Lawyers representing the family of Stacey Darden, an Altadena resident who perished in the Eaton Fire, filed a wrongful death lawsuit Monday, alleging that software used by Los Angeles County for emergency alerts was defective and failed to warn her to leave in time.
The suit, filed more than 10 months after the Eaton Fire ravaged Altadena, targets emergency alert software company Genasys and accuses the company’s predefined evacuation zones, or “polygons,” of preventing residents east of Lake Avenue from getting timely evacuation orders the night of the fire.
Although the lawsuit also accuses Southern California utility company Edison of starting the fire with its equipment, like several other lawsuits filed in the wake of the deadly fire, it is among the first to focus on how evacuation orders failed to reach a large portion of residents. Genasys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Geraldine “Gerry” Darden, Stacey Darden’s sister, said her family thought long and hard about the decision to press charges against Genasys for her sister’s death.
“Edison started this fire and Genasys never warned her that she was in danger,” Darden said in a statement. “My sister was carefully following evacuation orders the night of the Eaton fire. The truth is, if these companies had done what they were supposed to do, Stacey would be alive today.”
The morning sun breaks through the smoke from the Altadena Fire, seen from Sylmar on January 8.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
On January 7, Los Angeles emergency responders and firefighters were quickly overwhelmed when extreme signal-alarm conditions sparked a wave of devastating fires across the region, from the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains to the San Gabriel Mountains. When flames erupted near Eaton Canyon around 6:30 p.m., erratic hurricane-force winds carried red embers for miles, igniting countless small fires that ultimately destroyed thousands of homes. Nineteen people died in Altadena.
In the aftermath of the fire, The Times reported that residents in west Altadena did not receive electronic evacuation orders until hours after the fire broke out and ravaged the area. All but one of the Eaton Fire’s 19 deaths occurred west of Lake Avenue, where residents did not receive evacuation warnings until around 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 8, at least six hours after their neighbors across Lake Avenue began receiving alerts.
At a news conference at the Altadena Main Library, Doug Boxer, an attorney working for LA Fire Justice, said Stacey Darden, 54, and her sister Gerry were on alert when the Eaton Fire broke out and were constantly monitoring the news for information on evacuation zones.
Darden’s home in Altadena — 2528 Marengo Ave., about five blocks west of Lake Avenue — was not included in an evacuation order zone, or “polygon,” Boxer said.
According to the lawsuit, the only evacuation order for the Darden neighborhood didn’t hit his cell phone until 5:43 a.m. on Jan. 8. His last cell phone activity, according to the text, took place more than two hours earlier, around 3:30 a.m.
“By the time an evacuation order was finally sent to his phone, it was too late,” attorney Mikal Watts said in a statement. “It’s not a tragedy of bad luck, it’s a tragedy of business failures.”
“At its core, this is really a case of digital redlining,” Watts said at the conference, referring to Lake Avenue’s historic role as a frontier for racial redlining in Altadena.
The suit seeks to answer a question that the company, the county and its after-action report have been unable to answer thus far: Why were alerts for residents west of Lake Avenue delayed?
An evacuation warning from the Los Angeles Fire Department.
(Kirby Lee/Getty Images)
Since January, several Altadena neighborhood groups have mobilized around the issue of late alerts, pressuring county officials to explain why the city’s historically marginalized west side received alerts much later than the comparatively wealthier and whiter east side.
The complaint alleges that Genasys contracted to provide Los Angeles County with a mass notification software system that county officials could use to alert residents in the event of an emergency and that it had a duty to provide a system that was “safe in its operation for its intended use” and “free from defects in design and workmanship.”
However, he argued that the Genasys system was “flawed and excessively dangerous,” due to its predefined evacuation zones, which determine how alerts are broadcast to cellphones and other technology in a given area. According to the complaint, the zones failed to account for vulnerable populations, including the sick and elderly, who need more time to evacuate.
A recent state report highlighted a number of problems with high-level facility operators and their failure to evacuate all of their residents as the emergency unfolded.
As missteps in the response to the Eaton fire have come to light and questions about who was responsible have multiplied, Genasys officials have maintained that their company’s software did not fail during the fire.
In March, Richard Danforth, CEO of Genasys, told shareholders during a Zoom meeting, “the system was up and running.”
According to an after-action report from the county-supported McChrystal Group, most of the alert issues during the Eaton Fire were due to human error, not technological issues.
At the time of the fire, Genasys software was new to Los Angeles County and only a handful of staff members in the county’s emergency management office had been trained in its use before the fires broke out, the report said.
