Eaton & Palisades Fires After-Action Reviews

The report was commissioned by the Board of Supervisors to provide a comprehensive picture of actions taken to alert, warn, and evacuate the public during the January 2025 windstorm and wildfires and to make recommendations on how the County can improve processes, policies, and procedures in the future. That is the role of an after-action report—not to investigate or assign blame.

The review did not identify a “single point of failure” in the County’s efforts to warn and evacuate residents in the face of multiple simultaneous fires in areas across the County, fueled by hurricane force winds that grounded all firefighting aircraft, created power outages, and made nighttime aerial surveillance impossible on the critical night of January 7. The review found that a series of weaknesses, including “outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities,” hampered the effectiveness of LA County’s response.

The report was commissioned to provide a comprehensive picture of actions taken to alert, warn, and evacuate the public. The cause of the Eaton fire is still under investigation.

The After-Action Report includes multiple recommendations to improve communication, coordination and collaboration across departments, agencies and jurisdictions in five key areas. These recommendations include:

• Updating policies and County Code to ensure that first responders and emergency management clearly understand roles and responsibilities related to making decisions to issue evacuation warnings and orders.
• Restructuring the Office of Emergency Management and increasing staffing to a more robust level comparable to other large US city and county emergency management organizations.
• Standardizing and enhancing preparedness and evacuation-specific training for all County departments and partners.
• Updating obsolete systems and technology to enable all emergency response communications to leverage the Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System known as LA-RICS. The report also suggests improvements such as implementing field-accessible mobile dashboards and notes that “access to reliable satellite data and internet connectivity would allow for more consistent communications and ability to share information in future responses.”
• Developing a robust and consistent public education campaign across the County to increase public awareness of zone-based evacuation protocols and alert systems.

To view a full list of the report’s findings and recommendations, click here.

Yes, the McChrystal Group is leading a second after-action review to evaluate recovery and repopulation efforts and related issues during the fires, including coordination of services, debris removal, strategic communications, repopulation notification and procedures, and to identify best practices for recovery and repopulation procedures. The projected timeline for that next report is nine months . There are also multiple after-action reviews underway from the state and federal government.