Emergency management officials not to blame for west Altadena alert failures, sources say

The Los Angeles County emergency management officials responsible for sending evacuation alerts were not instructed to notify west Altadena residents until long after the Eaton fire had barreled into the area, according to two county officials not authorized to speak publicly.

County fire or sheriff’s officials appear to have failed to set the alerts in motion, leaving many west Altadena residents to flee as flames and terrifying swirls of embers closed in around them.

All 17 of the deaths from the Eaton fire occurred west of Lake Avenue, where residents did not receive an evacuation order until around 3:30 a.m. Jan. 8.

Neighborhoods east of Lake, closer to where the fire began, got their first evacuation alert around 6:40 p.m. Jan. 7 and continued to get alerts throughout the evening.

Both sections of the town, which is in an unincorporated part of L.A. County, were devastated by the blaze.

Until now, it was unclear if the Office of Emergency Management, which had one person sending evacuation orders for three different fires on a new alert system that night, was warned that west Altadena was on fire but failed to send evacuation orders.

According to the two county officials, emergency management staffers said they were not told to issue an evacuation order until shortly before the 3:30 a.m. alert went out.

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In this section of western Altadena, residents weren’t ordered to evacuate until after 5 a.m., according to records reviewed by The Times. That was well after smoke and flames were threatening the area.

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Fire, sheriff and emergency management officials were working together at a unified command center at the Rose Bowl the night of the fire. All three agencies declined to comment or to make their leaders available for an interview, citing an ongoing investigation into the evacuation delays by an outside firm, McChrystal Group.

County officials have said that the fire and sheriff’s departments share the responsibility of deciding where evacuations should take place and conveying that information to emergency management officials. But they have not explained who exactly should have recognized the danger to west Altadena or why evacuation orders weren’t issued earlier.

Kevin McGowan, head of the Office of Emergency Management, previously told The Times that the report by McChrystal Group will be made public after it is completed.

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna has said in interviews that although his employees are part of the decision-making process, they defer to fire officials on which areas to evacuate. Sheriff’s deputies typically focus on executing evacuation decisions, he said.

“We are included in the decision-making, but they’re the lead,” Luna said of the county Fire Department.

L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone and other top fire officials have said that their commanders worked to recommend evacuation zones, in coordination with other agencies, as the Eaton fire spread.

From the start, the L.A. County Fire Department was in “unified command” with the Angeles National Forest and Pasadena fire departments. That later expanded to include the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, a federal incident management team and other nearby fire agencies.

Marrone has previously emphasized that firefighters on the ground that night played no role in deciding which neighborhoods received an evacuation warning or order. He praised his crews, along with sheriff’s deputies, for helping about 500 people flee their homes.

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“I’m knocking on wood, but if it’s a failure of the Fire Department, I will own it,” Marrone said in a January interview.

With hurricane-force winds flinging embers across neighborhoods and aircraft grounded because of the winds, the lag in evacuation orders could have been the result of a breakdown in communication.

It’s also possible that fire and sheriff’s officials may not have realized that swaths of west Altadena were engulfed by flames during a night that officials have repeatedly described as pure chaos.

Marrone has repeatedly said that fire crews were overwhelmed by the scale and ferocity of the conflagration, as firefighters were spread thin battling three different blazes across the county.

West Altadena residents reported seeing L.A. County sheriff’s deputies drive down some streets with loudspeakers urging people to flee around 2 a.m. — more than an hour before the 3:30 a.m. alert was issued.

Luna has previously said that when sheriff’s deputies decide to evacuate homes, they typically notify the unified command center. He declined to say whether that happened the first night of the Eaton fire.

L.A. County firefighters poured into Altadena when the fire broke out, though it’s unclear how many moved into west Altadena as the flames spread. Some residents have reported seeing no fire trucks as they fled their west Altadena homes hours before the evacuation order came, and even after the order was issued.

However, radio traffic indicates that some county fire officials were aware by midnight that the fire had spread west of Lake Avenue, deepening questions about why they waited so long to order evacuation alerts.

The operations team, which served as an intermediary for radio communications between the unified command post and fire battalions battling the flames, was made aware of at least half a dozen reports indicating that the fire had spread to west Altadena hours before the 3:30 a.m. evacuation order.

The operations point person, typically a fire official, works with incident commanders to maintain a map of the fire perimeter, which more senior fire officials use to recommend evacuations.

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At 11:55 p.m., a county fire official radioed in a reported fire on the 500 block of East Calaveras Street in central Altadena, the third such report west of Lake Avenue.

“We have a lot of resources in that area, and they’re triaging the best they can,” an operations team member replied.

At 12:41 a.m., a county fire official called in a fire at 780 E. Altadena Drive. Both reports were more than a mile west of where the fire boundary was thought to be.

“That’s plotting way west,” an operations person said.

At 2:20 a.m., incident commanders relayed reports from sheriff’s deputies that they could see the fire moving west along the foothills north of Farnsworth Park.

“We got a good landmark on where that thing is to the west,” an operations person replied.

Radio operators from the county Fire Department did not discuss whether the area had been placed under an evacuation order. Until that point, most of the radio traffic had been dedicated to trying to keep up with the fire as it spread, with little discussion of evacuations.

Once the evacuation order went out to most of west Altadena around 3:30 a.m., fire personnel continued to radio in a growing list of homes ablaze as the Eaton fire spread uncontrolled toward the heart of the city.

At 3:40 a.m., a fire official told operations over the radio that an elderly woman who lived west of Lake Avenue needed help getting out, referencing the recent evacuation order.

One section of west Altadena that was also being threatened by flames did not receive an evacuation order until almost 6 a.m. It’s not clear what caused the added delay.