All 17 deaths in Eaton Fire were in a zone where evacuation orders took hours to arrive
All 17 people who died in the wind-fueled Eaton Fire in Lost Angeles were in an area where the first evacuation order wasn’t sent until more than nine hours after the fire started.
Within a half-hour of a fire igniting on an Eaton Canyon hillside in the afternoon of Jan. 7, thousands of residents’ phones buzzed in eastern Altadena with a warning from Los Angeles County: “BE AWARE.” Within 40 minutes, a dire alert: “LEAVE NOW.”
But neighborhoods in western Altadena did not see the same urgency, as evacuation orders didn’t arrive until early the following morning — more than nine hours after the Eaton Fire began.
By then, it was too late.
All 17 people who died in the wind-fueled fire were west of Lake Avenue, a major corridor that runs north-south through Altadena. They included an 83-year-old retired Lockheed Martin project manager, a 95-year-old who was an actress in old Black Hollywood, and a 67-year-old amputee who used a wheelchair and died with his adult son, who had cerebral palsy.
Fifteen of the deaths occurred in an area where the first evacuation order wasn’t sent until 3:25 a.m. on Jan. 8; the other two occurred in an area where the order came at 5:42 a.m., according to a review of the alerts as well as data compiled by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office.
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