The Santa Ana winds blew, gale-force, all over Southern California that terrible night of Jan. 7. If fires were to start, they were going to cause havoc, and no amount of human firefighting effort was likely to entirely quell them.
But the people of Los Angeles County still expect best efforts in the face of disaster on the part of the government agencies we hire to keep us safe, and new reporting shows that human and organizational failures led to inaction that likely led to the deaths of far more people than should have died, and the loss of far more homes and businesses.
For the Palisades fire, reporters Paul Pringle and Alene Tchekmedyian of the Los Angeles Times reviewed text messages among firefighters that reveal that some firefighters in the Los Angeles Fire Department had “grave worries” that a fire that had ignited in the area on Jan. 1 and was put down by members of the department was very much not out when personnel were ordered to leave the scene.
A battalion chief was warned on Jan. 1 “that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch,” according to text messages. But LAFD brass told firefighters to leave the scene. “And the rest is history,” one firefighter later wrote in a text. A hiker on Jan. 2 shot a video of the fire scene showing whiffs of smoke — “It’s still smoldering,” he says. That smoldering led to wind-driven reigniting five days later.
And it’s been well-known that late evacuation orders that night in west Altadena, where 18 of the 19 deaths from the Eaton fire occurred, were in hindsight a mistake. But now we now from the Times’ Grace Toohey and Terry Castleman that about midnight on Jan. 7, “several Los Angeles County firefighters on the ground suggested to incident commanders that the rest of the nearby foothill communities, from Altadena west into La Cañada Flintridge, be evacuated.” But orders from county commanders to do so didn’t happen for three more hours, when it was too late.
A September fire-response report by the private McChrystal Group, hired by the county, certainly noted communication breakdowns. But it almost entirely avoided laying blame. Blame must now be laid. City and county department brass made critical mistakes by not heeding warnings from their firefighters on the ground.