Los Angeles to review wildfire alert systems after lethal blazes
Los Angeles to review wildfire alert systems after lethal blazes
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Residents say patchwork network of public and private alert systems failed to warn them about extent of wildfires. Los Angeles county officials on Tuesday approved an outside review of how alerts functioned when fire ravaged the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods earlier this month.
After the wind-driven wildfires broke out on 7 January, evacuation orders for some neighborhoods – including the part of Altadena where the majority of deaths occurred – came long after houses were reported to be on fire. Several residents who lost homes in the Eaton fire in Altadena have said they received no notifications about their neighborhoods. For others, the first warning was an urgent text message in the middle of the night.
Susan Lee Streets, who signed up for the alert app Nixle, did not get any alerts specific to her west Altadena neighborhood before she and her family left of their own accord at about 10pm after losing power and cellphone reception, she said. “If we had even been informed that houses and other structures were burning down, we would have known better what was happening,” she said. “We almost went to sleep that night with two kids and a dog and two cats in the house.”.
Only after 3am did an alert hit her phone. It could take months for the investigation to reveal what went wrong. But an Associated Press review of scanner traffic recordings and data from California’s chief fire agency (Cal Fire), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the private fire tracking app Watch Duty suggests the hours between midnight and 3.30am appear to have been particularly challenging for first responders in Los Angeles county.
