It was just after noon on Friday, four days after the devastating Palisades fire, that Los Angeles Fire Chief Christine Crowley’s chest suddenly appeared to crack open.
“I’ve been sitting in this seat for three years sounding the alarm. We need more,” Crowley told Fox LA’s Gigi Graciette during an extended live spot. “We want adequate funding for our firefighters so they can do their jobs. My job as chief is to make sure my voice is heard.”
“Did the city of Los Angeles betray you?” Ms. Graciette pressed on her until nearly 13 minutes into the interview, when Ms. Crowley took a deep breath, flashed a bemused smile at the camera, and finally asked: Yes,” he answered.
It’s a story she just told NBC’s Robert Kovacik, and she was reportedly supposed to repeat to CNN’s Jake Tapper and CBS’ Norah O’Donnell right before she was called to City Hall late Friday. . She was about to be executed.
For some, the media onslaught urging self-immolation reiterated Crowley’s readiness to speak truth to power and stand up for the military during one of the worst urban firestorms in California history. .
For others, it was an act of desperation by a embattled chief whose wall-breaking promotion — the first woman and first openly LGBTQ+ firefighter to lead the department — now undermines his authority. Critics accused her of being an incompetent “DEI recruiter.” Disasters are becoming increasingly politicized.
On Monday, Crowley received an unsigned letter purporting to be from her current and former chief executives, the contents of which she received from right-wing commentators and social media as her interview aired on national news over the weekend. It reflected filtered claims. The letter chastised her for giving a television interview while the city was burning.
“I believe she should have focused solely on dealing with the emergency,” Fire Commission Chair Genecia Hadley Hayes, who read the letter, told the Times. “I agree with that too.”
Some have criticized Mr. Crowley’s response to the Palisades disaster, saying that as winds picked up in the early hours of January 7, he decided to more strategically deploy available engines and keep 1,000 firefighters on double shifts. He told the Times that he could have kept it.
But for the firefighters who wore boots to the scene in the Palisades, her “outburst” cemented Crowley’s status as a folk hero.
“It spread quickly in the Los Angeles Fire Department,” said Freddy Escobar, president of the Los Angeles Unified Fire Department, the union that represents the department’s rank-and-file firefighters. “Everyone was so shocked but so happy and excited. They support her 110%.”
“She’s the only fire chief who spoke out against the people who appointed her,” said Capt. Truong Ho, another union leader. “If that doesn’t show courage, I don’t know what does.”
Crowley declined an interview request for this article, but colleagues noted that she is one of the few women in what remains a predominantly male department. She is also one of the few top executives who has held nearly every role she currently commands, from paramedic to engineer to fire inspector.
“Unlike many of her male colleagues, she has steadily risen through the ranks,” Ho said.
Crowley’s wife, Hollyn Block, is a retired firefighter and the first woman to hold the equipment operator position, widely considered the most difficult within the fire department.
Mr. Crowley started at the city’s storied Station 11. Station 11 is one of the busiest ladders in the country and a must-stop for a growing number of Los Angeles firefighters.
“She is a leader among firefighters,” said Lauren Andrade, a captain with the Orange County Fire Department and president of Equity on Fire. “She’s always going to work for the people.”
Some of Mr. Crowley’s specific claims regarding LAFD funding have been hotly debated, and the department’s tactics on the morning of the Palisades fire are sure to come under further scrutiny in the coming weeks.
But many female firefighters say their chiefs have been made scapegoats for situations outside the department’s control, from grounded air tankers to dry reservoirs.
“There were 160 mile per hour winds that disrupted the water supply and critical infrastructure and she couldn’t access it, so is it because she’s a lesbian?” Andrade said. “Her strategy and tactics are completely consistent with how other departments have approached these events.”
By Thursday, the department had closed its units around Crowley and deployed both UFLAC and the Los Angeles Fire Department’s chief officers. Write an open letter of support.
Still, many see it as a reflection of the crisis that brought Mr. Crowley to the top of the department in the first place, amid the worst disaster to hit Los Angeles in a generation.
“You’re not going to break me.”
When Crowley was appointed Los Angeles Fire Chief in early 2022, there were few applicants for the job.
Backlash against vaccine mandates continued to rattle the department. Many government officials retired or resigned. A group of black firefighters filed a lawsuit claiming they were a “good ol’ white boy band.” Meanwhile, an internally commissioned 2021 survey revealed a crisis of trust, with less than 30% of sworn members saying they had confidence in senior leaders.
The same survey showed that more than half of sworn women felt bullying and harassment was the biggest problem within the department.
“I don’t take it lightly,” Crowley said in a 2022 interview with Spectrum News’ Gisele Fernandez. “Thirty years of talking about this is 30 years of talking about this, and now it’s a matter of action.”
Less than 5% of career firefighters in the United States are women. The percentage is even smaller in Los Angeles, where the LAFD, which has a total staff of about 3,500, currently has about 120 sworn women. By comparison, San Francisco has more than 250 female firefighters, less than half its size.
“There’s a very misogynistic, sexist tendency in the fire service, and some people are absolutely successful in it, and it’s very harmful,” said Golden State Women’s Fire Brigade founder and former Sacramento Fire Captain. Erica Enslin said. “She was trying to do something to stop further promoting that culture.”
At the heart of that sexism is the belief that women are not strong enough to do the job of a firefighter.
“On your worst day, the thought of someone throwing you over their shoulders and carrying you away gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling,” Andrade said, but that’s not what a firefighter’s job is really about.
She says the brute force needed to fight wildfires means little in an age when calls to emergency medical services are overwhelmingly overwhelming.
“Yes, it takes physical strength, and all female firefighters graduated from the same schools,” Andrade said. “Women are very strong. Maintaining the status quo is an outdated argument.”
She and others point out that Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Malone has shielded Crowley from intense public scrutiny.
Crowley said she had dodged questions about sexism and bullying during her rise through the ranks, but had an inherent sense of how to deal with men who bothered her at work. Crowley said her mother, who raised her three children single-handedly after her father died, gave her strength during difficult times.
In 2022, she told Fernandez: “Watching my mom go through that really set that path for me. Having that strength and ability to push through really left a huge mark on me.”
She also draws on her years of experience as a student-athlete. She first attended an all-girls high school in her hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and then attended St. Mary’s College, an all-girls school in Indiana, where she played basketball and soccer.
“Being an athlete, I’m not going to give up. You’re not going to break me down,” Crowley said.
Her rise to the ranks at the macho Fire Department 11 may have shielded her from some of the department’s sexism, said several people who knew her. Despite Crowley being about average height for a woman, she and Bullock have long been praised for their toughness, and they fought the Woolsey Fire in 2018 with just a garden hose and a spare fire extinguisher in their home. He became famous for saving part of Bullock’s mother’s neighborhood. car.
“She was one of those people who said, ‘I want to be like her when I grow up,'” Enslin said.
She and others watched with pride and hope as the mother of three rose through the ranks of the nation’s third-largest fire department.
“I was in awe when she got to the fire chief,” said Lt. Tina Guiler of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and CEO of Triple F, a national women’s fraternity. CEO) said. “She was like my hero.”
Like other female firefighters interviewed by the Times, Enslin and Geiler are members of the Women’s Fire Service, a professional group and training program set up by the Women’s Fire Brigade to maintain their ranks and develop future firefighters. I know Mr. Crowley through the camp network.
The women said Crowley was an active and dedicated leader. She encouraged young believers to envision a career in the fire department and said a career in the fire service would help them develop gender-specific skills, such as using their legs to pull a fire hose rather than relying on upper body strength like men. I helped put it on.
Critics have sought to portray these groups and their efforts as a product of the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion (often referred to as DEI for short) that has swept through U.S. institutions over the past five years.
The diversification of LAFD and other departments followed consent decrees that began in the 1970s and ’80s.
“The women’s group was part of that whole generation,” said San Francisco Fire Department Deputy Chief Julie Mau, who previously served as captain of the San Francisco Women’s Fire Brigade. “Over the years, we have become one of the largest and most active organizations because we use training as a way to help develop our members.”
Crowley filled top leadership positions with the same women she worked with in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Women’s Fire Brigade. Those appearing to be scolding the victims include Kristin Larson, a longtime critic of the department who came under fire this week for publishing old videos of Crowley. resurfaced in the media.
Mr. Crowley also elevated younger, historically marginalized members of Congress to replace older veterans as the top positions fluctuate. A recent lawsuit states that her second-in-command, Deputy Commander Orrin Sanders, is an “African-American gay male.”
Critics say the move distracts from the department’s core mission of fighting fires.
Her supporters say these criticisms are a fig leaf on the sexism they endured throughout their careers.
“DEI — it’s part of what she cares about, but it’s not the main thing she cares about,” Geiler said. “I’m tired of people saying women can’t do this job.”
Times staff writer David Zahnizer contributed to this report.
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