcry and swamped with a years-long backlog, the bureau packed its ranks with incompetent, untrained recruits and pushed them to conduct sloppy, incomplete inspections, according to a lawsuit filed in 2017 by six fire inspectors.

The employees alleged when they spoke up about the shoddy inspections, they were branded “internal terrorists” and denied promotions and valued assignments.

The plaintiffs, who are black, also alleged a longstanding culture of racism and sexism against the Fire Prevention Bureau by the wider fire department.

They alleged that black and women firefighters in the unit “have been branded by others within the LAFD as lazy and afraid to fight fires, which is why they go to FPB.”

The city gave the plaintiffs a $3 million settlement in 2022.

But when it comes to racism and sexism, the allegations go beyond a single bureau.

In 2021, leaders from three organizations for black, Latino, and women firefighters cried foul after Fred Mathis — a white, male deputy chief — received no punishment for allegedly being drunk on the job during a 2021 wildfire in the Pacific Palisades,  the LA Times reported.

After a seven-month investigation, the department concluded that he had marked himself sick after getting drunk and thus wasn’t technically on the job.

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Mathais told the Times that he did nothing wrong and that he was struggling with alcoholism at the time — but he never let it interfere with his job.

The department handed him a $1.4 million payout to smooth things over – which the organizations claimed would have never happened to a minority or female employee of the same rank.

That same year a black, female arson investigator sued the department for discrimination, and in 2024 a former firefighter filed a lawsuit over alleged homophobic harassment, according to the LA Times.

In 2022, department chief Ralph Terrazas resigned after widespread allegations of rampant sexism and abuse against women firefighters, and one of his deputies was taken off duty amid a sexual harassment investigation, the outlet also reported.

He was replaced by Kristin Crowley, the department’s first woman and openly gay fire chief.

When asked what the new chief has done in recent years to clean up the alleged toxicity within her department, LAFD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.