Evacuation orders were issued late for the Altadena area where the Eaton fire deaths were concentrated.

When the first fire of the Eaton fire began to engulf homes in Pasadena and Altadena, Calif., this month, evacuation orders were issued within minutes. But one village was not ordered to evacuate for hours, after some houses caught fire.

The effect was apparently fatal.

Of the 17 people who died in the fire, according to Los Angeles County coroners, residents on the west side of Lake Avenue were not told to evacuate until at 3 o’clock in the morning.

It was more than seven hours after other commands went out to the neighborhood near where the fire started, and hours after fire officials learned the house was on fire. Despite this, some people said that the authorities had not heard that they needed to come out.

“The tragic loss of life in west Altadena concerns me deeply,” said Kathryn Barger, regional supervisor for the region, in a statement Tuesday. “There must be a thorough review of the life-saving emergency response actions that took place on the tragic evening when the Eaton fire started.”

Among the dead was Dalyce Curry, a 95-year-old resident who was brought home around midnight by her grandson, who thought she was dead. About three chapters, Anthony Mitchell and his son Justin called for help at 5 am.

The evening before, Diana Lieb braced herself for a stormy night as the wind picked up outside her Altadena home. But he was not ready to leave.

The lights were out, but in the nine years he’d lived in the neighborhood, he wasn’t used to it. She was lighting candles in the living room with her 6-year-old daughter, when her husband entered the room, her face red.

“Diana,” he told her, “you need to go look in the yard now.” Outside, a wall of his house was on fire.

As of 7:06 p.m., officials did not issue an evacuation order for their area until 3:25 a.m. Wednesday — hours after the family fled.

“That’s what’s so sad about it all,” said Ms. Lieb, 39. “It could have been worse.”

A similar scene unfolded across Altadena on Tuesday night as the Eaton Fire spread through thousands of homes.

Residents relied on Facebook feeds, WhatsApp groups and text threads to notify each other to get out. The official notification of the exit came via cell phone. Many residents with little Internet access or no cell phones are stuck in their homes, overwhelmed by dangers they never saw coming.

“There’s a lot about it that’s out of our control,” said Irwin Redlener, founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “Then there are the things that concern me that we had control over – like the warning system.”

According to Dr. Redlener, the warning system is usually flawed. Notifications may be delayed or affected by technological issues. Sometimes the message is wrong or misleading.

“All these issues could have played out in LA,” he said.

Ms Barger said she would try to find out what happened “so we have the full picture”. On Tuesday, he proposed an independent review of how to notify residents of west Altadena after a report by The Los Angeles Times about delays in emergency notifications.

In an emergency, officials from the county fire department and the sheriff’s office determine where to evacuate. They were approved by the sheriff, and the county’s Office of Emergency Management issued an evacuation order through the emergency notification system.

Elizabeth Marcellino, a spokeswoman for the Joint Public Information Center, the countywide agency that oversees public information response, said wireless emergency alerts are one of several methods used to inform residents. what to avoid.

“Receipt of these wireless notifications depends on factors beyond our control, including whether individuals had reliable cell phone service or activated their cell phones,” Ms. Marcellino said in a separate statement to name of the Office of Emergency Management.

The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sent a request for comment to the joint news center, which provided the statement from the Office of Emergency Management. urgent.

Said Dr. Redlener estimates that up to 10 percent of Californians may not have a working cell phone, and on average, 15 percent do not have access to the Internet. Not everyone sleeps with a full phone next to their bed with a loud ring. These factors make emergency warning systems based on phone notifications “suboptimal,” he said.

Ms. Curry barely used her phone, and no warrant was issued for Ms. Curry’s Altadena area until 3 a.m. Wednesday — at which point no one could reach her.

The response to the evictions also included door knocking, loudspeakers and messages sent to local media, according to Ms. Marcellino. He said the joint media center was planning to look into how he was fired.

Four miles east of Ms. Curry’s home, near where the Eaton Canyon fire started, Jeffrey Ku used to prepare for evacuation. During a September 2020 bobcat attack across the Angeles National Forest, she and her husband were warned.

But during the Eaton fire, his wife came home from work and urged Mr. Ku to look outside, where the fire had started to burn in the ravine above his house. They started getting ready to leave at 6:19 p.m., he said, and were delayed at 6:48 p.m. when his cell phone rang. It says: “The wildfire in your area. “Be aware of your surroundings and monitor the situation closely.”

“It doesn’t say to move. It just says, ‘Be careful,’” Mr. Ku said. “But it was destroyed by fire, probably, because there were embers all over the ground, falling on us.”

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness in Columbia, said the decision to issue an evacuation warning was “a no-brainer.” The elderly and those who are medically vulnerable can die during the transfer and the economic consequences of closing down the entire area can be devastating.

And getting it wrong can reduce the effectiveness of future alerts, he added. (This may have happened the next day, when Los Angeles County blasted phones across untouched ZIP codes with evacuation instructions.)

“There are so many things that go into the decision to move there that it’s really hard to put together,” said Dr. Schlegelmilch. “Wildfire is a difficult disaster. You don’t have the benefits you have with other types of risk in terms of more advanced, more predictable alerts. “

In radio calls to fire officials in the morning hours of the fire, many said they were over the limit because the fire was spreading so quickly and unexpectedly.

“I hesitate to over-accumulate a very active condition that is very difficult to control,” said Dr. Schlegelmilch. “It may not be as bad as it should be, but it’s not as good as it should be.”

As the night of January 7 progressed, evacuation orders spread to other parts of Altadena. For hours, however, they did not enter the western part of the lake, even though there were nearby houses on fire.

Just after 1 a.m., officials received a call that a house west of Lake Avenue was on fire. Mr. Mitchell and Mrs. Curry’s home is a mile away. At 3:51 a.m., “multiple houses” were on fire in the area of ​​Ms. Lieb’s home, also west of Lake Avenue, half an hour after the evacuation order was issued for the area. .

By the time the sun rose over the ruins, 17 people had died within a radius of about two miles. Many are elderly and others have disabilities, so they could not leave quickly when the danger was discovered and the flames were seen in their backyard.

Two weeks after the fire, the devastation in Altadena is still unimaginable. The palm trees, their bark black and their leaves burning, hung over the ruins. On many blocks, only ruined buildings remain. The few buildings that made it look like ghosts, now uninhabitable, have changed forever.

Mrs. Lieb’s house is gone. The family was able to get out in about 10 minutes, fleeing with important documents and two cats to their parents’ home in West Los Angeles. Still, she goes through what she wants—that sweater, her grandmother’s jewelry, the family portrait she painstakingly painted over the past decade.

But the most troubled are the neighbors who were lost and thought about what could have happened if her husband, who usually works at night, did not come home when he came and noticed the fire outside.

“I probably just put the girls to bed without thinking about it,” he said. “It’s painful to think about.”