As Breitbart News noted in February, many of the 17 deaths that occurred in the Eaton fire were likely caused by the fact that residents did not receive an alert or evacuation order on their phones until it was too late.
The report, prepared by the McChrystal Group (led by the vehemently anti-Trump former general, Stanley McChrystal), found that there was not one particular failure, but a series of weaknesses across the system.
A media release stated:
The review—the first in a series of after-action assessments by the County, state and others—did not identify a “single point of failure” in the County’s efforts to warn and evacuate residents in the face of multiple simultaneous fires in areas across the County, fueled by hurricane force winds that grounded all firefighting aircraft, created power outages, and made nighttime aerial surveillance impossible on the critical night of January 7.
Rather, the review, commissioned by the Board of Supervisors, found that a series of weaknesses, including “outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities,” hampered the effectiveness of the County’s response.
“While frontline responders acted decisively and, in many cases, heroically, in the face of extraordinary conditions, the events underscored the need for clearer policies, stronger training, integrated tools, and improved public communication,” the report said.
The report did not deal with other failures, such as poor deployment of firefighters and the lack of water; nor did it deal with failures by the City of Los Angeles, which operates separately from the county government.
Other reports, such as the report by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) on the cause of the fire, remain under wraps. The U.S. Senate has begun its own investigation; the state has not.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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