On the morning of January 7, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning to most of the LA area, alerting residents of severe high winds expected throughout the city that night.
By the evening of January 8, entire neighborhoods in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena had been ravaged by the Palisades and Eaton fires, with thousands of residents displaced.
A month later, and some forty thousand acres have burned, tens of thousands of structures have been destroyed and there has been an estimated two hundred and fifty billion dollars in damage.
With the fires being mostly put out, questions have been raised about the preparedness of the fire department, and the procedures enacted before, during and after the fire started.
“Until the actual first flames broke out, there was no real warning that it was going to be the scale of what it was, and I think that’s part of why it got so bad so fast,” LAPD Commander Steve Lurie said.
The initial fire broke out around noon, and continued to burn well into the night, with winds reaching approximately 100 miles an hour at the height of the storm.
Once it became clear that the situation was dire, LAPD and LAFD established what is called a “unified command,” where both departments work together in order to fight the fire as efficiently as possible.
Approximately forty five to ninety minutes before a fire burns through an area, police officers are sent out to evacuate residents in that area.
Once the threat of the fire becomes too immediate for a police officer to handle, the LAFD is sent in.
However, with the winds as strong as they were, planes were grounded and firefighters were very limited with how much they could do.
“When those winds got to where those winds were at, there was probably no technology, or procedure, or person, or fire-fighting technique that could’ve stopped this thing,” Lurie said.
Once the fires had been mostly put out, LAPD immediately shifted focus towards protecting the burned areas from looting.
“It’s very rare for LAPD to request that, usually we’re the one giving cops away, but I saw cops from Torrance, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach…to prevent looting.”
With looting incidents being kept to a minimum, people in the affected areas try to rebuild their lives.