To a remarkable degree, they foretold many of the failures that would beset L.A. County during the even more catastrophic January firestorms that destroyed 17,000 structures and killed 31 people.<\/p>\n
The after-action report<\/a> on the Palisades and Eaton fires, released last week, found staff lacked training and no clear chain of command. The county struggled to monitor rapidly unfolding events without streamlined coordination tools and operated with \u201cunclear\u201d and \u201coutdated\u201d policies and protocols when deciding when to send evacuation warnings and orders. <\/p>\n As The Times reported in January, officials took hours to issue evacuation orders to a large swath of west Altadena. When the order finally went out, homes in the area were already ablaze. All but one of the 19 deaths in the Eaton fire occurred in west Altadena.<\/p>\n The seeming lack of progress \u2014 particularly the inability to develop clear policies and protocol \u2014 points to what some experts describe as a larger failure to learn from major fire disasters.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to work really hard to continue ignoring the patterns here,\u201d said Art Botterell, a former senior emergency services coordinator for the California Governor\u2019s Office of Emergency Services. <\/p>\n Firefighters assess their strategy during the wind-whipped Eaton fire.<\/p>\n (Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Los Angeles is not alone. Counties across California have commissioned reports that have highlighted severe problems with coordination and failures to send out evacuation alerts and warnings \u2014 from the 2017 Tubbs fire, which killed 22 people in the wine country, to the 2018 Camp fire<\/a>, which destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. <\/p>\n \u201cWe continue to do these groundhog day after-action reports. We\u2019re all expected to do it after an incident in order to spin the screwups and to create the impression that we\u2019re doing this in a systematic fashion,\u201d Botterell said. \u201cBut if you ask yourself a very simple question \u2014 \u2018Whose responsibility was this?\u2019 \u2014 you won\u2019t find anybody sticking their hand up.\u201d<\/p>\n The report on the Palisades and Eaton fires highlighted fundamental problems, he said. But in focusing on the minutiae of what happened and recommending mostly narrow or technical improvements, it failed to answer the deeper question: \u201cWhy, after all these years, don\u2019t we do this any better?\u201d<\/p>\n Kevin McGowan, director of L.A. County\u2019s Office of Emergency Management, said the county had made significant progress. After his office took on responsibility for the county\u2019s Emergency Operations Center after Woolsey, he said, that operation now activates sooner, based on threats, rather than after a disaster has taken place. It also sends out more mass notifications. After criticism for over-relying on Twitter during the Woolsey fire and not sending any emergency alerts via mass notification tools, he noted, his office issued more than 80 emergency notification campaigns during the January firestorms.<\/p>\n Still, McGowan acknowledged there was room for more improvement \u2014 and said the recent report identified the solution: bolstering his budget and staff. <\/p>\n \u201cYou want to improve, you\u2019ve got to get more resources,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a capacity challenge on our hands, and this disaster took our capacity to the limit. When your capacity is at the limit, trade-offs start occurring, and some of those trade-offs lead to coordination and communication challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n Protecting lives is no easy task in the nation\u2019s most populated county, built on land prone to fires and straddling five active earthquake faults. Although L.A. County has made a number of changes since Woolsey, some experts question whether it has done enough.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems strange that a county that oversees 10 million people would be saying we need to train people and we need to work on coordination and sort out protocols,\u201d said Thomas Cova, a geography professor at the University of Utah who specializes in emergency management. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of what their job is.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bank of America building burns along with many other businesses on Lake Avenue in Altadena.<\/p>\n (Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Botterell said the problem was not simply that L.A. County failed to enact the Woolsey report\u2019s recommendations. Rather, he said, after-action reports tend to issue moderate recommendations that do not address underlying problems: Too often, they endorse existing practices and protocols, with shortcomings blamed almost entirely on resource and funding limitations, and assume problems can be solved by newer technology.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are all manner of mechanical issues, which I think this report dealt with rather well,\u201d Botterell said. \u201cBut they don\u2019t \u2014 and it probably wasn\u2019t inside the terms of their contract \u2014 do a critique of the entire emergency management structure of L.A. County, which is what we\u2019re really needing to talk about and wanting desperately not to talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n A key problem, Botterell said, is that responsibility tends to be spread among departments.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody\u2019s got their jurisdictional and functional turf within government,\u201d he said. \u201cNobody wants to see that taken away from their department, because it\u2019s going to go to their budget. So, everybody will fight to have a piece of it. … The responsibility is spread around among multiple agencies, so that in the event [of a disaster], it will always fall between the chairs.\u201d<\/p>\n Both the Woolsey and Eaton reports referred to a \u201cperfect storm.\u201d<\/p>\n The Woolsey report described \u201ca firestorm of epic proportions\u201d propelled by 50-mph Santa Ana winds. It also said the L.A. County Fire Department \u201ccould not have planned for a complete exhaustion of California\u2019s limited firefighting resources\u201d after the Hill fire broke out in Ventura County and a wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise in Northern California. That significantly hampered L.A. County\u2019s ability to get mutual aid in the first crucial hours. <\/p>\n Similarly, the report into the January firestorms stressed that the Eaton blaze ignited near the end of a day that L.A. County officials had spent grappling with the Palisades fire. Spread by erratic, hurricane-force winds, it pushed embers for miles \u201cin darkness and intense smoke.\u201d <\/p>\n Cova said the Eaton report was right to emphasize the extraordinarily dire conditions on the night of Jan. 7. But that didn\u2019t excuse unclear policies or lack of training \u2014 and the report didn\u2019t ultimately answer the biggest question: What led to delays in issuing evacuation alerts to west Altadena?<\/a><\/p>\n The report, led by the McChrystal Group, said that a county Fire Department staffer in the field suggested to Unified Command before midnight that they send evacuation orders to foothills communities, including all of Altadena. But Unified Command staff didn\u2019t remember that, the report said, and said the fire front was not moving west at that moment.<\/p>\n The first evacuation order for west Altadena came at 3:25 a.m., after dispatchers received at least 14 reports of fire in the area, according to 911 logs from the Fire Department obtained by The Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat were they doing between 6 p.m. on the 7th and 3:25 a.m. on the 8th?\u201d Cova asked. \u201cWere they confused about who was in charge of evacuation orders? It just doesn\u2019t all add up.\u201d<\/p>\n After the Woolsey fire, investigators found that staff shortages limited participation in emergency management training and hindered a unified approach. <\/p>\n \u201cInfrequent training and lack of familiarity with the [Incident Command System],\u201d it said, \u201cmade interfacing with key agencies awkward.\u201d<\/p>\n The report issued dozens of recommendations to \u201cimprove coordination of multiple-agency emergency public messages,\u201d \u201cincrease the speed and use of all alerting tools\u201d and \u201ccreate more specific evacuation plans.\u201d <\/p>\n After hiring Citygate, the company that put together the report, to make sure its recommendations were put in place, the Office of Emergency Management took on the role of running the Emergency Operations Center and became the core coordination and support hub for county agencies. The county also increased the office\u2019s staff to 37 from around 30.<\/p>\n By 2022, Sheila Kuehl, then an L.A. County supervisor, said at a board meeting<\/a> that 80% of the report\u2019s recommendations had been implemented. \u201cAlthough there\u2019s plenty of work still to be done,\u201d she said, \u201cyou can see that improvements have been made, both on the ground and systemwide.\u201d <\/p>\n But the report on the Eaton and Palisades fires found glaring deficiencies. <\/p>\n The L.A. County Office of Emergency Management\u2019s annual budget of $15 million, it said, lags behind the budgets of New York City ($88 million) and Cook County, Ill., ($132 million). Its staffing of 37 employees to mitigate risk for more than 10 million people, it said, was \u201cfundamentally inadequate.\u201d By comparison, New York City has more than 200 emergency management staffers serving 8.5 million people and Cook County has 54 serving 5.2 million. <\/p>\n Staffing shortfalls, the report said, meant too few employees were trained in essential roles of alert and warnings planning, and situational awareness.<\/p>\n McGowan said the agency has already started to create six new positions \u2014 a figure that still leaves staffing levels behind jurisdictions of similar sizes.<\/p>\n And the budget challenges that stymie Los Angeles\u2019 ability to adequately prepare for disasters have only become more acute as the county faces a storm of financial problems \u2014 including slower property tax revenue growth<\/a>, a $4-billion settlement of thousands of childhood sexual assault claims,<\/a> and the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.<\/a><\/p>\n California has taken a number of steps over the years to help local officials alert residents in a disaster and evacuate them to safety.<\/p>\n After the state faced its most destructive wildfire season on record in 2017, the California Governor\u2019s Office of Emergency Services published statewide Alert and Warning Guidelines<\/a> and standardized alert language.<\/a> It also developed best practices <\/a>for county emergency plans after public workshops and meetings with local and state emergency responders.<\/p>\n But the state guidelines are recommendations, not requirements. The leaders of California\u2019s 58 counties have vastly different staff and budgets, state officials note, and should have leeway to develop localized plans.<\/p>\n Some emergency management experts argue that the state has long played too passive a role in making sure local jurisdictions are prepared for the next disaster.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the state has kind of done everything it can to stay out of this,\u201d Botterell said. \u201cThere\u2019s litigious liability, there\u2019s political liability, there\u2019s bureaucratic liability, because these issues cut across existing turf boundaries within agencies. So there\u2019s a lot of problems that need to be solved, and no particular great reward for solving them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Agencies across Los Angeles County were \u201coverwhelmed.\u201d The Emergency Operations Center was \u201clargely ineffective\u201d in maintaining situational awareness.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":283808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[146258,1582,276,146256,3059,5810,146255,8055,146254,2961,224,5337,1812,17466,3546,18590,1630,6831,29272,146257],"class_list":{"0":"post-283807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-art-botterell","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-coordination","12":"tag-county","13":"tag-eaton-fire","14":"tag-emergency-management-agency","15":"tag-l-a-county","16":"tag-l-a-county-fire","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-office","21":"tag-palisades","22":"tag-people","23":"tag-recommendation","24":"tag-report","25":"tag-staff","26":"tag-west-altadena","27":"tag-woolsey"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115332514124008317","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n
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