A failure to learn from one fire after another

County falls short on policy and protocol fixes after Woolsey disaster, experts say.

- JENNY JARVIE

A REPORT on the Jan. 7 fires found L.A. County needed clearer policies and protocols. Above, west Altadena.

BRIAN VAN DER BRUG Los Angeles Times

Agencies across Los Angeles County were “overwhelmed.”

The Emergency Operations Center was “largely ineffective” in maintaining situational awareness.

Some notification tools were not “used or used often enough” in the early hours of the fire and there was “no clear, single, comprehensive voice” on evacuations.

These were the troubling findings of a sweeping report that examined the performance of L.A. County fire, sheriff, and emergency management agencies in the wake of the 2018 Woolsey fire, which burned 1,100 structures across L.A. and killed three people.

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.

The after-action report 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struggled to monitor rapidly unfolding events without streamlined coordination tools and operated with “unclear” and “outdated” policies and protocols when deciding when to send evacuation warnings and orders.

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.

The seeming lack of progress — particularly the in ability to develop clear policies and protocol-points to what some experts describe as a larger failure to learn from major fire disasters.