SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California officials quietly disbanded a dedicated state wildfire-fighting team last year, less than three years after military leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services touted it as a key part of the state’s strategy for tackling California’s increasingly hotter and more prevalent wildfires.

Adjutant General Matthew Beevers, who leads the California Military Department, ordered a restructuring early last year of the State Guard’s Emergency Response Command.

That effectively eliminated Team Blaze, a 150-member volunteer unit dedicated to fighting wildfires and other natural disasters that the military department jointly operated with OES.

Firefighters from all over the state and nation are in the Los Angeles area battling the devastating wildfires that have displaced tens of thousands of residents and killed 28 people.

Newsom’s office and OES did not respond to questions and a request for comment by deadline.

The now-disbanded Team Blaze had responded to some of California’s worst wildfires such as the 2021 Dixie Fire. It performed search-and-rescue missions, according to interviews with two current state guard members and former State Guard Commanding General Jay Coggan, who started the command in 2021 before retiring in May 2023.

The current state guard members who spoke to The Sacramento Bee requested anonymity to avoid retaliation because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The Daily Signal first reported the command restructuring, which was not publicly announced at the time.

Members, many of whom held day jobs as firefighters and law enforcement officers, were paid when they were deployed, according to Coggan and the current members.

A private charity, the California State Guard Foundation, raised donations to pay for their training and equipment until Beevers determined such gifts were illegal, according to federal documents and a memo obtained by The Bee.

The End of Team Blaze

Beevers, whom Newsom appointed in May 2023, ordered the command’s restructuring in early 2024, which dismantled Team Blaze and its security forces counterpart Team Shield, which protected government buildings, manned checkpoints, and did riot control.

Members of both teams were absorbed into Task Force Rattlesnake, which is embedded with Cal Fire and is currently helping first responders battle the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles.

The military department reorganized the teams to “better support and align with those federal forces and department priorities in early 2024,” spokesperson Col. Brandon Hill said via email.

He said that Team Blaze was a standalone unit and disputed that it was ever able to deploy because it did not have an agreement with Cal Fire, which Coggan disputed.

“It interesting that the former volunteer member of the California State Guard is speculating on our current wildfire response operations that he is not even a part of,” Hill said, referring to Coggan. “The issues that plagued Team Blaze are now nonexistent, as they are a reserve detachment on Task Force Rattlesnake It is a much more efficient use of government resources.”

“We didn’t have an agreement. We didn’t have to. We were part of the military department,” Coggan said.

Newsom sent National Guard members to respond to the Los Angeles fires, which broke out the week of Jan.uary 8. Oregon, Nevada, Mexico and Canada also sent firefighters to assist in battling the blazes, which Cal Fire have estimated to be the most destructive in state history. The 1,100-member State Guard supports the California National Guard, which has about 18,500 combined Air National Guard and Army National Guard members.

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have blamed the fires on inaction by Newsom and local officials and suggested that any federal disaster relief aid should come with contingencies. Newsom hit back both in interviews and via a fact-checking website, accusing the president and his allies of spreading misinformation.

“You always have to have some humility and grace as it relates to (what we could’ve done to better prepare), and I’m very self critical in that respect,” the governor told the liberal podcast Pod Save America. “And so we, in every incident, do an after action report, and we will take a sober and reflective look at that.”

On Thursday, Newsom signed a $2.5 billion wildfire recovery and cleanup package hours after its passage by the Legislature.

Could Team Blaze have helped L.A.?

The state guard members who spoke to The Bee said they thought Team Blaze could have helped mitigate some of the fires, though they conceded first responders faced Santa Ana winds of up to 100 miles per hour.

“I kind of like the idea of the governor having a ready-made group (to respond to wildfires),” said one current member, who served in the emergency response command. “The National Guard is not necessarily set up for fire fighting.”

“There’s always going to be a delay if you use a National Guardsman,” said another senior state guard member who served in the command. “It just makes sense to use a pre-trained force. I 1,000% believe that these wildfires could have been mitigated had Team Blaze been used.”

While an early version of Team Blaze first began operating in 2020, Cal Guard and OES announced its creation in August 2022. The agencies hailed the unit in a press release as the “first all-hazards fire engine strike team” operated by a state military department.

“This partnership helps strengthen the state’s ability to quickly respond to climate-driven disasters,” the release read. The team came with four-person engine crews equipped with 300 gallons of water that could “get into tight areas and quickly attack fires.”

Team Blaze, trained for the sole purpose of fighting fires, could be immediately called up to active duty by the governor during emergencies. National Guard members can also be immediately deployed, but must be trained for firefighting, typically delaying their response, according to one of the current state guard members.

“How many houses were lost in those five days?” Coggan said of the response to the ongoing Los Angeles fires. “How many people died?”

Hill refuted this, saying that Team Blaze was never able to immediately respond to wildfires because they were “not part of the available resources for Cal Fire to even request.”

The two current state guard members attributed Team Blaze and the command’s demise to “differences of opinion” about how the State Guard should support the National Guard, and a “personality fight” between Beevers and Coggan, who accused the military department leader of making antisemitic remarks in 2022.

The agency Office of the Inspector General said it could not substantiate the complaint. Hill declined to comment.

“I think this will go down as a tragic episode,” said one of the current state guard members about the wildfire response. “There’s enough scrutiny already. The bottom line is, why wasn’t Team Blaze part of it?”

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