Two Los Angeles County supervisors are calling for a third-party investigation into the county’s emergency alert system in light of the discovery that all 17 confirmed deaths from the Eaton fire occurred in west Altadena neighborhoods that did not receive evacuation orders until flames were already dangerously close.
At Tuesday’s board meeting, Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Lindsey Horvath introduced a motion requesting a probe into how and when those alerts were deployed in both the Eaton and Palisades fires. The motion will go to a vote during the board’s Jan. 28 meeting.
“While I deeply appreciate the heroic efforts of our first responders, we owe it to our communities to assess and review our emergency notification systems,” Barger stated. “Our Board is committed to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement in the face of increasingly severe natural disasters. This independent assessment will also ensure we are better prepared for future disasters and can act swiftly to protect lives and property.”
• See also: Victims of Los Angeles wildfires: A look at the people killed by Eaton, Palisades fires
The connection between the deaths and the late alerts in Altadena was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.
The Eaton fire, named for the canyon near its ignition point, began shortly after 6 p.m. Jan. 7 and the first evacuation warnings went into place for the east side of Lake Avenue within two hours. Hurricane-force gusts spread the fire quickly from the mountain side to the neighborhoods below. Embers were launched as far as miles away at times, igniting homes and brush.
Altadena Town Councilmember Connor Cipolla, who grew up in Sierra Madre and experienced his share of wildfires, described the fire as unlike any he had ever experienced. It moved “horizontally” rather than uphill. At one point, the flames burned east and west simultaneously, he said.
“It was a hellish situation that firefighters found themselves in,” he said.
No warning for west Altadena
Though the east side of Altadena received warnings quickly, a history of alerts captured by the PBS Warning, Alert and Response Network appears to show an evacuation warning — the alert telling residents to prepare for a possible evacuation — was never issued for the neighborhoods west of Lake Avenue, north of Woodbury Road and east of the Hahamonga Watershed Park.
Those areas received the first alert, a full evacuation order telling residents to immediately flee, at 3:25 a.m., according to WARN.
“The east side of Lake, we got pretty timely orders,” Cipolla said. “The west side of Lake didn’t get any orders until the fire was right on them.”
In Altadena, Lake Avenue has a history as a “de facto dividing line between east and west, wealthy and working class, White and Black,” according to CNN. Before the discriminatory practice of redlining was ended, Black residents in Altadena were segregated to the west and were prevented from buying homes on the east side.
Data released by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office showed all 17 confirmed deaths occurred in that area west of Lake Avenue.
“I cannot believe there isn’t any correlation there,” Cipolla said. “Something went wrong.”
In a statement, the Los Angeles County’s Coordinated Joint Information Center stated while it could not comment on “all factors leading to the tragic loss of life, there will be a comprehensive third-party evaluation of all response efforts” that will focus on “identifying areas of strength and pinpointing opportunities for improvement, ensuring we are prepared to respond to future emergencies.”
“During the night of January 7 and morning of January 8, the Sheriff’s Department and County Fire Department were in unified command and deployed public safety resources to impacted areas to perform evacuation notifications and rescue operations, including in the neighborhoods west of North Lake Ave.,” the statement reads. “Wireless emergency alerts are only one of several means of notifying residents to evacuate their homes during a fire emergency.”
Alert system layered
The Alert LA County system sends out notifications via landline, text and email. The response also included door knocks, patrols with loudspeakers, as well as leveraging local media to get news to residents quickly, according to the statement.
“This is a layered process and system intended to provide redundancy during local and widespread disasters,” the statement reads. The county’s internal investigation “will take months because it will require combing through and validating the call histories of the fire, interviewing first responders on the scene, interviewing incident commanders, and searching and reviewing our 911 records, among other essential steps, including obtaining feedback from all relevant sources.”
Altadena resident Briana Johnson told Newsweek there were hours between her family’s evacuation after seeing fire visibly in the mountains and when the maps updated to include the family’s home in the evacuation zone at 3 a.m. A law enforcement officer drove through the neighborhood, telling people to evacuate, but his message wasn’t loud enough to hear inside of the house, she said.
“We were already in the evacuation zone, and probably had been for like an hour or two. … (The map) was just not updating and there was no alert until the fire,” Johnson said. “I literally looked out the window and I could see the mountain on fire.”
Sleeping through disaster
Friends who lived in the community had to wake up their parents to get them to leave, she said.
Shaw Zhao, whose 84-year-old father Zhi Feng Zhao died in the Eaton fire, told the Southern California News Group he had spoken to his father earlier that day ahead of a planned flight to Los Angeles and stayed up until 1 a.m. watching updates on CalFire’s website. He finally allowed himself to rest then, as the fires seemed distant and his father’s neighborhood was still marked safe.
When he woke up four hours later, the fire map showed his father’s neighborhood in red. Panicked, Shaw called the home phone, but the line was already out of service. He texted a neighbor of his father and learned that the evacuation order had been issued hours earlier, at 3 a.m.
Shaw moved up his flight, but couldn’t get into the neighborhood when he arrived. He tried to find his father at the Pasadena Convention Center to no avail.
“I did not receive a single phone call from my father. Even though he didn’t use the cellphone that much, he is still smart enough to borrow a phone to call me,” he said. “I had not received any messages from him. I know something bad would have happened.”
‘Has to be corrected’
Attorney Gerald Singleton of Singleton Schreiber said his firm is representing 300 Altadena residents in a lawsuit against Southern California Edison, the utility being blamed for the start of the Eaton fire. Many of his clients did not receive alerts until after midnight, he said.
“Our clients that were located on the west side of Lake have all reported that they didn’t get those warnings and the first they heard they had to leave was when they got the notification saying to leave immediately,” Singleton said.
Los Angeles County’s investigation into the alerts is critical for not only understanding what happened, but for ensuring it never happens again, he said.
“If there were mistakes made, they very well may have cost lives,” Singleton said. “This is something that has to be corrected because unfortunately, I don’t think this is the last fire California is going to experience.”
Singleton said it is too early to know if Los Angeles County is liable in anyway for the deaths that occurred, but he believes the ultimate responsibility lies with the utility allegedly responsible for the blaze.
Delayed alerts in Palisades fire
Last week, The Associated Press reported that alerts in the Palisades fire, where at least 10 people have died, were reportedly delayed as well and did not come until 40 minutes after some of the homes were already burning. The wildfire, which would become one of the most destructive in California history, was spreading rapidly in ornamental plantings and burning homes by 11:27 a.m. on Jan. 7, recordings of scanner traffic reveal.
So many people fled on their own, as wind-whipped flames raced over the nearby hills, that by the time officials issued the order to evacuate at 12:07 p.m., traffic was gridlocked.
Darrin Hurwitz and his wife, alarmed by the astonishing speed of the flames in the nearby hills, left their home more than an hour before his phone buzzed with the evacuation order, according to the AP. Their house, at the end of a cul-de-sac bordering Topanga State Park, burned down.
“This would have been a different situation if it had been in the middle of the night,” Hurwitz said. “If it had taken 30 to 45 minutes to get our phones buzzing, it would have been a potentially big issue.”
Attorney Shant Karnikian, whose firm has handled wildfire cases throughout the country, said that even if the alert system is found to have failed, it is very challenging to hold a government agency liable due to protections offered to agencies providing fire and police services. That immunity ensures cities and counties can continue to provide such services without a constant fear of lawsuits, he said.
“If the city was held liable for arguably bad firefighting every time they didn’t do a perfect job, or didn’t make the right move, then cities would get sued to oblivion and they’d be discouraged from having a fire department,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is a political problem, it is something that has to be dealt with at the local legislative level.”
Staff writer Teresa Liu contributed to this article.