More than a year after the deadly Eaton fire swept through Altadena, killing 19 people, a new, outside review of firefighters’ decision-making concluded “there was no failure” by L.A. County fire officials in ordering evacuations.
The report, released Monday and commissioned by the Los Angeles County Fire Department, found that incident command could not have “reasonably” requested evacuation orders for the area earlier because they weren’t aware the fire was moving into west Altadena.
Over the last 16 months, The Times has reported on mounting evidence that fire was threatening west Altadena well before evacuation alerts were issued, with several spot fires and heavy smoke reported, but it took hours to evacuate the historically Black neighborhood. Those revelations — based on 911 calls, dispatch records and harrowing resident accounts of perilous escapes — prompted the California Attorney General in February to open a civil rights investigation into potential disparities in the fire response, looking particularly at delays in evacuation alerts and resource allocation.
The new 51-page report, however, doesn’t acknowledge any shortcomings related to the evacuation alerts. Rather, it points out that many conditions that had existed there for years — streets aligning with the canyons, dense neighborhoods with heavy tree canopies that can help spread fire — combined with the strong winds and lack of intelligence from aircraft overhead “made stopping the fire spread impossible.”
L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who has previously said there was a “breakdown” in how evacuation alerts went out, said the new report found that “Unified Command did not engage in misconduct or intentionally delay evacuation decisions affecting areas west of Lake Avenue.”
“At the same time,” Barger said in a statement,” this investigation should not be interpreted as dismissing the experiences of residents. Public trust requires both accountability and a willingness to learn from every aspect of a disaster response.”
For many in the community, though, the report feels like another instance of the county, again, failing to hear their concerns or learn how to better alert residents in future disasters.
The Altadena for Accountability group, which pushed for the attorney general’s civil rights probe, dubbed the new report “deflection without accountability.”
“The Los Angeles [County] Fire Department declines to acknowledge any meaningful failures,” the group said in a statement, “and offers little assurances that substantive changes will be made to better protect Altadena residents in the future.”
Shimica Gaskins, an Eaton fire survivor and a leader of Altadena for Accountability, said the report “dismissed or overlooked” residents’ experiences and failed to acknowledge evacuation alerts that came too late for too many.
“I want to know, first, that you can be honest about what happened on Jan. 7 and the following days, so we know you’re actually making the changes needed,” Gaskins said of the county fire department. “Without that first step, there’s no trust.”
For Gaskins, the report fell short of determining if L.A. County Fire Dept. “adequately protected all the communities.” Still, she said, she is holding out hope for comprehensive findings from the attorney general’s independent investigation.
Art Botterell, a former senior emergency services coordinator for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, also criticized the report, saying it struck a “defensive tone and did not answer the real questions: Why have so many Altadena residents complained about the warning process? Do those complaints have any validity or standing?
“Wails of ‘but we didn’t know!’ and blaming inadequate intel are traditional deflections,” Botterell wrote in an email, “but they don’t improve future outcomes.”
The report, completed by CityGate Associates LLC, found “there was no failure … to request evacuation orders west of Lake Avenue sooner.” The road is a main thoroughfare and marks an unofficial east-west boundary for the unincorporated town of Altadena.
“Based on interviews, operational records, dispatch information, and incident communications, the investigation concluded that Unified Command acted appropriately amidst unprecedented fire and weather conditions that grounded aircraft, leaving them without aerial surveillance to track the spread of the Eaton Fire in real-time,” the report’s summary said.
The document’s focus on how county firefighters handled evacuations followed a county-issued review of evacuation alerts that revealed several L.A. County firefighters whohad suggested to Unified Command staff just before midnight that “evacuation orders should go out for the foothills of Altadena all the way to La Cañada.” But three hours —or longer — passed before west Altadena was ordered to evacuate.
Monday’s report simply said the calls for expanded evacuations that would have included west Altadena “could not be cross-verified.”
Citing cell phone calls and texts between Incident Command and Operations from 11:24 p.m. to 11:32 p.m., the report found that officials were focused on the Eaton fire’s eastern flank around northern Sierra Madre, and that firefighters on the ground on the western flank had not reported deteriorating conditions that would make the area a “prime concern.”
At around 1 a.m, the report found, incident commanders at the Rose Bowl were “still blind to the fire’s movements above them in the canyons.” Unbeknownst to them 1,200 feet below, winds were pushing the fire west between Eaton Canyon and Rubio Canyon.
In the hours before incident commanders decided to evacuate most of west Altadena, incidents of spot fires in that area were mostly created by downed power lines or felled trees, not burning embers or from a “main fire front” that wouldn’t arrive until after 5 a.m., the report stated.
According to the report, commanders became aware of the fire’s westward movement just after 2 a.m., and ordered evacuations for much of west Altadena at 3 a.m., with alerts going out at 3:25 a.m.
Since the fire storm, the department has created a new policy to issue evacuation warnings to zones bordering areas ordered to evacuate. But it did not do that for every community west of Lake Avenue the night of the Eaton fire and the report did not explore if things would have been different for the victims if it had.
Also, though the report claims all evacuation zones west of Lake Avenue were ordered to evacuate at 3:25 a.m., at least two zones — the Calaveras zones — were not ordered to evacuate until 5:43 a.m., according to county records and a Times review of the alerts.
The report does not identify that time gap or explore why it took so long to evacuate those neighborhoods. Heidi Oliva, a spokesperson for the county fire department, did not respond to questions about this inaccuracy in the report.
The Times has published a series of investigations into the late evacuation alerts in west Altadena and other response disparities compared to the more affluent eastern half of the unincorporated town. Fire damage was particularly widespread in west Altadena, and almost all of the fire’s 19 deaths occurred there — among them a 54-year-old woman whose family claimed she died because of the delayed evacuation alerts.
The report doesn’t get into most of those concerns. But it points out that evacuations were made using predetermined evacuation zones, many of which used Lake Avenue because it’s a major north-south street, which are “natural landmarks… that could be utilized as an anchor for creating evacuation zones,” the report said.
Lake Avenue has also long been known as a dividing line in the town’s demographics, with discriminatory redlining in the mid-20th century keeping Black homebuyers from settling east of Lake Avenue for years.
In a statement, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said he hopes the report can provide the community more transparency, but understands “that no investigation can truly capture the horror and tragedy residents endured.”
“My focus is to ensure that the lessons learned from the Eaton and Palisades Fires are turned into lasting changes that will better protect our residents and neighborhoods into the future,” Marrone said.
The report’s only recommendations called for the fire department to develop another way to gather intelligence during a fire when aircraft can’t fly, which the department said it has already done, and to designate a technical specialist dedicated to “incident intelligence, not consumed by immediate command.”
Botterell questioned that recommendation, noting that such an admission about needing someone not consumed by command decisions implied the command team was overrun.
The report, Botterell noted, stated that the strategy during the Eaton fire was to prioritize “life safety first, perimeter control, and defending building as resources allowed.” But that, he said, left out a key element: alerting or informing the public.
“That shortfall of emergency public information that was the real issue here,” Botterell said.
“The fires were a tragic disaster and there’s no reason to assume that any such event would go smoothly,” Botterell added. “But each disaster is a teachable moment, and I’m afraid the defensive tone of this report suggests a limited institutional capacity to learn from bitter experience.”
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