Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was 7,500 miles away from her city when it went up in flames in January because no one told her that she “shouldn’t have gone on the trip,” the mayor said in a recent interview.
Although the National Weather Service warned that intense Santa Ana winds were due to hit L.A. two days before Bass left the city for Ghana, she ignored advice that the city was at high risk of wildfires, and instead chose to attend the inauguration of Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama. Bass claimed in an interview that she was not aware of the wildfire risk when she flew to Africa.
“We need to look at everything about the preparation and all of that for the fires . . . I think when we evaluate that, we will find that although there were warnings, that I frankly wasn’t aware of,” Bass told Fox 11. “That level of preparation didn’t happen. If it had, I wouldn’t have even gone to San Diego, let alone leave the country.”
“From the city, from the county, that level of preparation didn’t happen. So it didn’t reach that level to me, to say, ‘Something terrible could happen and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip,'” she added.
When the Palisades Fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. local time Tuesday, January 7, Bass was in Ghana. The Eaton Fire started to burn in Altadena around 6:30 p.m. the same day, and the Hurst Fire broke out just northwest of downtown L.A. around 10:30 p.m.
Bass returned home midday Wednesday, January 8. At the airport, a reporter asked about her absence. Bass did not answer the reporter’s questions, and stood silently.
Her overseas trip comes years after Bass promised at campaign rally in 2021 that she “would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”
“I will tell you that I felt absolutely terrible not being here for my city, and not being here for my family, who was impacted by the fires as well,” Bass said during the recent Fox interview. “When I say it was a mistake, absolutely, the idea that I was not present was very painful.”
Nearly 100,000 people signed a petition in January calling for Bass’s resignation over her “gross mismanagement” of the fires, and her “failure to effectively respond to the devastating 2025 fires in and around the city.”
The Palisades Fire burned for 24,000 acres and decimated 6,800 buildings, damaged hundreds, and caused twelve known deaths.