Why didn’t Cal Fire raid the Esparto facility storing fireworks — which exploded more than year ago, killing seven — after it had done so at a warehouse in Southern California, finding a trove of illegal explosives that belonged to the same company?
A Cal Fire investigator says the agency should have — and he had warned his colleagues in a memo before the Commerce raid that the company, Devastating Fireworks, was “hemorrhaging product onto the streets in several counties including: San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Alameda, Yolo, Yuba, and Sacramento.”
The investigator, Gershom Slonim, now calls himself a whistleblower and has come forward to criticize the lack of action taken by the state agency — action that could have saved lives.
“I wish I could have jumped up and down and screamed at my supervisor and my team and said, let’s effing do this,” he said in an emotional interview at The Bee’s office. “I did all I could as one person. I tried my hardest, and it was repeatedly shot down.”
The May 21, 2025 raid on a warehouse in the industrial city of Commerce southeast of downtown Los Angeles seized 500,000 pounds, the largest illegal fireworks seizure in California history. Cal Fire carted away 150,000 pounds the day of the raid. The remaining 350,000 pounds of explosives and raw chemicals stayed in the warehouse because Cal Fire lacked the capacity to remove them safely.
Forty-one days later, the deadly explosion occurred in Esparto
Last week on his LinkedIn profile...
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