When flames erupted above Pacific Palisades on the morning of Jan. 7, Ben Kahn instructed staff to begin calling disabled Angelenos, even before official evacuation orders came.
“Go ask your neighbor for a ride,” was the advice the Disability Community Resource Center gave to people on their registry. They knew people with mobility challenges would need more time to flee.
What followed was a frantic DIY rescue effort. City and county officials had no such registry, so DCRC and other groups improvised, calling Ubers and Lyfts, even autonomous vehicles, to pick them up. They flagged high-risk cases — a woman bedridden with serious medical issues — to the city’s Emergency Operations Center, just to make sure they were not overlooked.
“We’re kind of doing it on our own,” said Kahn, the DCRC’s disaster coordinator. “You didn’t have time to be stressed. It was kind of nonstop.”
By the time a new fire erupted 35 miles away in Eaton Canyon, they had already called hundreds of people. Chaos ensued in Altadena as neighbors scrambled to find cars that could accommodate disabled people and nurses wheeled elderly residents from nursing facilities as embers rained down. Some relatives were unable to get past evacuation checkpoints to save loved ones.
Anthony Mitchell Sr. poses with two of his great-grandchildren. The Altadena patriarch died in the fast-moving Eaton fire while waiting to be evacuated with his disabled son.
(Courtesy of Mitchell family)
The death of 17 people in Altadena has shone a spotlight on L.A. County’s struggle to plan for the evacuation of elderly and disabled in a major disaster. The median age of those killed was 77, and at least a third of them suffered impairments that could affect their mobility.
After reporting from The Times revealed that west Altadena did not get official evacuation alerts until nearly nine hours after the Eaton fire started, L.A. County delays in alerting and evacuating vulnerable residents are now the subject of multiple investigations. They have also raised questions of whether officials could have done more to help those in need.
“The systems, which were supposed to have been in place for emergencies, not only didn’t function, they didn’t even seem to exist.” said Jenny, whose friend, Patricia McKenna, died in her Altadena home.
Disabled people make up about 10% of L.A. County’s population, and advocates have long warned that officials are not prepared to evacuate residents with mobility issues in a disaster. Less than 16 months before the L.A. fires, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services urged L.A. County to do more to “adequately address” the emergency planning and evacuation needs of its most vulnerable residents and bring its plan up to speed with California law and “inclusive best practices.”
In a 2023 review of L.A. County’s Emergency Operations Plan, Cal OES made 17 recommendations, including that the county develop a standard operating procedure for helping the mobility challenged to evacuate.
That didn’t happen.
Asked if officials followed the state’s recommendation to develop a set of instructions describing how to transport the disabled in disasters, L.A. County’s Coordinated Joint Information Center told The Times it would have to consult other departments to “provide a clearer picture of resources, such as Access L.A., that exist to aid in evacuations.”
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to transportation in the event of an emergency evacuation,” the center said.
It will probably take months to fully understand the county’s response. Officials declined to answer detailed questions about plans for transporting disabled people in an emergency, citing ongoing investigations.
“When an emergency arises that warrants activation of the Emergency Operations Center, the EOC acts as a coordination hub,” the center said. “But a host of other agencies are responsible for both planning and emergency response. … Real-time assistance is provided through a layered approach that includes 911 services, field incident command, transportation agencies, and city or county EOC coordination, if needed.”
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The fight over emergency planning for disabled residents in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most disaster-prone regions, began long before the Eaton fire.
In 2009, Audrey Harthorn, a Van Nuys woman who used a wheelchair because of a muscular disorder, served as lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit alleging Los Angeles city and county emergency plans discriminated against people with disabilities.
At the time, the county’s Operational Area Emergency Response plan — 455 pages long — made just one reference to the needs of residents with disabilities.
“For me this isn’t a policy debate or an academic issue; it’s a matter of personal safety,” Harthorn told Ability Magazine. She noted that she lived alone, had no family nearby and could not evacuate her apartment in a fire or earthquake.
The county settled in 2012 and agreed to a remediation plan that was declared complete in 2018.
But in its final review, Global Vision Consortium — the court-appointed outside monitor — flagged problems with the county’s readiness to transport people in a major disaster.
“It is strongly recommended that LA County conduct training with and for the transportation partners,” the consortium wrote. It also urged the county to conduct “a major functional exercise to train people … who will coordinate this activity and the community transportation organizations on what is expected of them and determine if they can perform as anticipated.”
They also mentioned “serious concerns about how the full activation of the county EOC would go considering that it has not been fully activated for a real-world event or exercise for many years.”
The Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management did not answer questions about whether training exercises took place.
When Cal OES reviewed L.A. County’s Emergency Operations Plan in 2023, it raised concerns about the county’s ability to help residents evacuate and coordinate transportation.
The state urged L.A. County to establish “formalized, signed agreements with transportation providers” in and around the county to make sure vulnerable people could access free, round-the-clock transportation during large-scale evacuations. The county declined to tell The Times whether it followed that recommendation, and refused to provide copies of any agreements. But it said it did not follow another state recommendation: that it maintain a list of transportation agreements for use in the EOC.
“The Office of Emergency Management uses technology rather than a list to access critical resources like transportation,” it said in a statement, noting that a staffer from the county’s Internal Services Department can use the system to access and contact vendors to fulfill requests for assistance.
“It’s shocking, yet not shocking,” Cat Winesburg-Balogh, a longtime friend of McKenna’s, said when she learned the state had issued 17 recommendations to the county in 2023 — at least some of which had yet to be carried out. “It’s very unfortunate they didn’t act upon it sooner.”
When Jenny, who asked her last name be withheld for privacy concerns, called McKenna around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 7, encouraging her to come over to her home in Woodland Hills, McKenna declined.
An undated photo of Patricia McKenna and her husband, Tom Wellbaum.
(Courtesy of Michelle Dohl)
The 77-year-old, who used a walker and would have needed help evacuating because she couldn’t drive due to vision issues, said she needed to pack and would leave once she got an evacuation order.
The order came too late.
McKenna was pronounced dead in her Punahou Street home by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner on Jan. 12.
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Some who run paratransit services say they would have provided vehicles to help evacuees — if officials had called them.
Mike Greenwood, chief operating officer of Access Services, a major paratransit provider in L.A. County, said he didn’t get a call from the county, city or a partner transit agency on Jan. 7 or 8.
“If we had been invited to come into the Emergency Operations Center and staff a transportation desk … we could have homed in on what the needs were,” Greenwood said. “If the EOC was aware of the need to evacuate people, we would have been front and center to provide part of that assistance.”
During previous wildfires, Greenwood said the city EOC’s transportation desk, or a partner transit agency, would contact him if they needed help. Sometimes Access was asked to send vehicles to a command post to wait for direction. If needed, law enforcement would escort them to a location to pick up evacuees.
It is unclear whether officials used other paratransit companies to get people out of harm’s way.
When asked about transportation on Jan. 7, county officials declined to comment, citing the ongoing after-action review. “We expect that review to provide valuable insights to help the County enhance its collective response to future emergencies,” the county said.”
The heightened risk to those who cannot easily flee means that proper planning and coordination between the county and transit agencies is crucial, said June Isaacson Kailes, a disability consultant familiar with Los Angeles emergency planning.
“Why do they have to wait to be called in?” she asked of transit companies.
Too often, she said, disabled people struggle to reach transit providers as emergency lines are jammed.
“If it’s just call 911,” she said, “well, good luck with that.”
In the wake of the fires, some have urged that emergency officials reestablish a database that tracks residents with mobility or health challenges.
But Isaacson Kailes said that even if agencies could keep a list of vulnerable residents — something the county tried with its Specific Needs Awareness Planning (S.N.A.P.) registry, but scrapped it in 2016 after deciding it was too costly and had “low acceptance by the disability community” and “obsolete software” — the government does not have the resources to make a promise to respond.
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As California reels from a series of devastating wildfires over the last decade, some disability advocates insist L.A. County has made significant strides in emergency planning.
While the old planning model was more top-down and government-led, new partnerships between advocacy groups and officials have become more equitable, according to T.J. Hill, executive director of the Disability Community Resource Center.
He said evacuation efforts were surprisingly successful, given the speed of the fires and number of displaced people.
According to the California Department of Public Health, about 850 residents of nursing homes, assisted living facilities and group homes were successfully evacuated during the L.A. fires. However, the county’s Office of Emergency Management is not responsible for evacuating people from such sites, which fall under the responsibility of various state and county entities. Many were rescued by facility staff and hundreds were transported to safety by Pasadena Transit bus drivers.
Some critics of L.A. County — including two people with detailed knowledge of its Emergency Operations Center — complain that the county has taken several steps backward in the last six years.
Soon after the court-mandated monitoring of L.A. County’s remediation plan ended in 2018, the county Office of Emergency Management reassigned its point person for overseeing emergency preparations for disabled people in nonemergency periods.
Asked why the county terminated the role, the OEM said the staffer’s role was a ” time-limited position dedicated to helping coordinate the CALIF lawsuit settlement activities.” Once the settlement was complete, that role was “woven into multiple levels of our organization — just as it is in many other emergency management agencies.”
Even if L.A. County’s emergency team no longer has a single person devoted to planning for the disabled, the county stressed that whenever an emergency is declared, a Disability, Access and Functional Needs liaison is stationed at the Emergency Operations Center.
“This liaison was in place on the night of January 7,” the OEM said in a statement.
During the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, the county disbanded its Access and Functional Needs Advisory Committee, a forum set up to help vulnerable people. Its last formal meeting was in 2019.
After committee meetings were disrupted by the pandemic, “OEM began reaching out more actively to individual community groups, town councils and other stakeholders on these issues,” the county CJIC said in a statement. “We found our other efforts to be successful even in the absence of this forum.”
As part of the state’s 2023 review, the chief of Cal OES’ Office of Access and Functional Needs urged the county to reestablish its advisory committee.
“When you start bringing community members to the table … ultimately what happens is you build trust, you develop credibility,” L. Vance Taylor told The Times.
Greenwood, who previously sat on the committee, said reestablishing it would help improve communication.
But Hill described the committee as an overly formal, top-down initiative that was not necessary now that his group had regular calls with county emergency officials.
“The focus has been less about having a specific group that is focusing just on AFN,” Hill said, and more about “a community integration model” with more input from local stakeholders.
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California legislators are examining how the state can do more to help counties.
Since 2016, legislators have passed laws requiring local jurisdictions to update their emergency plans with information on how they would serve disabled people and include disabled advocates in regular plan updates. In 2020, they required the state to review at least 10 county emergency plans a year to determine if they are doing enough.
At a March 5 legislative hearing, Rep. John Harabedian (D-Pasadena) said the state had taken steps to guide, train and review counties since a 2019 state audit found California was not adequately prepared to protect its most vulnerable residents.
Still, he said, the L.A. fires offered “heartbreaking accounts” of people with disabilities dying as they waited to be evacuated.
Were the state guidelines and reviews, Harabedian asked, actually working?
Taylor, chief of Cal OES’ Office of Access and Functional Needs, replied that there had been improvement, but more needed to be done.
He stressed that Cal OES is not a regulatory agency, so it has limited power to enforce its recommendations.
Harabedian told The Times it was frustrating to see that the overwhelming number of people who died in Altadena were elderly or disabled.
“We fell short,” he said. “I don’t think that there’s any question that if we would have gotten notifications out earlier, if we would have gotten transportation vehicles out to get people out of their houses earlier, then we would have saved lives.”
