No one likes L.A. County's independent report on the Eaton and Palisades fire response, not even the supervisors. The attorney general should step in.
In many ways, Lauren Randolph is a model fire evacuee.
Days before her Altadena house burned to the ground in the early morning hours of Jan. 8, Randolph noted the increasingly dire forecasts of life-threatening winds. She told me she charged her electric vehicle and parked it facing out of her driveway, allowing quicker, easier egress.
So when the freak Santa Ana wind storm hit Jan. 7 and the Eaton fire ignited in hills well east of her home, Randolph didn’t wait long to leave with her two children, now ages 3 and 6. She had seen a video posted at 7:17 that night by local meteorologist and climate activist Edgar McGregor exhorting Altadenans to “get out” and “not wait for an official evacuation notice” if they feel it’s time to leave.
Evidently, Randolph and McGregor had more foresight that night than the emergency professionals. As has been reported extensively, the section of Altadena that saw the most death and destruction — the ethnically diverse, largely middle-class portion west of Lake Avenue — didn’t receive evacuation notices until after 3 a.m., by which time residents were already making desperate 911 calls to report homes on fire.
The late evacuation order figured prominently in an independent after-action report presented Tuesday to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. That report, by the Virginia-based McChrystal Group, identified widespread systemic — but fixable — faults in county government and a “perfect storm” of wind, fire and drought as the most obvious causes of the catastrophes in the Palisades and Eaton fires.
But so many questions remain, and this report didn’t even set out to answer them: If L.A. County Fire Department personnel radioed that the fire was moving west at 2:18 a.m., as the report notes, why did it take until 3 a.m. for the first evacuation notice to go out to west Altadena residents? If firefighters and sheriff’s deputies acted heroically to save lives, as the report says, then why do so many residents insist they didn’t see first responders putting out flames or telling residents to flee?
Why do so many burned-out lots have yard signs saying, “Altadena west of Lake, we saved ourselves!”?
At a news conference before the county supervisors’ meeting Tuesday morning, Altadena residents decried the report as woefully incomplete. The McChrystal Group, they noted, could not compel officials to talk — in fact, the report contains an appendix of “stakeholders who declined interviews,” and it includes fire departments in the cities of L.A., Pasadena and Sierra Madre; the Federal Communications Commission; the Los Angeles Police Department and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, among others. The group called on state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to launch a separate investigation — a sensible request, since the very report that calls on the county to build trust with residents seems to have undermined it.
Randolph, a member of the group that put on the news conference, told me she was surprised by what came next: At their meeting, the county supervisors themselves discredited much of the report and cast blame on other officials.
Supervisor Kathryn Barger (Altadena, in unincorporated L.A. County, is in her district) slammed city officials and other agencies and municipalities that refused to participate in the investigation.
“When I go out into Altadena and I look people in the eye who lost everything, I owe it to them to get answers,” Barger said. “So I am incredibly disappointed. I feel that this report then is lacking in areas that would provide maybe answers to some of these questions, like the 42-minute gap” between the first report of fire heading to west Altadena and the evacuation notices.
There was also the jarring revelation that officials based their initial evacuation orders not on where the unpredictable winds might carry red-hot embers, but rather the movement of Eaton Fire perimeter itself — and for the first several hours, it was spreading away from west Altadena.
“I think that’s crazy, it makes no sense,” Randolph told me when I asked her about that. “I’ve only been in Altadena for seven years, and it’s long enough to know high winds can change any moment.”
Under questioning by Barger, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone admitted that in retrospect, “with hindsight being 20/20,” that was a bad decision.
I was deeply shaken by the fire chief’s answer. Much of my mother-in-law’s Ventura County ranch burned in the Mountain fire last November. If you look at a map of that incident, you’ll see a splotch in Camarillo where dozens of homes burned far from the main fire. High winds carried embers that ignited areas thought safely distant from danger. That was two months before the Eaton fire.
State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), who represents Altadena and previously served on my local city council in Alhambra, echoed residents’ and the supervisors’ frustrations with the McChrystal Group’s investigation. She cited the county’s after-action review for the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which made similar recommendations on increasing emergency staff and updating technology.
But she is circumspect about accountability and assigning blame, especially when it comes to reports of firefighters ignoring residents’ pleas to fight structure fires, or the allegation that minimal resources were stationed in west Altadena. “I know that [Altadena residents] are telling the truth, because I’ve heard everything that you’re talking about,” she told me. “But I think that part of what becomes more complicated is when you start looking deeper into some of those stories.”
Among the complicating issues, she said, is the fact that Altadena is served by multiple water districts, and some of their systems failed during the Eaton fire. She said “there’s blame kind of everywhere” and elected officials owe it to residents to listen, no matter how much those residents might blame them.
Randolph told me that for her, accountability would involve precisely that: county officials holding frequent public question-and-answer sessions with community members. That doesn’t seem too much to ask — nor does an investigation by the attorney general or any other body that could compel officials from all the relevant agencies to sit for interviews.
After all, the McChrystal Report says one of the county’s primary goals going forward should be “fostering trust” — and the best way to foster trust is to answer the questions swirling in Altadena.
