The Eaton fire was cutting a destructive path into Altadena and parts of northern Pasadena just before midnight on Jan. 8 when some fire officials urged more widespread evacuations.
With home after home going up in flames, 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. Most of east Altadena had been evacuated, but residents on the west side had not yet been told to flee. They were not even under an evacuation warning.
For unknown reasons, it took another three hours, and in some cases even longer, for officials to issue west Altadena mandatory evacuation orders. By then, homes in the area were on fire, and residents were in danger, as embers rained down on streets and smoke filled bedrooms and obscured sight lines.
In the end, all but one of the 19 people who died in the Eaton fire were found in this section of Altadena.
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### Evacuation Delays Raise Questions
The evacuation recommendation, revealed in county documents released last month, raises new questions about the L.A. County Fire Department’s handling of the Eaton Fire.
County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena, conceded this week that the county fire department was responsible for what she called “a gap” between when evacuation alerts were needed and when they were actually ordered.
“That was where the breakdown was,” Barger told The Times. “There was a gap there.”
West Altadena received its first evacuation order at 3:25 a.m., four hours after 911 callers started reporting smoke and flames in the area. Some parts of west Altadena weren’t evacuated until just before 6 a.m.
The Times first reported in January the disparity between when the fire threatened west Altadena and when residents were ordered to leave.
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### Official Reports and Findings
Barger pointed specifically to the period from 1:12 a.m. to 3 a.m., when the Office of Emergency Management received no direction to send out evacuation alerts—a finding from the after-action report on evacuations.
That report, conducted by the McChrystal Group at the request of county supervisors, found that during that time period “ember cast from the main fire and from downed power lines caused spot fires west of Lake Avenue after midnight on Jan. 8 and accelerated in the following hours.”
Lake Avenue is the unofficial divider between east and west Altadena. It’s historically significant since the avenue served as a discriminatory redlining boundary for home loans in the early 20th century and confined Black homebuyers to western neighborhoods.
The population of east Altadena, which received evacuation orders within an hour of the Eaton fire’s ignition, remains much whiter than that of unincorporated neighborhoods to the west.
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### Responses from Fire Department and Officials
L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone declined to be interviewed for this story. However, agency spokesperson Heidi Oliva said Marrone “is committed to ensuring the Department continues to improve for future fires.”
In response to questions about whether the department should be considered at fault for the delayed evacuation alerts, Oliva only said that the department “agrees with Supervisor Barger that Unified Command makes and executes evacuation decisions.”
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### Unified Command Structure and Challenges
A unified command structure is typically how California officials respond to major fires, with several agencies joining forces.
During the first hours of the Eaton fire, L.A. County Fire was one of the main agencies responding but formed a unified command with other local fire agencies, including from Pasadena and the Angeles National Forest, as well as other first responder agencies, including the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and Office of Emergency Management.
Oliva did not directly answer questions about why the pre-midnight evacuation recommendation from staff in the field wasn’t acted upon. Instead, she pointed to the “massive, unprecedented natural disaster” that county fire officials faced that night, with the Eaton, Palisades, and Hurst fires all igniting the same day during severe winds that grounded aircraft for hours and limited situational awareness.
“Unified command did their very best to identify evacuation zones to be alerted based on the information available to them at that time,” Oliva said in a statement. “When unified command learned that the fire was seen north of Lake and moving west, it validated and acted to issue the orders that were sent out by OEM.”
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### Unanswered Questions and Communication Issues
Oliva did not explain why it took hours for officials to realize the fire was threatening west Altadena, despite evidence from 911 calls, radio traffic, and the recommendation from firefighters in the field.
She did, however, say that the county fire department “is committed to continuing to learn and improve.” The agency has now made it a “best practice” to surround evacuation orders with evacuation warnings, something the McChrystal report recommended.
McChrystal investigators found out about the suggestion to enact more widespread evacuations just before midnight “during the interview process,” according to the report.
But the only other mention of this communication in the report says that “Unified Command staff did not recall this occurring and reported that the fire front of the Eaton Fire was not moving west into those areas at that time.”
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### Missing Details and After-Action Report Insights
The Times requested more information about the evacuation recommendation, but the McChrystal Group declined to share anything beyond what was in the report. A request for related records to the county has not yet been filled.
Shawn Tyrie, a McChrystal Group partner who worked on the report, said in an interview that his team was unable to uncover any evidence about what happened to that pre-midnight recommendation.
While he didn’t want to speculate, he said there were many potential reasons that a call to evacuate may not have been acted upon, noting findings in the report of poor internet access, spotty cell service, short-staffing, and overall chaos during the unprecedented conflagration fueled by hurricane-force winds.
“It could have been a technical issue,” Tyrie said. “It could have been somebody got busy and didn’t push the right button. Who knows?”
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### Complexity of Unified Command and Accountability
Part of the reason it has been so hard to pin down exactly what happened is the structure of that unified command. While the command structure is designed to encourage collaboration, it also divides responsibility and accountability, Tyrie said.
“It does leave responsibility and actual command authority as this kind of ambiguous thing,” Tyrie said, noting that this is a common practice across the country.
“There tends to be someone that’s running the incident command post. But there is really not even any room in the guidance in the county code to say that, definitively, Person X is in charge.”
While the report was not intended to assign blame for the delayed evacuation alerts, he said that task could be challenging if officials decide to go that route.
He said the “vast majority” of communication the night of the fire was through radio calls, text messages, or shared in person, with little note-taking.
“It’s difficult to go back and do a forensic audit of how was the decision-making actually made,” Tyrie said.
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### Who Was Responsible for Evacuation Orders?
Though the report didn’t make clear why west Altadena got such late alerts, it detailed a process that put L.A. County Fire at the helm of the delayed evacuation alerts.
“For the Eaton Fire, the evacuation zones receiving evacuation warnings and orders were identified by LACoFD staff as part of Unified Command,” the report said. “They were then communicated to OEM.”
L.A. County has a contract with Genasys to send out its wireless emergency alerts, which ping cellphones within a designated geographical area.
The L.A. Sheriff’s Department was a part of unified command, but the report found that LASD officials were not “always initially aware in real time of what zones were designated for evacuation.”
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### Ongoing Reviews and Looking Ahead
There are other ongoing reviews of the fire response, including a probe initiated by the governor which should have access to more data from a wider array of agencies, Barger said.
Only county agencies participated in the McChrystal after-action review, which was requested by L.A. County supervisors at a price tag of almost $2 million.
“There are still a lot of things that the community wants to better understand as it related to what went wrong,” Barger said. She hopes the independent review ordered by the state can provide more answers.
That review, which looks at the entire 2025 Los Angeles firestorm, is being conducted by UL Research Institutes’ fire safety research arm, according to the institute’s spokesperson, Natalie Haack. She said there wasn’t yet a release date for the findings, but Barger thought it could come in the next few weeks.
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### Confidence in Preparedness
Still, Barger said she believes the county is better prepared to respond to wildfires, given all that has been learned since January.
“I am, 100%, confident that we are ready,” Barger said. “I do believe that the lessons learned have definitely helped to restructure from within an emergency management department that actually is going to meet the needs of the 10 million residents of L.A. County.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-11-01/firefighters-urged-evacuations-three-hour-delay
