(CNN) — By the time the flames from the deadly Eaton fire approached their western Altadena neighborhood, Mark Douglas and some of his neighbors had already given up on the Los Angeles County emergency evacuation system.
“None of us got a red (mandatory evacuation) alert before we felt ready to leave our houses,” he told CNN Wednesday. “You know, we felt heat and fire and that trumps any alert. So a lot of us gave up on the alert system at that point. These systems are really great when they work. In this case, I don’t think they work.”
Of the 28 deaths reported in the Los Angeles wildfires so far, 17 fatalities occurred in parts of western Altadena where residents said they either did not receive evacuation orders or — like Douglas — did so hours after the rapidly-spreading blaze started.
Los Angeles County officials are now calling for an independent investigation to review the emergency alert system used during the recent Eaton and Palisades Fires to warn residents to evacuate.
The Eaton Fire started at 6:18 p.m. on January 7, according to state officials. Some Altadena residents said they learned about the approaching fire only when they saw the flames near their homes.
The call for an investigation comes after a Los Angeles Times review found that residents in western Altadena did not receive electronic evacuation orders until several hours after the Eaton Fire erupted, raising the question of whether deaths could have been prevented. The Times reported that western Altadena neighborhoods got no electronic evacuation orders until 3:25 a.m. and never received evacuation warnings.
The delay in evacuation orders also raises concerns about the effectiveness of the county’s emergency response system.
County Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Lindsey Horvath introduced a motion Tuesday to “retain a consultant to review the evacuation policies and emergency alert notification systems utilized by the county and its partners in responding to the Palisades and Eaton Fires.”
The night the fire started, official alerts were issued primarily via cellphone. But many residents have said that without cellphone service or power for the internet they were left in the dark.
“While I deeply appreciate the heroic efforts of our first responders, we owe it to our communities to assess and review our emergency notification systems,” Barger said in a statement Tuesday. “This independent assessment will also ensure we are better prepared for future disasters and can act swiftly to protect lives and property.”
Wireless alerts only one of several methods to inform residents
In a statement Wednesday, Los Angeles County’s Coordinated Joint Information Center noted that while it “cannot immediately comment on all factors leading to the tragic loss of life, once the immediate wildfire crisis has passed, there will be a comprehensive third-party evaluation of all response efforts.”
The statement added that the night of January 7 and the next morning, local law enforcement and fire department personnel performed evacuation notifications and rescue operations in western Altadena neighborhoods.
“Wireless emergency alerts are only one of several means of notifying residents to evacuate their homes during a fire emergency. Our response also includes door knocks, patrols with loudspeakers driving up and down streets messaging the need to evacuate,” the statement said. “This is a layered process and system intended to provide redundancy during local and widespread disasters.”
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said he supports the review of the response: “We all need to know in an after-action what happened, how it happened, why it happened. We need those level of details.”
The Los Angeles County Fire Department, in a statement, said it is “committed to prioritizing and fully engaging” in the independent review “to understand what occurred during this disaster and will be declining requests for comments and interviews in the interim.”
‘We’re on our own’
Douglas said he and his partner were fortunate to evacuate with their pets and three horses before the arrival of official evacuation orders from the county, but many of their older western Altadena neighbors were not.
“They’re not tech savvy. They’re not mobile,” he said of his older neighbors.
Many African American families built their lives and businesses in historically Black communities like Altadena. The area has long been racially diverse — African Americans began settling there during the Great Migration, when Black people fled the racism of the South in search of a better life. In Altadena, locals saw Lake Avenue as the de facto dividing line between east and west, wealthy and working class, White and Black.
“My fear — and we’ve lost a lot of these people in the neighborhood — is that they don’t have the ability to get out the way we did,” Douglas added. “So when I think about the system failing, and if we can say that it did, which I think is fairly certain, it’s those people that were really at risk.”
Douglas said the skies over his home, now destroyed, in the western Altadena neighborhood of Farnsworth began to glow from the approaching fire, yet there were no official evacuation alerts or warnings. He began hooking up a trailer to his electric pickup to take the three horses. His partner grabbed their dog and two cats. He could see the fire moving closer, he said.
“That’s when (we got) the sense that nobody’s going to warn us, nobody’s driving down our streets, saying, ‘Get out.” Nobody. We’re on our own, essentially,” said Douglas.
The winds picked up, he recalled. The flames now appeared to be just blocks away. The horses appeared scared. His partner headed to her sister’s apartment in Silver Lake in a separate vehicle. He drove away to find a place to temporarily keep the horses.
Douglas said he did not receive an evacuation warning or mandatory order, on his smart watch or cellphone, until sometime between midnight and 3 a.m. on January 8.
Longtime resident Vester Pittman, a pastor, told CNN he never received an evacuation alert. He woke up at 2 a.m. and saw the fire was across the street. He and his grandson jumped into their pre-packed truck and escaped before his house burned down.
“I’m not surprised the government was not doing their job — I’m just glad me and my grandson got out in time,” said Pittman.
The-CNN-Wire
