Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faced renewed scrutiny Wednesday after new details emerged about her trip to Ghana and the exact timing of her travel back to the United States, raising further questions about whether she returned as quickly as she could have when the Palisades Fire broke out.
Bass traveled to Ghana to attend the inauguration of the nation’s new president on Jan. 4, a day after the National Weather Service issued a fire weather watch for Los Angeles. She landed on Jan. 5., and later that day, the weather service issued a red flag warning.
Warnings escalated several times on Jan 6., becoming a “particularly dangerous situation” by the late afternoon in Los Angeles. That evening Bass posted her first statement on X about the fires, sharing information that was out of date by a few hours.
The inauguration ceremony in Ghana began at around 10 a.m. local time on Jan. 7, or around 2 a.m. Pacific Time in Los Angeles. A few hours after it ended, now 10:30 a.m. in L.A., the Palisades Fire broke out.
Social media photos showed Bass posing for photographs at a reception hosted by the United States ambassador to Ghana at around 12 p.m. L.A. time, an hour and a half after the fire began, The Los Angeles Times reported.
A spokesperson for the mayor told The Los Angeles Times that Bass and the U.S. delegation stopped at a reception on the way to the airport, but said they were on their way back to the U.S. on a military flight by 1 p.m. Los Angeles time on Jan. 7.
Data provided by FlightRadar, a flight tracking website, indicates that the plane took off just after 1 p.m. and landed in Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland just after 2 a.m. Pacific Time on Jan. 8.
Bass then traveled to Dulles International Airport, where she boarded a flight to LAX. By the time the mayor landed in Los Angeles at around 11 a.m. on Jan. 8, around 1,000 structures had been burned and more than 70,000 people were under evacuation orders.
In a press conference last week, Bass said she took the “fastest route back” to Los Angeles and that she was on the phone coordinating with officials “every hour” of her flights on both the military and commercial flights.
When asked by CBS News national correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti on Tuesday if she was happy with the city’s response, she said, “Well, you know, everything could be better, there is no question about that.”
“Looking back, would you have taken that trip overseas?” Vigliotti asked. “You know, I am going to focus today on what we —” Bass began, before Vigliotti prompted her to answer the question. “No,” she responded.
Here is a timeline of Bass’s travels amid the wildfire warnings:
contributed to this report.
