Attorneys representing the family of Stacey Darden, an Altadena resident who perished in the Eaton fire, filed a wrongful death lawsuit Monday, alleging that the software that Los Angeles County uses for emergency alerts was defective and failed to alert her to leave in time.
The complaint, filed more than 10 months after the Eaton fire engulfed Altadena, targets the emergency alert software company Genasys, and blames the company’s predesigned evacuation zones, or “polygons,” for causing residents east of Lake Avenue from getting timely evacuation orders the night of the fire.
While 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. Genasys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Geraldine “Gerry” 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’s death.
“Edison started this fire, and Genasys never warned her that she was in danger,” Darden said in a statement. “My 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.”
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 pm, 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.
In the fire’s aftermath, The Times reported that residents of west Altadena did not get electronic evacuation orders 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 begun to get alerts.
At a news conference at Altadena’s main library, Doug Boxer, an attorney working with LA 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.
Darden’s Altadena home — 2528 Marengo Ave., about five blocks west of Lake Avenue — was not included in an evacuation order zone, or “polygon,” Boxer said.
According to the lawsuit, the only evacuation order for Darden’s 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.
“By the time an evacuation order was finally pushed to her phone, it was too late,” attorney Mikal Watts said in a statement. “This is not a tragedy of bad luck, this is a tragedy of corporate failures.”
“At its core, this is really a case of digital redlining,” Watts said at the conference, referring to Lake Avenue’s historic role as a boundary for racial redlining in Altadena.
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?
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 got alerts so much later than the comparatively more affluent, whiter east side.
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 which was “safe in its operation for its intended purpose” and “free of defects in its design and manufacture.”
However, it argued Genasys’ system was “defective and unreasonably dangerous,” 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 make considerations for vulnerable populations including the sick and elderly, who need more time to evacuate.
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.
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’s software did not fail during the fire.
In March, Richard Danforth, the chief executive of Genasys, told stockholders in a Zoom meeting “the system was up and operational.”
According to a county-supported after-action report from the McChrystal Group, most of the issues with alerts in the Eaton fire were due to human error, not technological issues.
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.
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