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U.S.|L.A. Wildfire Evacuations Were Slowed by Poor Visibility and System Weaknesses
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/us/los-angeles-fires-evacuations-report.html
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An independent report on the January disaster found that emergency alerts were hampered by flawed policies, aging equipment and high winds.
Sept. 25, 2025, 3:08 p.m. ET
The first official review of the Los Angeles wildfires found that the county’s emergency systems were not only overmatched by hurricane-force winds, but also hampered by outdated equipment and a lack of aerial surveillance that kept firefighters from clearly seeing the path of the flames.
The 133-page report, released on Thursday, found no “single point of failure” in the county’s efforts to warn and evacuate residents.
But with winds gusting up to nearly 100 miles per hour, firefighting fixed-wing planes, helicopters and other aircraft were grounded, depriving fire officials of any aerial view for several critical hours. A nearly four-decade-old dispatch system hampered communications. Emergency workers were spread thin by staff shortages that included more than 900 sheriff’s department vacancies. Digital warnings had to go through a cumbersome approval process, and failed to get through to many people’s cellphones, possibly impeded by power shut-offs and spotty cellular coverage in mountain areas.
The effectiveness of the county systems that alert residents and order evacuations were impacted by “a series of weaknesses, including outdated policies, inconsistent practices, and communications vulnerabilities,” the report stated.
The review was conducted for Los Angeles County by the McChrystal Group, a consulting firm led by Stanley McChrystal, a retired four-star general. It was one of at least a half-dozen local, state and federal reviews to be commissioned in the aftermath of the disaster, which raged for nearly a month in January across some 37,000 acres in Los Angeles and surrounding suburbs, killing at least 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures, most of them homes.
Six separate wildfires ignited across Los Angeles County during the first two days of the disaster, the review found, with fire crews at one point stretched across five of them simultaneously.
