City Reviews Its Own Fire Response — But Only Its Own

On the agenda tonight is discussion of the after-action report on city staff's handling of the two fires last year.

That report only examines the city, not the county fire department. The city notes that "this report is not an evaluation of wildfire suppression, firefighting tactics, or fire origin. Those functions fall under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles County Fire Department and other responding agencies."

Those other agencies examined themselves in a report called the McChrystal Report. But the McChrystal Report concentrated on the Eaton Fire — the simultaneous disaster that unfolded on the other side of L.A. County, 40 miles east of Malibu.

And even county supervisors agreed the McChrystal report was poorly done at best, a coverup at worst.

19 people were killed in the Eaton Fire, above Pasadena.

Areas threatened by the Palisades Fire east of Malibu were evacuated door to door — by heroic firefighters and sheriff's deputies going door to door. But seven people were killed in Malibu and the mountains above Topanga in the Palisades Fire.

City officials say we came very close to a fire that would have burned all of Malibu, from Topanga Canyon Boulevard west all the way to Point Mugu. That didn't happen because the Palisades Fire ran into the area that had been burned in the Franklin Fire just five weeks earlier.

Evacuating all the rest of Malibu would have been under the joint command at the Palisades Fire headquarters, run by the City of L.A. down at Sunset Boulevard.

There has been no official review of that near disaster — how Malibu would have been awakened and ordered to leave, in the middle of the night.

Nine years after the Woolsey Fire caused a panicked evacuation down Pacific Coast Highway, the city still does not have an instant notification system, like sirens or emergency alert radios.

That is also not on the agenda tonight.