As the first embers of the Eaton fire began showering homes in Pasadena and Altadena, Calif., this month, evacuation orders went out within minutes. But one neighborhood did not get the order to leave for hours, well after some homes there had already caught fire.
The consequences appear to have been fatal.
Of the 17 people who died in that fire, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner, all lived in an area west of Lake Avenue that wasn’t ordered to evacuate until after 3 a.m.
It was more than seven hours after other orders went out to neighborhoods closer to the fire’s starting point, and hours after fire officials had received reports that houses in the area were burning. Even then, some people said that they never heard from officials that they needed to get out.
“The terrible loss of life in western Altadena deeply concerns me,” Kathryn Barger, the county supervisor for the area, said in a statement on Tuesday. “There must be a thorough examination of the lifesaving emergency notification actions that took place the terrible evening the Eaton fire started.”
Among the dead was Dalyce Curry, a 95-year-old resident who had been dropped off at home around midnight by her granddaughter, who thought all was safe. About three blocks away, Anthony Mitchell and his son Justin called for help evacuating after 5 a.m. Both died when flames consumed their home.
The evening before, Diana Lieb had prepared for a stormy night in as winds howled outside her Altadena home. But she was not prepared to evacuate.
The power had gone out, but in her nine years living in the neighborhood, that was not out of the ordinary. She had lit some candles in the living room with her twin 6-year-old daughters, when her husband came into the room, his face ashen.
“Diana,” he told her, “you need to go look in the backyard right now.” Outside, a wall of fire was bearing down on their home.
It was 7:06 p.m. Officials would not issue an evacuation order for her area until 3:25 a.m. Wednesday — hours after the family fled.
“That’s what is very distressing about all of this,” said Ms. Lieb, 39. “It could have been so much worse.”
Similar scenes played out across Altadena on that Tuesday night as the Eaton fire spread to thousands of homes.
Residents relied on Facebook feeds, WhatsApp groups and text threads to warn one another to get out. Official evacuation alerts came primarily via cellphones. Many residents with little internet access or without smartphones were left stranded in their homes, overwhelmed by a disaster they never saw coming.
“There are many things about this that we had no control over,” said Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “Then there’s the things that trouble me where we did have control — like the warning systems.”
According to Dr. Redlener, warning systems are frequently flawed. Notifications can arrive late or fall victim to technological issues. Sometimes the messages are incorrect or misleading.
“All of these issues were potentially in play in L.A.,” he said.
Ms. Barger said that she would be working to find out what happened “so we have a complete picture.” On Tuesday, she proposed an independent review of the notification of residents in western Altadena after a report by The Los Angeles Times on the delays in the emergency alerts.
In an emergency, incident command officials from the county fire department and the sheriff’s office identify areas for evacuation. The sheriff approves them, and the county’s Office of Emergency Management issues evacuation orders via emergency notification systems.
Elizabeth Marcellino, a spokeswoman for the coordinated joint information center, a countywide agency overseeing the news media’s response, said that wireless emergency alerts were one of several methods used to inform residents of the need to evacuate.
“The receipt of those wireless alerts does depend on factors beyond our control, including whether people had reliable cell service or their phones turned on,” Ms. Marcellino said in a separate statement on behalf of the Office of Emergency Management.
The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department referred requests for comments to the joint information center, which provided the statement from the Office of Emergency Management.
Dr. Redlener said that up to 10 percent of Californians might not have working mobile phones, and on average, 15 percent do not have broadband internet access. Not all people sleep with fully charged phones at their bedside with the ringer on loud. These factors make emergency warning systems based solely on phone notifications “suboptimal,” he said.
Ms. Curry rarely used her cellphone, and there was no evacuation order issued for Ms. Curry’s section of Altadena until after 3 a.m. on Wednesday — at which point no one could reach her.
The evacuation response also included knocking on doors, loudspeakers and messages sent to local news media, according to Ms. Marcellino. She said the joint information center planned to review its evacuation methods.
Four miles away to the east of Ms. Curry’s home, near where the fire started in Eaton Canyon, Jeffrey Ku was used to preparing for evacuation. During the Bobcat fire in September 2020, on the other side of the Angeles National Forest, he and his wife were put under a warning.
But during the Eaton fire, his wife arrived home from work to a shower of embers and urged Mr. Ku to look outside, where the fire was beginning to burn in the canyon above their house. They began preparing to leave at 6:19 p.m., he said, and backed out of the driveway at 6:48 p.m. as his phone buzzed with a message. “Fast-moving wildfire in your area,” it read. “Be aware of your surroundings and monitor the situation closely.”
“It does not say to evacuate. It just says, ‘Be aware,’” Mr. Ku said. “But it was go or be consumed by fire, potentially, because embers were everywhere, raining down on us.”
Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said that the decision to send an evacuation warning “is not a no-brainer.” Older people and those who are medically fragile can die during evacuations and there can be economic consequences to shutting down entire areas.
And getting it wrong can lessen the efficacy of future alerts, he added. (That might have happened in the following days, when Los Angeles County blasted phones across unaffected ZIP codes with instructions to flee.)
“There are a lot of things that go into the decision to evacuate there that are very difficult to pull together,” Dr. Schlegelmilch said. “Wildfires in particular are a difficult hazard. You don’t have the benefits that you have with other kinds of hazards in terms of better advanced notice, better predictability.”
In radio calls among fire officials in the early hours of the fire, many said they were stretched past the limit as fires spread rapidly and unpredictably.
“I’m reluctant to overly indict a very dynamic situation that’s very difficult to control,” Dr. Schlegelmilch said. “It may not have been as bad as it could have been, but it wasn’t as good as it should have been.”
As the night of Jan. 7 progressed, evacuation orders spread to other parts of Altadena. But for hours, they did not include the area west of Lake Avenue, even as houses nearby were reported on fire.
Just before 1 a.m., a call came in to fire officials that a house west of Lake Avenue was burning. It was a mile away from Mr. Mitchell’s and Ms. Curry’s homes. At 3:51 a.m., “multiple structures” were reported on fire in the area of Ms. Lieb’s house, also west of Lake Avenue, half an hour after the evacuation order for the area was issued.
By the time the sun rose over the ruins, 17 people were dead within a roughly two-mile radius. Many were older and others had disabilities, leaving them unable to swiftly depart once the danger was readily apparent and the flames were visible in their backyards.
Two weeks after the fire swept through, the destruction in Altadena remains unimaginable. Palm trees, their bark blackened and their fronds singed, tower above the wreckage. On many blocks, all that remains are razed homes. The few houses that made it stand ghostlike, currently uninhabitable museums of lives forever changed.
Ms. Lieb’s house is gone. The family was able to get out in about 10 minutes, escaping with their important documents and two cats to her parents’ house in West Los Angeles. Still, she runs through what she wishes she had grabbed — that one sweater, her grandmother’s jewelry, the family portrait she had painstakingly painted over the past decade.
But what she grapples with most are the neighbors she lost and the thought of what would have happened had her husband, who usually works late, not arrived home when he did and noticed the fire outside.
“I probably just would have put the girls to bed and not thought about it,” she said. “It’s really distressing to think about.”
