I'm reading the most recent report from the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury "Victims of the CZU Wildfire – Four Years Later". Their focus, unsurprisingly, is on the anemic rebuilding process. Still, something that jumped out at me was the section on "Lack of Communication with CAL FIRE". I quote:
This Grand Jury heard anecdotal testimony from multiple victims about local fire volunteers being discouraged from responding to the fire or being outright ordered by CAL FIRE to stand down.
This is consistent with the Civil Grand Jury's noting of county residents' concerns about "Cal Fire taking a 'watch it burn' posture" in their 2021 report, and certainly seems interesting. The 2021 report gives more space to complaints from residents along these lines, but notes that "Many topics were not discussed by Cal Fire. Our inference is that this is out of a concern for future liability…"
The most recent report references three footnotes for the above quote (20, 21, 22). I eagerly jumped down to the references, only to see that the first two are simply "Confidential Grand Jury interview". The third is the above-mentioned 2021 report. It seems that unincorporated county residents are simply out of luck: their Supervisors aren't interested in pursuing this, the Civil Grand Jury apparently can't, and the few remaining news outlets haven't pursued the story. A pity.