Wednesday, October 7, 2026

County Supervisors Order Seven-Day County Analysis of State-Commissioned Report Covering Altadena’s Eaton Fire

Lake Avenue in Altadena, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025. [Eddie Rivera / Pasadena Now]

Motion by Barger and Horvath asks which of the report’s 266 recommendations repeat three earlier county reviews and which are new

Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday, Oct. 6, approved a motion giving County Counsel seven days to analyze a state-commissioned report on the January 2025 fires, including Altadena’s Eaton Fire.

The motion, by Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Lindsey P. Horvath, asks how the new report’s recommendations compare with three reviews the county already holds. The county must urgently evaluate where those recommendations align, where they diverge and where gaps remain, the two supervisors wrote. Altadena is an unincorporated community in Barger’s Fifth District.

“The findings in this report are serious and Eaton Fire survivors deserve to know that our County is listening and will act on what we have learned,” Barger said in the release. “Survivors’ voices are central to this work. Their experience should shape the reforms that make our emergency systems stronger before the next disaster strikes.”

County Counsel is to work with the Fire Department, the Office of Emergency Management, the Sheriff’s Department and the Department of Public Works. County Counsel is to send the board a written summary analysis of the report.

The summary is to do three things. It is to identify where the report’s recommendations overlap with those in the county’s earlier reviews. It is to outline the recommendations found only in the new report. And it is to identify immediate or near-term actions the county can take while longer-term recommendations are carried out, without duplicating actions already identified.

UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute released the Southern California Fires Incident Analysis Report on Friday, Oct. 2. It is the second of two reports the institute conducted at the request of the governor’s office. It contains 175 findings and 266 recommendations. Its subjects include emergency preparedness and management, utilities, weather and vegetation, evacuation, transportation, fire and law enforcement operations, fatalities and the built environment.

Outcomes in the fires were influenced by the combined performance of many interconnected systems rather than a single point of failure, the institute said. It said it found considerable challenges in incident management, evacuation coordination, situational awareness and fire suppression effectiveness, among other areas. Its key recommendations include improving evacuation and communications interoperability and strengthening situational awareness, the institute said. Timelapse visualizations of the Eaton Fire’s progression and evacuation activity accompany the report.

In the Eaton Fire, paramedics’ observations of embers reaching west Altadena were not conveyed to incident command hours before the first evacuation alert was sent there, according to the report as described by LAist. The analysis runs 724 pages, LAist reported.

The county’s earlier reviews are two after-action reviews by the McChrystal Group and an investigation by Citygate Associates. The first McChrystal review, released in September 2025, examined alert notification systems and evacuation policies. The second, released Sept. 11, examined recovery and repopulation and listed 26 findings and 25 recommendations.

The county Fire Department commissioned the Citygate investigation of evacuation decisions, incident communications and fire behavior during the critical overnight hours of the Eaton Fire. The department released it May 18. Citygate issued recommendations along with its findings.

The board has already directed departments to begin carrying out recommendations from the McChrystal reviews, Barger and Horvath wrote.

“These reports cannot sit on a shelf—we owe it to the people we lost, the survivors rebuilding their lives, and every community facing the next emergency to turn these lessons into action,” Horvath said in the release.

The motion ensures the county has a complete, coordinated picture of what the independent analyses found, Barger’s office said.

The state attorney general has separately opened an investigation into the county’s response to the fires.

County Counsel’s written summary is due back to the board within seven days under the motion.