Probe pushes on into why Altadena residents’ alerts were late during Eaton fire

A consultant group hired by Los Angeles County to investigate why Altadena residents didn’t receive evacuation alerts until nearly nine hours after the Eaton fire broke out is expected to give a second update to the Board of Supervisors no later than July 27.

Since early February, the McChrystal Group has been working on an independent review of the county’s emergency-alert notification systems to better understand the delay in evacuation alerts.

Timely evacuation orders may have helped more people flee before flames descended on homes. In all, 18 people died in the Eaton fire and 17 were in west Altadena, authorities have said.

On April 28, the McChrystal Group gave its first 90-day report to the county’s Board of Supervisors.

Helen Chavez, spokeswoman for Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes Altadena, said the supervisor is receiving updates from the group.

“The first phase has wrapped up and that was the McChrystal Group collecting data and doing interviews,” Chavez said. “They are now in the analysis phase.”

Requests for comment to the staff of Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Long Beach, were not answered. The congressman oversaw a report on the erroneous evacuation messages sent out for another fire.

The McChrystal Group has not yet provided any recommendations as a result of its ongoing investigation, nor has it said human error appeared to be a cause.

Julie Esnard, a resident at El Mirador Apartments off of Figueroa Drive, said she didn’t receive an emergency alert until 3 a.m., after she had already evacuated her fourth-story apartment and was settling in at the Pasadena Convention Center.

Esnard said she called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department about 1 a.m. and asked for help in evacuating because she uses a walker and has four dogs, but she was told she wasn’t yet in an evacuation zone. Less than an hour later, members of a Sheriff’s Department’s mountain rescue team knocked on her door and helped her evacuate.

“It was a very frightening night,” she said. “My heart is pounding right now just thinking about it.

“When that fire started jumping into Altadena, that evacuation notice should have gone out immediately,” she continued.

As for the investigation, Esnard said she hopes it leads to a fix of the notification system and that there is no chance for error. She hopes it leads to a more proactive approach to evacuations.

“We lost 18 people and that shouldn’t have happened,” Esnard said. “I don’t hold the first responders responsible for anything, but I think that the rank administration and upper ranks need to take a more proactive approach to things, and I hope that that’s the recommendation — walk the streets, pound on doors, wake people up.”

Through the first 90 days, the McChrystal Group didn’t give any conclusions as to what it believed caused the delay, but did update county authorities on its progress.

Investigators had conducted 33 group and individual interviews as of April 28 and anticipated doing another 18. The initial wave of interviews included officials with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the county’s Office of Emergency Management, a county communications division, the National Weather Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and Genasys, which operates the county’s emergency alerts.

The McChrystal Group also scheduled six community listening sessions and gathered feedback from residents concerning the Palisades and Eaton fires.

Flames began in Eaton Canyon the evening of Jan. 7 during an uncommon windstorm and initially didn’t appear to pose much of a challenge as they spread to the south toward Sierra Madre.

But after a change in wind direction, the fire quickly spread to the west toward Altadena, presenting a much greater challenge for firefighters in much tougher topography.

Kwynn Perry and her family were among the first to evacuate their home after following the fire on the news and the Watch Duty app. On their way out, she said she warned her next-door neighbors to make sure they knew of the fire.

Those neighbors, she said, awoke to flames on their house at 2 a.m.

“I’m assuming that means there was no evacuation notice (up to that point),” she said, adding that she didn’t see any evacuation alerts from the county until 5 a.m., when her family was already in La Cañada Flintridge.

Like Esnard, Perry said she hopes that future evacuation efforts include more first responders in the streets, perhaps with bullhorns or sirens, to make people aware of the imminent danger.

She said people are so reliant on cell towers for everything — but that technology could be fleeting in a weather event, or some could forget to charge their cellphones.

“My phone goes off constantly because there’s a silver alert, amber alert, whatever the thing is that’s happening,” Perry said. “Once you have so much of that you don’t pay attention to it as much since it’s the same exact sound for everything.

“Sometimes you need something that’s a jarring thing to happen, and to have someone going down the street with a bullhorn telling you to get out is jarring,” she added. “It spurs you into action.”

The fire burned 14,021 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 10,000 structures, according to Cal Fire. It took a month to fully contain the blaze.