Wednesday, October 1, 2025

After Report on Fire Response, LA County Looks to Bolster Emergency Management

CITY NEWS SERVICE

In a sometimes-emotional and occasionally testy hearing, members of the county Board of Supervisors pressed for answers Tuesday about a delay in evacuation orders for residents in western Altadena during January’s Eaton Fire, while also calling for a report on expanding and streamlining the county Office of Emergency Management. 

The board on Tuesday received a detailed presentation on an after-action report released last week that pointed to a series of outdated policies, weaknesses and systemic vulnerabilities that hampered emergency notifications and evacuation orders during the deadly Eaton and Palisades wildfires that erupted Jan. 7. 

The “Independent After-Action Report” was commissioned by the Board of Supervisors and produced by McChrystal Group, a consulting firm led by retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The firm was charged with conducting “an independent after-action review of alerts and evacuations” to provide “a comprehensive picture of actions taken during the catastrophic January wildfires along with recommendations to help guide future Los Angeles County responses.” 

Some concerns arose during and after the fires regarding the effectiveness of community notifications in terms of evacuation warnings and alerts — particularly regarding the effectiveness or absence of warnings for many western Altadena-area residents at the onset of the Eaton Fire. 

The report noted that investigators found “no single point of failure” relating to public alerts, warnings and notifications. 

“Instead, a series of weaknesses, including outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities impacted the system’s effectiveness,” according to the report. “These systemic issues did not manifest uniformly across the two major fires. The effects of these weaknesses varied based on environmental conditions, community readiness and operational complexity caused by the variables of wind, power outages and fire behavior.” 

During Tuesday’s meeting, supervisors grilled representatives of the McChrystal Group, along with Sheriff Robert Luna, county Fire Chief Anthony Marrone and Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan about specific issues cited in the report and efforts to rectify problems. 

Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the Eaton Fire burn area, became visibly angry during the discussion, noting that while county agencies cooperated fully with the McChrystal investigation, some other law enforcement declined to be interviewed or provide emergency-response information. 

“To me it is inexcusable and I would challenge any one of those departments or any one of those chiefs to explain why (they did not participate),” Barger said, adding that she was “incredibly frustrated and disappointed.” 

Barger asked repeatedly about the law enforcement and fire response in the western Altadena area, where evacuation orders were not issued until roughly 3:25 a.m. Jan. 8, hours after spot fires were being reported in the area. 

Marrone acknowledged that fire personnel and commanders were “severely challenged” due to the number of blazes that were raging during the unprecedented windstorm, and it took time to verify the path and status of the fast-moving fire, delaying the process of issuing an evacuation order. 

But the fire chief strongly denied suggestions that there was only one fire truck in the western Altadena area, or that firefighters were “sitting idle” as the conflagration raged. 

“We had resources including other fire agencies and law enforcement partners performing evacuations and rescues throughout the night, well ahead of the evacuation order that came at 3:25 (a.m.),” Marrone said.

He added that there were 20 different fire departments in the Altadena area offering mutual aid, at the time, but some of those agencies declined to be interviewed by the McChrystal investigators, so there was no detailed accounting of those deployments. 

Luna also insisted that sheriff’s deputies were in the western Altadena area urging residents to leave, even before evacuation orders were issued. 

Some Altadena residents attending the meeting, however, disputed those contentions, saying they didn’t see any emergency responders in the area for hours. 

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents that Palisades Fire area, became visibly emotional as she complained about what she called omissions in the report, such as any discussion about an evacuation alert that was intended for residents in the San Fernando Valley but was mistakenly sent countywide amid the various fires. She also said the report should have included more personal input from fire survivors and their experiences. Horvath also questioned the report’s suggestion that many residents aren’t fully educated about Public Safety Power Shutoffs that often occur during wildfire conditions – – insisting that Pacific Palisades residents were fully aware of the program, having lived through it during multiple previous wildfires. 

The report’s authors outlined key differences in the Palisades and Eaton fires, noting that the Palisades blaze erupted during daylight hours in a community that was familiar with wildfire risks. The Eaton Fire, however, occurred at night in an area not traditionally associated with severe wildfire danger.

“Some residents in Altadena reported receiving little or no warning before the fire reached their neighborhoods,” according to the report. 

“Beyond alerting and evacuation operations, this review identified systemic issues that impacted the alert and evacuation response,” the document states. “Outdated and inconsistent policies, protocols and standard operating procedures created ambiguity around evacuation authority and responsibilities. In many cases, decision-making roles were unclear, and pre-incident public messaging responsibilities lacked standardization across agencies. These gaps contributed to nonuniform preparedness strategies across jurisdictions and slowed coordinated efforts.” 

The report also cited “longstanding challenges” regarding training, staffing, resource management and interagency cooperation that “further strained the response.” 

The report specifically pointed to resident complaints that emergency alerts and warnings failed to provide “complete information,” including exact locations of evacuation zones — an issue compounded by character limits in text/push alerts that required recipients to click on a link to obtain further details. 

The rapid spread of the fires also left incident commanders unable to keep up and issue timely evacuation warnings and orders. As a result, some residents were left with “little time to prepare and evacuate,” the report found. Some areas did not receive evacuation warnings at all before many residents had already decided to leave.

“This contributed to confusion and panic, with many evacuating residents feeling that they had little time to collect essential belongings,” the report states. 

Power outages — some planned for fire safety and others caused by the conflagrations — also hampered some residents’ ability to receive emergency notifications, according to the report. 

The wildfires killed 31 people and destroyed 16,251 properties in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, along with parts of Los Angeles, Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Malibu. 

The report stressed that despite the identified breakdowns in communications and training,”frontline responders acted decisively and, in many cases, heroically, in the face of extraordinary conditions.” 

At the end of Tuesday’s discussion, the board unanimously approved a joint motion by Barger and Horvath asking for an immediate start to implementation of recommendations in the report, with update reports presented to the board every 60 days. The motion also called on county staff to report back in two months on the possibility of increasing the size of the county’s Office of Emergency Management, and moving it into a stand-alone department rather than operating within the county executive office. 

Shawn Tyrie of the McChrystal Group noted during a news conference last week that the county’s Office of Emergency Management has only 37 staff members — in a county of 10  million residents. He said by comparison, New York City has 200 such workers for a population of about 8.5 million.

Tyrie said the report includes recommendations in five primary areas, relating to: 

• ambiguity in authority for issuing emergency alerts;
• training and staffing guidelines to improve emergency response;
• resource and staffing shortfalls in the emergency management system;
• the lack of coordinated tools and systems to coordinate communications among first responder and emergency management personnel; and
• ragmented community engagement and public information procedures.

The full report is available to view by clicking here.