The Eaton fire was cutting a destructive path into Altadena and parts of northern Pasadena just before midnight Jan. 8 when some fire officials urged more widespread evacuations. <\/p>\n
With home after home going up in flames, several Los Angeles County firefighters on the ground suggested to incident commanders that the rest of the nearby foothill communities, from Altadena west into La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, be evacuated. <\/p>\n
Most of east Altadena had been evacuated, but residents on the west side had not yet been told to flee. They were not even under an evacuation warning. <\/p>\n
For unknown reasons, it took another three hours \u2014 and in some cases even longer \u2014 for officials to issue west Altadena mandatory evacuation orders. <\/p>\n
By then, homes in the area were on fire and residents were in danger<\/a>, as embers rained down on streets and smoke filled bedrooms<\/a> and obscured sight lines. In the end, all but one of the 19 people who died in the Eaton fire were found in this section of Altadena<\/a>. <\/p>\n The evacuation recommendation, revealed in county documents released last month<\/a>, raises new questions about the L.A. County Fire Department\u2019s handling<\/a> of the Eaton Fire.<\/p>\n County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena, conceded this week that the county fire department was responsible for what she called \u201ca gap\u201d between when evacuation alerts were needed and actually ordered. <\/p>\n \u201cThat was where the breakdown was,\u201d Barger told The Times. \u201cThere was a gap there.\u201d<\/p>\n West Altadena received its first evacuation order at 3:25 a.m., four hours after 911 callers started reporting smoke and flames in the area. Some parts of west Altadena<\/a> weren\u2019t evacuated until just before 6 a.m.<\/p>\n The Times first reported in January<\/a> the disparity between when the fire threatened west Altadena and when residents were ordered to leave. <\/p>\n Barger pointed specifically to the period from 1:12 a.m. to 3 a.m., when the Office of Emergency Management received no direction to send out evacuation alerts, a finding from the after-action report on evacuations.<\/a> That report, conducted by the McChyrstal Group at the request of county supervisors, found that during that time period \u201cember cast from the main fire and from downed power lines caused spot fires west of Lake Avenue after midnight on Jan. 8 and accelerated in the following hours.\u201d <\/p>\n Lake Avenue is the unofficial divider between east and west Altadena. It\u2019s historically significant since the avenue served as a discriminatory redlining boundary for home loans in the early 20th century and confined Black homebuyers to western neighborhoods. The population of east Altadena, which received evacuation orders within an hour of the Eaton fire\u2019s ignition, remains much whiter than that of unincorporated neighborhoods to the west. <\/p>\n L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone declined to be interviewed for this story. But agency spokesperson Heidi Oliva said Marrone \u201cis committed to ensuring the Department continues to improve for future fires.\u201d<\/p>\n In response to questions about whether the department should be considered at fault for the delayed evacuation alerts, Oliva only said that the department \u201cagrees with Supervisor Barger that Unified Command makes and executes evacuation decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n A unified command structure is typically how California officials respond to major fires, with several agencies joining forces. During the first hours of the Eaton fire, L.A. County Fire was one of the main agencies responding, but formed a unified command with other local fire agencies, including from Pasadena and the Angeles National Forest, as well as other first responder agencies, including the Los Angeles Sheriff\u2019s Department and Office of Emergency Management. <\/p>\n Oliva did not directly answer questions about why the pre-midnight evacuation recommendation from staff in the field wasn\u2019t acted upon. Instead she pointed to the \u201cmassive, unprecedented natural disaster\u201d that county fire officials faced that night, with the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst fires all igniting the same day during severe winds that grounded aircraft for hours and limited situational awareness. <\/p>\n \u201cUnified command did their very best to identify evacuation zones to be alerted based on the information available to them at that time,\u201d Oliva said in a statement. \u201cWhen unified command learned that the fire was seen north of Lake and moving west, it validated and acted to issue the orders that were sent out by OEM.\u201d <\/p>\n Oliva did not explain why it took hours for officials to realize the fire was threatening west Altadena, despite evidence from 911 calls, radio traffic and the recommendation from firefighters in the field. She did, however, say that the county fire department \u201cis committed to continuing to learn and improve.\u201d <\/p>\n The agency has now made it a \u201cbest practice\u201d to surround evacuation orders with evacuation warnings, something the McChrystal report recommended. <\/p>\n McChrystal investigators found out about the suggestion to enact more widespread evacuations just before midnight \u201cduring the interview process,\u201d according to the report. But the only other mention of this communication in the report says that \u201cUnified Command staff did not recall this occurring and reported that the fire front of the Eaton Fire was not moving west into those areas at that time.\u201d<\/p>\n The Times requested more information about the evacuation recommendation, but the McChrystal Group declined to share anything beyond what was in the report. A request for related records to the county has not yet been filled. <\/p>\n Shawn Tyrie, a McChrystal Group partner who worked on the report, said in an interview that his team was unable to uncover any evidence about what happened to that pre-midnight recommendation. While he didn\u2019t want to speculate, he said there were many potential reasons that a call to evacuate may not not have been acted upon, noting findings in the report of poor internet access, spotty cell service, short-staffing and overall chaos during the unprecedented conflagration fueled by hurricane-force winds. <\/p>\n \u201cIt could have been a technical issue,\u201d Tyrie said. \u201cIt could have been somebody got busy and didn\u2019t push the right button. Who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the reason it has been so hard to pin down exactly what happened is the structure of that unified command. While the command structure is designed to encourage collaboration, it also divides responsibility and accountability, Tyrie said. <\/p>\n \u201cIt does leave responsibility and actual command authority as this kind of ambiguous thing,\u201d Tyrie said, noting that this is a common practice across the country. \u201cThere tends to be someone that\u2019s running the incident command post. But there is really not even any room in the guidance in the county code to say that, definitively, Person X is in charge.\u201d<\/p>\n