The Pacific Palisades fire, as seen on Jan. 8, 2025
LOS ANGELES — The city of Malibu has jumped into the court fight seeking to make the state of California, the city of Los Angeles and other government agencies pay for allegedly creating the conditions that allowed the Palisades fire to consume thousands of homes and businesses, including large chunks of nearby Malibu.
The lawsuit was filed Feb. 17 in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
It landed just two days before a L.A. County judge refused the attempt by the state and city of L.A. and other defendants to close out thousands lawsuits from homeowners and others whose property was consumed in the fires.
In those lawsuits, which have rolled into court since early 2025, the plaintiffs have accused a number of government agencies, including the L.A. Department of Water and Power and the California State Department of Parks and Recreation, among others, of allegedly creating and enabling conditions which allowed the fire to ignite and spread in early January 2025.
According to court documents, the fire ignited in the mid-morning hours on Jan. 7, 2025, on the Temescal Canyon Trail in Pacific Palisades. The fire then rapidly spread to become the worst fire in L.A. history, destroying nearly 7,000 structures, killing 12 people and injuring three civilians and a firefighter over the next six weeks.
However, in recent court filings, plaintiffs have claimed depositions conducted to this point have revealed California state parks workers and officials may have allowed a fire to continue to smolder along the Temescal Ridge Trail. According to court documents, L.A. firefighters had left that fire, known as the Lachman Fire, on Jan. 1, 2025, when they had declared it extinguished.
However, according to court filings, plaintiffs say parks workers in nearby Topanga State Park had noticed the fire was still smoldering day later, but allegedly did not notify the L.A. Fire Department or take any further action.
According to court documents, the L.A. Fire Department reported embers from that "extinguished" fire later sparked the blaze that would grow into the destructive and deadly Palisades Fire.
L.A. County Superior Court Judge Samantha Jessner's Feb. 19 ruling would allow plaintiffs to continue to dig into those reports, among other evidentiary claims, including whether government agencies should be to blame for allegedly limiting the amount of water available to combat the fires.
While those individual lawsuits continue, the city of Malibu has also joined in the fray.
In the Feb. 17 lawsuit, the city also laid the blame for the fires at the door of the LADWP, the city of Los Angeles and the California Parks Department.
In the lawsuit, the city of Malibu faults the state agency over its handling of the Lachman Fire, asserting the state parks department chose not to resume the work of extinguishing that small fire in a bid to protect "rare plants" on state-owned land.
"Shockingly, the State elevated rare plants over human lives in failing to inspect and address the dangerous burn scar from the Lachman Fire that ignited just days before on its own land – its smoldering embers remaining clearly visible to anyone who cared to look," Malibu wrote in its lawsuit.
The complaint asserts California state employees "actively worsened that danger by interfering with firefighters’ efforts to extinguish and remove material from the burn scar in order to prevent reignition" in an effort to protect "'sensitive' plants in Topanga State Park."
They specifically noted a California state "environmental scientist spoke with an LAFD Chief on January 1 and requested that LAFD put back some of the dry vegetation that fire crews had cut around the Lachman Fire."
In the complaint, the city of Malibu further blamed the city government of its larger neighbor, the city of L.A. and the LADWP for allegedly allowing reservoirs to remain "empty for over a year," as part of a water system left in "disrepair."
They also blamed the city and LADWP for failing to "provide for the maintenance of essential firefighting infrastructure," and for allegedly adopting "a cost-saving approach that shifted risk onto surrounding communities."
According to the complaint, the Palisades Fire resulted in the destruction of about 10% of all structures in Malibu, displacing more than 1,400 Malibu residents and ravaging the city's economy.
The complaint notes that investigators have estimated the total cost of the Palisades fires at nearly $250 billion.
"The Palisades Fire turned swaths of beloved neighborhoods and local establishments of Malibu to ash and rubble, and catastrophically impacted the local community beyond it," Malibu wrote in its lawsuit.
The city is asking the court to make the defendants pay a litany of unspecified damages, including sums to pay for the lost and damaged property and lost tax revenues from the lost and interrupted economic activity in the city, plus attorney fees, among other damages.
Malibu is represented in the action by attorneys Christopher Tayback, Jeffrey N. Boozell, Crystal Nix-Hines, Marina Lev and Ben Odell, of the firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, of Los Angeles.
