Almost two hours before the Eaton fire broke out in the San Gabriel foothills Jan. 7, 2025, Los Angeles County emergency management officials had been pushed to send out an emergency alert to warn residents that increasingly high winds would pose a significant risk. <\/p>\n
But no such alert was sent.<\/p>\n
The residents of west Altadena did not receive an emergency alert until 3:30 a.m. the next day, nine hours after the fire started \u2014 and almost 12 hours after an emergency management employee urged a prefire alert. All but one of the Eaton fire\u2019s 19 deaths occurred in west Altadena. <\/p>\n
Working side by side with National Weather Service officials, an emergency management staffer around 4:30 p.m. had called for a cellphone blast across the Interstate 210 corridor \u2014 a stretch of foothill communities that includes Sylmar, Altadena and Sierra Madre \u2014 to warn people that they needed to prepare for dangerous winds. Even if a fire didn\u2019t spark, trucks could topple. Limbs would certainly come down. Power lines could endanger residents. And if a spark did catch, it could quickly mirror the inferno that was engulfing Pacific Palisades, or worse. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not clear what difference a prefire preparedness alert sent to residents before the Eaton fire would have made. But it could have added another element of urgency as perilous fire weather was beginning to overwhelm the region. <\/p>\n
In the wake of the January firestorm, the idea of prefire alerts during dangerous conditions is getting more attention as officials grapple with how to better prepare communities, especially when fire weather conditions are being forecast with increasingly precise timing and location.<\/p>\n
In a statement, L.A. County\u2019s Office of Emergency Management defended its decision not to send out a prefire wireless emergency alert, saying it was not warranted before the fire started because the wind event was not a \u201cspecific life-safety incident requiring an immediate protective action,\u201d for which such alerts are reserved. <\/p>\n
The late alerts in west Altadena, revealed by The Times in January 2025<\/a>, have become the subject of multiple investigations at the state<\/a> and local levels<\/a>, including a civil rights inquiry launched last month<\/a> by the California attorney general. The 3:30 a.m. alert ordered people to immediately evacuate, but at that point, flames and smoke had been threatening the area for hours.<\/p>\n That section of town, which would end up among the most devastated, never received an evacuation warning. Many residents have blamed the late alerts for chaotic and dangerous evacuations, and some, for family members\u2019 deaths<\/a>. <\/p>\n For Nick Vaquero, the emergency management employee who pushed for the alert before the Eaton fire started, he can\u2019t help but wonder how an earlier alert \u2014 even one that wasn\u2019t a traditional evacuation warning \u2014 might have helped residents prepare. <\/p>\n \u201cWe had multiple options to be able to alert that community in Altadena,\u201d Vaquero said in an interview with The Times. \u201cSending something out before cell towers went down, before people went to bed … it\u2019s hard to say for certain, but it could have saved lives.\u201d<\/p>\n For decades, wildfires were considered a reactive emergency, but more disaster experts are looking for ways to apply proactive messaging, deployment and warning systems to fires \u2014 systems more akin to hurricane preparedness. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a work in progress,\u201d said Mark Ghilarducci, the former director of the California Governor\u2019s Office of Emergency Services. He helped bring to life the state\u2019s Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center in 2019, which he said was partly modeled after the National Hurricane Center. That center, he said, has been transformative in how the state assesses and forecasts fire risk, which has improved resource pre-positioning and agency coordination. But he acknowledged there\u2019s still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to public communication.<\/p>\n \u201cThe extreme wildfires we\u2019ve been seeing really didn\u2019t get started until 2016,\u201d said Ghilarducci, who is now chief executive of Emergent Global Solutions, a crisis management consulting firm. \u201cSo I think that we\u2019re at the beginning of the journey. … There is so much more that can be done in the wildfire space to get our communities prepared.\u201d<\/p>\n In his experience, officials generally utilize only the geographically targeted cellphone alerts, known as wireless emergency alerts, when there\u2019s an extreme threat, Ghilarducci said. But he remembers deciding to send out one such cellphone blast alert to much of Southern California in 2017<\/a> about elevated fire conditions. The weather service had issued widespread, heightened red flag warnings, several fires were already burning across the state and nighttime was approaching. He still thinks that was the right call but said such decisions must be made judiciously. <\/p>\n You have to think about \u201cpublic perception … whether it gets overdone and people don\u2019t take it seriously or pay attention to it,\u201d Ghilarducci said of the alert. That concern is particularly heightened if a fire doesn\u2019t materialize \u2014 less of an issue for hurricanes.<\/p>\n \u201cI tend to want to always err on the side of sending out more information than less,\u201d Ghilarducci said. Even if it\u2019s the same information that\u2019s been in the news and all over social media or pushed out by the weather service, he said the alert is \u201cputting a finer point on it because it\u2019s coming directly to their phone, it\u2019s waking them up, it\u2019s more proactive.\u201d <\/p>\n