As Altadena waited for evacuation orders, fire commanders faced ‘chaotic’ conditions
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As flames exploded from the parched hillsides of Eaton Canyon on Jan. 7, fire agencies faced a crisis far beyond their worst reckoning.
In just a few hours, hurricane-force winds would stoke three major Los Angeles-area wildfires like a hellish bellows, and perilous flight conditions would ground all aircraft — hampering emergency commanders’ ability to track the fire’s chaotic movement. On the streets of Altadena, thick black smoke was limiting visibility to several feet in some areas, and howling winds lofted burning embers over the heads of firefighters.
It was in this difficult environment that a group of emergency officials established a mobile command center to coordinate the fight against the Eaton fire and help get residents out of harm’s way. In the course of three hours, the center was moved twice as officials struggled to keep up with a fire that was moving faster and more erratically than anything they had seen before.
“Was it chaotic? Absolutely,” said John Miller, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman and incident command staffer who recalled seeing a response vehicle with a tree branch protruding from its shattered windshield.
In this section of western Altadena, residents weren’t ordered to evacuate until after 5 a.m., according to records reviewed by The Times. That was well after smoke and flames were threatening the area.
The handling of the fire has come under increasing scrutiny as residents and others question why it took almost nine hours for a large swath of Altadena west of North Lake Avenue to receive electronic evacuation orders. By then, several fires had been reported in that area and many residents say they watched in horror as flames rapidly approached their homes. Of the 17 people who died, all lived west of North Lake Avenue.
The delayed notice is now the subject of an independent investigation by Los Angeles County.
The actions and movement of the mobile command center offer a window into the turmoil officials faced while battling the Eaton fire. County resources had already been stretched thin due to the massive Palisades fire, and were further taxed when yet another fire broke out near Sylmar later that night.
“It was really a phenomenon we’ve never seen,” said Carlos Herrera, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Fire Department.
When the Eaton fire erupted beneath a Southern California Edison transmission tower just after 6 p.m., incident commanders quickly established a command post at a nearby equestrian center, but then relocated to Farnsworth Park in western Altadena shortly before 7 p.m., according to radio transmissions reviewed by The Times.
But within an hour, fire officials realized they would again need to relocate, moving operations from Farnsworth Park — which would eventually burn in the fire — to the Rose Bowl just before 9 p.m. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone and Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia decided they needed additional space because their incident command had grown to include a federal incident management team.
In these early hours of the fire, evacuation alerts went out frequently. Some eastern Altadena neighborhoods received their first “BE AWARE” alert at 6:48 p.m., while others were issued evacuation orders at 7:26 p.m. From 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Jan. 8, evacuation warnings and orders from the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, or OEM, went out several times per hour, largely covering areas that would not end up burning.
“Most of the time, this is pretty smooth except for the fact [that this night] we had raging 100-mph winds,” Herrera said. “The fire was initially pushing away from that west side [of Altadena]; later it switched directions. ... We were trying to get ahead of this thing, but again, it’s something we’ve never seen.”
From roughly 2 a.m. to 9 a.m., Herrera was tasked with assisting command staff in monitoring and changing evacuation alerts, when necessary.
From inside the back of a firetruck, Herrera said he worked with three other officials — one from OEM, one focused on communications technology and another county firefighter acting as an incident commander — to evaluate radio traffic and 911 calls to help determine where to send resources and evacuation alerts.
“We’d get a call, I’d check where the call was, I’d check if the area was under evacuation warning or order,” said Herrera, who used the county’s Genasys Protect website. “In that initial phase, our priority was: We got to get these people out of here, we got evacuate them.”
At the Rose Bowl, incident command consisted of three SUVs parked side by side: county fire, sheriff and OEM, according to Miller.
A nearby truck housed the operations team, which served as an intermediary for radio communications between the command post and fire battalions battling the flames.
“Operations is getting intelligence from the various divisions,” Miller said. “They’re your eyes and ears.” Crucially, officials had no picture from the air of where the fire was going, as helicopters and planes had been grounded shortly after the fire began due to high winds.
The SUVs had their back hatches open, revealing trunks fitted with “command boxes, maps, lights and radios,” Miller said. Sheriff’s officials maintained a map of evacuation areas covered with clear plexiglass and a grease pencil to mark it.
The team had a methodical process for deciding whether or not to issue evacuation orders.
“There is criteria, there’s a system of what needs to be met before you start issuing evac orders,” Herrera said, explaining that officials want to be sure they don’t unnecessarily issue orders, creating additional hazards that further strain resources.
“You don’t want to create hysteria,” he said.
Those alerts are ultimately sent out by OEM, Herrera said, and he was only helping inform decisions. OEM officials have said that evacuation alerts are issued and executed in coordination among its team, county fire officials and the Sheriff’s Department.
Herrera rejected the idea that officials were slow in taking action.
“That wasn’t the case. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, we dropped the ball, we were late,’” he said. “The fire was just spreading so fast.”
Yet from 12:51 a.m. to 3:25 a.m., the warning and evacuation system fell silent, according to a Times review of archived alerts. Noticeably absent were warnings or orders for areas west of North Lake Avenue, which, according to interviews and fire radio calls, had begun burning.
During this time, Miller recalled hearing a radio transmission about fires on Wapello Street and looked at the map and thought: “Oh crap! This is a heartbreaker.” At the time, he did not realize that the area was under no evacuation order or warning.
At 2:37 a.m., operations reported several homes on fire in this area: one near Cobb Estate trailhead at the northern end of Lake Avenue, and two more several blocks southwest on Wapello Street.
Evacuation warnings had never been issued for the area west of Lake — including these homes — and evacuation orders would not come until 3:25 a.m. Miller could not explain the gap, and noted that Angeles National Forest was not responsible for evacuation zones. Herrera declined to comment on the specific timing or location of orders.
In the absence of official evacuation orders, some sheriff’s deputies took it upon themselves to evacuate areas that seemed clearly imperiled by fire, or areas where they’d gotten calls for service, according to Capt. Jabari Williams of the Altadena Sheriff’s Station. His deputies helped with evacuations west of Lake Avenue well before 3:30 a.m., he said.
“The incident management team has assigned missions, and some of those would be to evacuate certain areas,” Williams said. “But you don’t have to wait for that; if you see an area needs to be evacuated, you just make the announcements.”
It was unclear whether incident command knew of these evacuations.
Officials with the country Coordinated Joint Information Center declined to discuss specifics of their actions, but released the following statement: “The Board of Supervisors has voted for an independent review specifically related to both evacuations and emergency notifications conducted by an independent third party. The Office of Emergency Management, County Fire Department and Sheriff’s Department are committed to prioritizing and fully engaging in that process.”
Several family members of those who were killed in the Eaton fire told The Times that they believe earlier evacuation notifications could have made a difference in preventing deaths.
“A lot of the lives that were lost were either elderly or disabled, which is unfortunate because they’re one of the vulnerable groups that need the most assistance from family or their support system,” said Briana Navarro, whose grandmother Erliene Kelley, 83, died in the fire.
At 1:22 a.m., Kelley responded to a text from her grandaughter asking how things were going at her western Altadena home.
“In the living room looking out,” Kelley wrote. “I’m going to take a picture.”
The photo never came.
“I think with a notice,” Navarro said, “it would have given enough time for some of us to go help our family members.”
Times staff writers Keri Blakinger, Ruben Vives and Summer Lin contributed to this report.
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