Agencies across Los Angeles County were “overwhelmed.”
The Emergency Operations Center was “largely ineffective” in maintaining situational awareness.
Some notification tools were not “used or used often enough” in the early hours of the fire and there was “no clear, single, comprehensive voice” on evacuations.
These were the troubling findings of a sweeping report that examined the performance of L.A. County fire, sheriff, and emergency management agencies in the wake of the 2018 Woolsey fire, which burned 1,100 structures across L.A. and killed three people.
To a remarkable degree, they foretold many of the failures that would beset L.A. County during the even more catastrophic January firestorms that destroyed 17,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The after-action report on the Palisades and Eaton fires, released last week, found staff lacked training and no clear chain of command. The county struggled to monitor rapidly unfolding events without streamlined coordination tools and operated with “unclear” and “outdated” policies and protocols when deciding when to send evacuation warnings and orders.
As The Times reported in January, officials took hours to issue evacuation orders to a large swath of west Altadena. When the order finally went out, homes in the area were already ablaze. All but one of the 19 deaths in the Eaton fire occurred in west Altadena.
The seeming lack of progress — particularly the inability to develop clear policies and protocol — points to what some experts describe as a larger failure to learn from major fire disasters.
“We have to work really hard to continue ignoring the patterns here,” said Art Botterell, a former senior emergency services coordinator for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
Los Angeles is not alone. Counties across California have commissioned reports that have highlighted severe problems with coordination and failures to send out evacuation alerts and warnings — from the 2017 Tubbs fire, which killed 22 people in the wine country, to the 2018 Camp fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
“We continue to do these groundhog day after-action reports. We’re all expected to do it after an incident in order to spin the screwups and to create the impression that we’re doing this in a systematic fashion,” Botterell said. “But if you ask yourself a very simple question — ‘Whose responsibility was this?’ — you won’t find anybody sticking their hand up.”
The report on the Palisades and Eaton fires highlighted fundamental problems, he said. But in focusing on the minutiae of what happened and recommending mostly narrow or technical improvements, it failed to answer the deeper question: “Why, after all these years, don’t we do this any better?”
Kevin McGowan, director of L.A. County’s Office of Emergency Management, said the county had made significant progress. After his office took on responsibility for the county’s Emergency Operations Center after Woolsey, he said, that operation now activates sooner, based on threats, rather than after a disaster has taken place. It also sends out more mass notifications. After criticism for over-relying on Twitter during the Woolsey fire and not sending any emergency alerts via mass notification tools, he noted, his office issued more than 80 emergency notification campaigns during the January firestorms.
Still, McGowan acknowledged there was room for more improvement — and said the recent report identified the solution: bolstering his budget and staff.
“You want to improve, you’ve got to get more resources,” he said. “We have a capacity challenge on our hands, and this disaster took our capacity to the limit. When your capacity is at the limit, trade-offs start occurring, and some of those trade-offs lead to coordination and communication challenges.”
Protecting lives is no easy task in the nation’s most populated county, built on land prone to fires and straddling five active earthquake faults. Although L.A. County has made a number of changes since Woolsey, some experts question whether it has done enough.
“It seems strange that a county that oversees 10 million people would be saying we need to train people and we need to work on coordination and sort out protocols,” said Thomas Cova, a geography professor at the University of Utah who specializes in emergency management. “That’s kind of what their job is.”
Botterell said the problem was not simply that L.A. County failed to enact the Woolsey report’s recommendations. Rather, he said, after-action reports tend to issue moderate recommendations that do not address underlying problems: Too often, they endorse existing practices and protocols, with shortcomings blamed almost entirely on resource and funding limitations, and assume problems can be solved by newer technology.
“There are all manner of mechanical issues, which I think this report dealt with rather well,” Botterell said. “But they don’t — and it probably wasn’t inside the terms of their contract — do a critique of the entire emergency management structure of L.A. County, which is what we’re really needing to talk about and wanting desperately not to talk about.”
A key problem, Botterell said, is that responsibility tends to be spread among departments.
“Everybody’s got their jurisdictional and functional turf within government,” he said. “Nobody wants to see that taken away from their department, because it’s going to go to their budget. So, everybody will fight to have a piece of it. … The responsibility is spread around among multiple agencies, so that in the event [of a disaster], it will always fall between the chairs.”
Both the Woolsey and Eaton reports referred to a “perfect storm.”
The Woolsey report described “a firestorm of epic proportions” propelled by 50-mph Santa Ana winds. It also said the L.A. County Fire Department “could not have planned for a complete exhaustion of California’s limited firefighting resources” after the Hill fire broke out in Ventura County and a wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise in Northern California. That significantly hampered L.A. County’s ability to get mutual aid in the first crucial hours.
Similarly, the report into the January firestorms stressed that the Eaton blaze ignited near the end of a day that L.A. County officials had spent grappling with the Palisades fire. Spread by erratic, hurricane-force winds, it pushed embers for miles “in darkness and intense smoke.”
Cova said the Eaton report was right to emphasize the extraordinarily dire conditions on the night of Jan. 7. But that didn’t excuse unclear policies or lack of training — and the report didn’t ultimately answer the biggest question: What led to delays in issuing evacuation alerts to west Altadena?
The report, led by the McChrystal Group, said that a county Fire Department staffer in the field suggested to Unified Command before midnight that they send evacuation orders to foothills communities, including all of Altadena. But Unified Command staff didn’t remember that, the report said, and said the fire front was not moving west at that moment.
The first evacuation order for west Altadena came at 3:25 a.m., after dispatchers received at least 14 reports of fire in the area, according to 911 logs from the Fire Department obtained by The Times.
“What were they doing between 6 p.m. on the 7th and 3:25 a.m. on the 8th?” Cova asked. “Were they confused about who was in charge of evacuation orders? It just doesn’t all add up.”
After the Woolsey fire, investigators found that staff shortages limited participation in emergency management training and hindered a unified approach.
“Infrequent training and lack of familiarity with the [Incident Command System],” it said, “made interfacing with key agencies awkward.”
The report issued dozens of recommendations to “improve coordination of multiple-agency emergency public messages,” “increase the speed and use of all alerting tools” and “create more specific evacuation plans.”
After hiring Citygate, the company that put together the report, to make sure its recommendations were put in place, the Office of Emergency Management took on the role of running the Emergency Operations Center and became the core coordination and support hub for county agencies. The county also increased the office’s staff to 37 from around 30.
By 2022, Sheila Kuehl, then an L.A. County supervisor, said at a board meeting that 80% of the report’s recommendations had been implemented. “Although there’s plenty of work still to be done,” she said, “you can see that improvements have been made, both on the ground and systemwide.”
But the report on the Eaton and Palisades fires found glaring deficiencies.
The L.A. County Office of Emergency Management’s annual budget of $15 million, it said, lags behind the budgets of New York City ($88 million) and Cook County, Ill., ($132 million). Its staffing of 37 employees to mitigate risk for more than 10 million people, it said, was “fundamentally inadequate.” By comparison, New York City has more than 200 emergency management staffers serving 8.5 million people and Cook County has 54 serving 5.2 million.
Staffing shortfalls, the report said, meant too few employees were trained in essential roles of alert and warnings planning, and situational awareness.
McGowan said the agency has already started to create six new positions — a figure that still leaves staffing levels behind jurisdictions of similar sizes.
And the budget challenges that stymie Los Angeles’ ability to adequately prepare for disasters have only become more acute as the county faces a storm of financial problems — including slower property tax revenue growth, a $4-billion settlement of thousands of childhood sexual assault claims, and the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
California has taken a number of steps over the years to help local officials alert residents in a disaster and evacuate them to safety.
After the state faced its most destructive wildfire season on record in 2017, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services published statewide Alert and Warning Guidelines and standardized alert language. It also developed best practices for county emergency plans after public workshops and meetings with local and state emergency responders.
But the state guidelines are recommendations, not requirements. The leaders of California’s 58 counties have vastly different staff and budgets, state officials note, and should have leeway to develop localized plans.
Some emergency management experts argue that the state has long played too passive a role in making sure local jurisdictions are prepared for the next disaster.
“I think the state has kind of done everything it can to stay out of this,” Botterell said. “There’s litigious liability, there’s political liability, there’s bureaucratic liability, because these issues cut across existing turf boundaries within agencies. So there’s a lot of problems that need to be solved, and no particular great reward for solving them.”
The post Fire after fire, L.A. County keeps promising to fix failures but doesn’t deliver appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
