L.A. County lacked coordinated plan, processes to guide recovery after 2025 fires, report finds
Facing the greatest disaster in Los Angeles history, the county government did not have the plans and procedures in place it needed to jump-start a recovery after the January 2025 fires, a new review found.
The new report suggested a slew of reforms to ensure the region is better prepared for the next major emergency, and noted that — despite outdated or absent plans — county employees and partners worked hard to provide many of the resources and support that fire survivors needed, often under exceptionally challenging circumstances.
L.A. County employees and partners “carried this recovery, under extraordinary pressure and on compressed timelines,” the report found, navigating the immediate recovery of the Eaton and Palisades fires through “institutional knowledge rather than in a formal plan.”
The report, which examined the first three months after the firestorm, is the second major after-action review ordered by the county Board of Supervisors and carried out by McChrystal Group, a consulting firm based in Alexandria, Va.
Residents said that many of the findings reflect their experiences — and validate their fears as they work to rebuild in a region infamous for its wildfire, earthquake and flood risks.
“Basically this report just confirms something that all of us … [knew] through our lived experience: There was no plan in so many categories,” said Sylvie Andrews, a fire survivor and advocate for Altadena’s recovery after she and many of her neighbors lost their homes on the west side of town last year. “L.A. County doesn’t have a plan for disasters — that’s a ticking time bomb.”
The report praised the work of county emergency employees during this period but concluded they were working with an inadequate playbook.
“The County currently lacks an updated Los Angeles County Operational Area Recovery Plan, a formal repopulation decision framework, a countywide volunteer and donations model, and integrated data for reaching vulnerable populations at higher risk,” the report found. Among the dozens of findings and recommendations, the consultants urged the county to update and formalize plans, systems and leadership structures to carry out important aspects of recovery, particularly in communication, volunteer and donation management, repopulation, sheltering and public health.
The review will be discussed further on Tuesday at the county Board of Supervisors meeting.
“Fire survivors deserve the very best protection and support from their government — and they deserve action,” Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, who represents much of the area devastated by the Palisades fire, said in a statement Monday. “There are lessons to learn, gaps to close, and changes we must make.”
“As we prepare now for El Niño and the disasters the County knows are coming, we must act on these lessons and do everything in our power to protect our communities,” she added.
Officials did not disclose how much the county paid for the review, saying the full cost had not yet been determined.
The prior after-action report cost $1.9 million and followed Times reporting that revealed evacuation alerts were significantly delayed for Altadena’s historically Black community. The report was heavily criticized for failing to assign blame or identify specific evacuation failures, but officials have said that wasn’t the goal of the McChrystal Group review.
All but one of the 19 people who died in the Eaton fire were found in west Altadena. The California attorney general in February opened a civil rights investigation into potential disparities in the fire response, looking particularly at delays in evacuation alerts and resource allocation between west and east Altadena.
Twelve people died in the Palisades fire. The fires destroyed much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, as well as parts of Malibu, leveling more than 17,000 structures across those communities.
Shawna Dawson Beer, a longtime Altadena advocate, was glad this latest review acknowledged that it was “not just a chaotic night, … but a cascade of failures.” But, she said, she’s still concerned about when these issues will be addressed, as all the recommendations were given vague “near-term,” “mid-term” or “long-term” timelines, and funding for implementation was yet to be assigned.
“It’s a mess,” Dawson Beer said. “It’s clearly a pattern, with no accountability structure.”
But Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena, vowed to make accountability her goal as the board moves forward.
“I want every recommendation to have a responsible department, a clear timeline, and a way for the Board and public to measure whether it is actually operational,” Barger said, pointing to many concerns raised by the report. “An after-action report only has value if we learn from it and make meaningful changes before the next emergency. … We cannot wait for the next disaster to figure out how we shelter and support our most vulnerable residents or how County departments coordinate critical recovery decisions.”
The report found that several recommendations made after the Woolsey fire, which destroyed more than 1,100 homes in L.A. County in 2018, had not been addressed by the time of the 2025 firestorms — and continued to hurt the county’s effectiveness.
In one such case, the report found that the county struggled to set up a way to collect online donations for weeks after the fires, finally getting a live donation link Feb. 11, which meant it missed the time when interest was the highest. Establishing such a process that could be quickly implemented was actually a recommendation from the Woolsey fire review, but it was not carried out, the report found.
In many cases, county personnel and partners “repeatedly built effective structures in real time,” the report found, but many of those wins came from “improvisation and individual relationships rather than standing plans, codified authorities and rehearsed systems.” The county needs to focus on updating and enumerating plans to ensure “the next disaster is met with updated and enhanced plans with clear authorities,” the report said.
Among the successful, quickly established operations, the report cited the county’s Coordinated Joint Information Center, recovery task force networks and what it called “the fastest debris removal operations on record.”
The county acted as the local administrator for debris removal, and the report found it was able to quickly get forms and processes established within days — but that came “without pre-positioned contracts or pre-built tools, a formal debris management plan or pre-negotiated landfill agreements,” the report found.
The report also found that communication to fire survivors was fragmented and lacked predictable pathways to reach residents. There was much confusion about when and how people could return to their properties after the fire. A survey of about 1,500 fire survivors found that more than half were dissatisfied with the notice they received before being allowed to return home, the report said. Respondents in the Eaton fire footprint were “more than five times as likely as respondents in the Palisades fire footprint to report no awareness of road closures or no closure updates,” the report said.
While setting up and maintaining short-term shelters was a huge task given the scale of the disasters, the report found that county officials did not have enough staff trained to lead such sheltering, and that the shelters were not “consistently equipped for the full range of medical, mobility, personal care and continuity needs.” It also found that moving and sheltering the most vulnerable — children in foster care, incarcerated youth and adults, people with disabilities — “lacked a countywide coordination model.”
“These are the residents for whom coordination gaps create the greatest risk of adverse consequences,” the report found, recommending a formalized shelter staffing readiness program, updated plans for in-custody populations and a real-time dashboard for children in foster care.
It also found that the county lacked a “wildfire personal protective equipment stockpile or distribution model,” which slowed that process.
The authors recommended that the county update its County Recovery Plan, including a disaster debris plan, as well as formalize a disaster recovery center coordinator position and create a one-stop web platform for post-disaster services.
Andrews said she is glad the report looked comprehensively at these issues, but given how many recommendations were made and how much was left undone after the Woolsey fire, it’s “not reassuring,” she said.
“I hope that they learn some lessons from our fire,” Andrews said. “You don’t live through a disaster like this without forever thinking about the next disaster. … It bothers a lot of us that the county doesn’t seem to share that vigilance.”