Number of damaging fires in Los Angeles homeless camps grows

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Fires linked to homeless tents and camps are raising concerns in Los Angeles, where flames claimed seven lives last year and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage to nearby businesses, according to a newspaper report.

In the three years since the city's Fire Department began classifying them, the number of blazes related to homelessness has nearly tripled, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. In the first quarter of 2021, they occurred at a rate of 24 a day, making up 54% of all fires the department responded to.

The paper said its analysis of records showed that fires related to homelessness doubled in all of the department’s 14 districts since 2018, the first year of complete records. The fires were most prevalent in downtown and South Los Angeles.

In the popular Venice beach area, a fire that started in a tent destroyed a Venice boardwalk office building in January.

A rash of fires among camps on the boardwalk has prompted residents to petition city officials to act. The Fire Department has equipped a new paramedic unit with a 150-gallon water tank that can respond to flames more quickly than a bulkier fire engine, KCBS-TV reported.

Many fires are attributed to cooking, heating and smoking amid the flammable materials found in homeless street camps, makeshift shelters and RVs, the newspaper said. Others were intentionally set. Arson was blamed for a third of more than 15,600 fires related to homelessness in about the past three years, the Times reported. Some were set by outsiders, but police say most stemmed from disputes between homeless people.

Dumpsters and trash piles are set ablaze, and melted plastic city trash cans are not uncommon in some areas of Los Angeles.

In 2017, a wildfire sparked by a cooking fire in a ravine...