Damning 700-page Palisades, Eaton fire report exposes staggering delay in warning residents as homes burned

A damning new Palisades Fire report stops short of blaming any one person or agency, but found Los Angeles sent firefighters home despite dangerous winds, while some residents didn’t get an evacuation alert until 40 to 90 minutes after homes began burning.The bombshell 724-page fire incident analysis was released Friday, nearly 21 months after the January 2025 fire tore through Pacific Palisades, a coastal LA neighborhood, and killed 12 people.It says the destruction “was the result of multiple interconnected factors rather than any single decision, event, or system failure.” Still, the Los Angeles Fire Department takes the hardest hits.The independent review was completed by UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute at the request of Gov.

Gavin Newsom.The delay in warning residents is one of the report’s starkest findings.Some residents closest to where the fire started didn’t get an evacuation alert until roughly 40 to 90 minutes after homes had already begun burning, investigators found.At 10:46 a.m., 16 minutes after the fire was reported, a fire helicopter radioed that flames would hit homes “within minutes.” By the time an LAFD assistant chief radioed for an “evacuation all the way down to PCH” ,Pacific Coast Highway, at 11:29 a.m., spot fires were already burning on both sides of a main road out of the neighborhood, according to the report.The city’s first evacuation order didn’t go out until 12:09 p.m.The delay appears to have been caused by outdated manual processes and software transitions, along with a fast-moving, wind-driven fire, the report says.The city was still switching to new alert software.Staffers drew evacuation zones by hand from street names read over the radio, and at times had to check how streets were spelled, investigators found.LAFD officials were also “cautious in issuing evacuation notices,” investigators wrote, because those decisions “are often subject to public and governmental scrutiny.�...