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• Firefighters alerted a battalion chief that areas of a New Year’s Day fire in Pacific Palisades, known as the Lachman fire, were still smoldering the next day, according to text messages.
  
• The firefighters were ordered to pack up and leave anyway, instead of monitoring the burn area for reignitions.
  
• Federal authorities say the blaze reignited on Jan. 7, destroying thousands of homes and killing 12 people.
  

Firefighters mopping up a small brush fire that authorities say reignited as the Palisades fire five days later were ordered to leave the original burn scene even though they complained the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch, according to firefighter text messages reviewed by The Times.
To the firefighters’ surprise, their battalion chief ordered them to roll up their hoses and pull out of the area on Jan. 2 — the day after the 8-acre blaze was declared contained — rather than stay and make sure there were no hidden embers that could spark a new fire, the text messages said.
On the morning of Jan. 7, according to federal authorities, strong winds stoked the remnants of the New Year’s Day blaze into the firestorm that killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga.

In one text message, a firefighter who was at the scene on Jan. 2 wrote that the battalion chief had been told it was a “bad idea” to leave the burn scar unprotected because of the visible signs of smoldering terrain. “And the rest is history,” the firefighter wrote in recent weeks.
The text exchanges among three firefighters and a third party provide previously undisclosed details about the Los Angeles Fire Department’s handling of the Lachman fire, which federal investigators say was deliberately set and had burned underground in a canyon root system until the winds rekindled it. The third party ask