Los Angeles county officials on Tuesday approved an outside review of how alerts functioned when fire ravaged the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods earlier this month.
After the wind-driven wildfires broke out on 7 January, evacuation orders for some neighborhoods – including the part of Altadena where the majority of deaths occurred – came long after houses were reported to be on fire.
Several residents who lost homes in the Eaton fire in Altadena have said they received no notifications about their neighborhoods. For others, the first warning was an urgent text message in the middle of the night.
Susan Lee Streets, who signed up for the alert app Nixle, did not get any alerts specific to her west Altadena neighborhood before she and her family left of their own accord at about 10pm after losing power and cellphone reception, she said.
“If we had even been informed that houses and other structures were burning down, we would have known better what was happening,” she said. “We almost went to sleep that night with two kids and a dog and two cats in the house.”
Only after 3am did an alert hit her phone.
It could take months for the investigation to reveal what went wrong.
But an Associated Press review of scanner traffic recordings and data from California’s chief fire agency (Cal Fire), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the private fire tracking app Watch Duty suggests the hours between midnight and 3.30am appear to have been particularly challenging for first responders in Los Angeles county.
Resources were stretched thin, and hurricane-force winds had grounded air support, limiting authorities’ ability to get a top-down perspective on the flames.
Calls reporting burning homes were flooding in as embers blew on to roofs and yards. During one half-hour period, 17 new addresses were relayed to firefighters, even as some crews ran low on fuel.
By 12.07am, Cal Fire records show, dozens of neighborhoods had been ordered to evacuate because of the Eaton fire, all of them east of Altadena’s North Lake Avenue. None of the neighborhoods to the west – where 17 confirmed fatalities occurred, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times – had received evacuation warnings or orders, despite house fires being reported there more than an hour earlier.
Over the next three hours, fire crews would go from begging for resources on the eastern flank of the blaze to radioing the command center to make sure it knew the fire was spreading west along the foothills near Sunset ridge.
Just before 3.30am, evacuation orders expanded significantly, with residents in 12 areas of Altadena and elsewhere told to “leave now”.
The process of issuing evacuation notices starts with firefighters or other personnel on the ground recommending action, said Nick Russell, vice-president for operations at Watch Duty, a private fire-tracking app that has become a lifeline for many residents of fire-prone zones. It then moves up the chain of command to sheriffs, who ultimately put out any order.
During major emergencies, communications can be hampered by issues such as limited radio connectivity, wind noise or other technical problems. Incident command stations may have trouble synthesizing the large amounts of information they are getting from different agencies, which is critical for understanding the scope of an emergency such as a fire.
Possibly another complicating factor is the web of alert systems in the region. In Los Angeles county, residents who sign up for emergency notifications through the Alert LA County website are then directed to a list of 57 links to other specific neighborhood or city alert system signups, as well as a general one covering 19 other cities. The city of Los Angeles and the sheriff’s department also have alert systems.
It is not clear how the overlapping systems, which use different software programs, work together, or whether officials coordinate.
A 2024 hazard mitigation plan directed the city’s emergency management department to assess gaps in alert and warning systems in areas with poor cellphone connectivity and then implement a solution to ensure alerts reach people. But that goal was given a “medium” priority level and a long-term timeline, with completion expected sometime in the next 10 years.
Meanwhile the county’s hazard mitigation plan, last updated in 2020, did not include a focus on emergency alerts or public notifications. Instead its high-priority goals had to do with educating people about wind’s impact on wildfire risk and with community wildfire protection.
Issues with alert systems have been a common issue in recent years. After-action reports and investigations revealed problems in the 2017 Tubbs fire, which killed 22 people in Santa Rosa; the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people in Paradise; the Woolsey fire, which started the same day and killed three in Malibu; as well as in Colorado’s 2021 Marshall fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes outside Denver; and in Hawaii’s 2023 Lahaina fire, which decimated that historic town and killed 102.
Tricia Wachtendorf, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, said alerts have to be specific and clear. Research has shown that for them to be effective, people have to hear, understand, believe, personalize and confirm them before they react.
“Just because you send the message at 3am doesn’t mean someone is hearing it,” Wachtendorf said.
Jodi and Jeff Moreno first heard that the Eaton fire was blazing near their home on a neighborhood app. But the first official warning only came at about 2.30am, when authorities yelled through a bullhorn to evacuate, they said. The couple grabbed their three daughters, their dog and some important papers, and fled.
There were no text alerts until after they were gone.
“On the neighborhood apps, some people were going, some people were staying. It was a wide variety of responses. We were navigating it on our own,” Jodi Moreno said. “It’s hard for us to gauge where exactly is that fire, where are the embers blowing.”
Desperate for more information, both the Morenos and Streets downloaded the Watch Duty app.
Officials at Los Angeles county’s coordinated joint information center declined to comment other than to say that an independent review of evacuations and emergency notifications is planned and the office of emergency management, county fire department and sheriff’s department plan to fully engage with it.
