Bass: ‘No greater priority than getting people back home’

Fresh off a tour of the destruction left by wildfires in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass assured residents on Friday that getting people back home is her top priority.

Though there is still some fire risk from more Santa Ana winds coming early next week, Bass said she’s “hopeful that it will not be anywhere near the severity that we saw in the beginning of this.”

In the meantime, some evacuation orders have been lifted, and crews are hard at work to ensure more areas are safe for residents to return to their homes, something Bass said is top of mind for her and all other public officials.

“After the fires are out definitively, there is no greater priority than getting people back home,” she said.

Part of that process will involve rebuilding thousands of homes and finding places for the evacuees to stay, and Bass said local government will accomplish this and other tasks by reorganizing “around urgency, common sense and competence.”

More information is expected next week, when Bass plans to unveil a series of executive directives aimed at fire recovery.

“This is an unprecedented natural disaster, and it warrants an unprecedented response,” Bass said. “We’re going to do everything we can to clear the way so that people can get back home.”