{"id":58117,"date":"2025-11-18T07:13:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T07:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/58117\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T07:13:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T07:13:19","slug":"she-died-in-the-eaton-fire-her-family-blames-emergency-alert-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/58117\/","title":{"rendered":"She died in the Eaton fire. Her family blames emergency alert software"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Attorneys representing the family of Stacey Darden, an Altadena resident who perished in the Eaton fire, filed a wrongful death lawsuit<\/a> Monday alleging that the software that Los Angeles County uses for emergency alerts was defective and failed to alert her to leave in time.<\/p>\n

The complaint, filed more than 10 months after the Eaton fire engulfed Altadena, targets the emergency alert software company Genasys and blames the company\u2019s predesigned evacuation zones, or \u201cpolygons,\u201d for keeping residents east of Lake Avenue from getting timely evacuation orders the night of the fire. <\/p>\n

Although the lawsuit also blames the Southern California Edison utility company for starting the fire with its equipment, like several other lawsuits filed in the wake of the deadly blaze, it is among the first to focus on how evacuation orders failed to reach a large swath of residents. <\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Genasys said the company\u2019s attorneys were reviewing the complaint. \u201cGenasys denies any wrongdoing and will vigorously defend itself against these allegations,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

Geraldine \u201cGerry\u201d Darden, the sister of Stacey Darden, said her family thought long and hard about the decision to bring a complaint against Genasys for her sister\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

\u201cEdison started this fire, and Genasys never warned her that she was in danger,\u201d Darden said in a statement. \u201cMy sister was studiously following the evacuation orders the night of the Eaton Fire. The truth is that if these companies had done what they were supposed to do, Stacey would be alive today.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The morning sun peeks through the smoke from the Altadena fire as seen from Sylmar on Jan. 8.<\/p>\n

(Myung J. Chun \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

On Jan. 7, Los Angeles emergency officials and fire responders were quickly overwhelmed when extreme red flag conditions ignited a spate of devastating fires across the region, from the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains to the San Gabriel Mountains. When flames erupted near Eaton Canyon around 6:30 p.m., erratic hurricane-force winds carried red-hot embers for miles, igniting countless small fires that ultimately destroyed thousands of homes. Nineteen people in Altadena died<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the fire\u2019s aftermath, The Times reported that residents of west Altadena did not get electronic evacuation orders<\/a> until hours after the fire had started and engulfed the area. All but one of the 19 deaths from the Eaton fire occurred west of Lake Avenue, where residents did not receive evacuation warnings until around 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 8, at least six hours after their neighbors on the other side of the Lake Avenue began to get alerts.<\/p>\n

At a news conference at Altadena\u2019s main library, Doug Boxer, an attorney working with L.A. Fire Justice, said Stacey Darden, 54, and her sister Gerry were on high alert when the Eaton fire ignited and were constantly monitoring the news for information on evacuation zones. <\/p>\n

Darden\u2019s Altadena home \u2014 2528 Marengo Ave., about five blocks west of Lake Avenue \u2014 was not included in an evacuation order zone, or \u201cpolygon,\u201d Boxer said.<\/p>\n

According to the lawsuit, the only evacuation order for Darden\u2019s neighborhood did not hit her cellphone until 5:43 a.m. on Jan. 8. Her last cellphone activity, it said, is believed to be more than two hours earlier, around 3:30 a.m.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time an evacuation order was finally pushed to her phone, it was too late,\u201d attorney Mikal Watts said in a statement. \u201cThis is not a tragedy of bad luck, this is a tragedy of corporate failures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt its core, this is really a case of digital redlining,\u201d Watts said at the news conference, referring to Lake Avenue\u2019s historic role as a boundary for racial redlining in Altadena.<\/p>\n

The suit seeks to answer a question that the company, the county, and its after-action report have thus far been unable to answer: Why were alerts for residents west of Lake Avenue delayed?<\/p>\n

\"An <\/p>\n

An evacuation warning from the Los Angeles Fire Department.<\/p>\n

(Kirby Lee \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Since January, several neighborhood groups in Altadena have rallied around the issue of late alerts, pressing county officials for answers as to why the historically marginalized west side of town received alerts so much later than the comparatively more affluent, whiter east side.<\/p>\n

The complaint alleges that Genasys entered into a contract to provide L.A. County with a mass notification software system that county officials could use to alert residents in the case of emergencies and had a duty to provide a system that was \u201csafe in its operation for its intended purpose\u201d and \u201cfree of defects in its design and manufacture.\u201d<\/p>\n

It argues, however, that Genasys\u2019 system was \u201cdefective and unreasonably dangerous,\u201d because of its predefined evacuation zones, which determine how alerts are rolled out onto cellphones and other technology in a given area. According to the suit, the zones did not take into consideration vulnerable populations including the sick and elderly, who need more time to evacuate. <\/p>\n

A recent state report highlighted a number of issues with senior facility operators and their inability to evacuate all of their residents as the emergency unfolded.<\/p>\n

As missteps around the Eaton fire response have come to light and questions of who is responsible have mounted, officials with Genasys have maintained that their company\u2019s software did not fail during the fire.<\/p>\n

In March, Richard Danforth, the chief executive of Genasys, told stockholders<\/a> in a Zoom meeting \u201cthe system was up and operational.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to a county-supported after-action report from the McChrystal Group<\/a>, most of the issues with alerts in the Eaton fire were due to human error, not technological issues.<\/p>\n

At the time of the fire, the Genasys software was new to L.A. County and only a handful of staff members at the county Office of Emergency Management had been trained to use it before the fires broke out, the report stated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Attorneys representing the family of Stacey Darden, an Altadena resident who perished in the Eaton fire, filed a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2640,2475,35557,1804,9664,4300,3802,35558,1793,48,52,51,35561,47,50,49,35562,15158,35559,315,35560],"class_list":{"0":"post-58117","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-a-m","9":"tag-alert","10":"tag-altadena-resident","11":"tag-company","12":"tag-county-official","13":"tag-eaton-fire","14":"tag-fire","15":"tag-genasys","16":"tag-issue","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-la-headlines","19":"tag-la-news","20":"tag-lake-avenue","21":"tag-los-angeles","22":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","23":"tag-los-angeles-news","24":"tag-predesigned-evacuation-zone","25":"tag-sister","26":"tag-stacey-darden","27":"tag-time","28":"tag-timely-evacuation-order"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}