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March 10, 2011, was like no other final day of the Utah Legislature’s annual session. Hundreds of Utahns streamed into the Capitol in the waning hours before adjournment singing, chanting and banging drums as they marched in protest around the rotunda. Liberals, conservatives and everyone in between united in outrage over an 11th-hour bill on the fast-track to pass before the clock struck midnight.

No negotiation, no amendments, no debate.

What was this legislation that struck a nerve so deep that it brought people of all political stripes together?

Lawmakers’ attempt to gut Utah’s premier sunshine law — the Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA.

Passed in 1991, the law provides the public with the right to access information maintained by governmental entities in Utah while also setting forth guidelines for managing and restricting access to certain sensitive or private information.

“You’re dredging up an old, bad memory,” said former Gov. Gary Herbert, who was in office and signed the infamous HB477 that riled the state.

“How it was handled was probably one of the biggest errors the Legislature made and my mistake was trying to help them out of that mess that they created for themselves.”

Fourteen years ago, the Republican-dominated Legislature wanted to eclipse the sunshine law.

Legislative leaders had decided “to send a message to the press, wall off their own potentially embarrassing emails and text messages and roll back public access. … Drafted in secret with zero public input, the bill was released, passed in both the House and Senate and signed by the governor — all in less than 72 hours,” as longtime Salt Lake City media attorney Jeffrey Hunt wrote in a 2021 column published by the Deseret News.

But lawmakers underestimated the backlash, not just from the media, but from the public, who make the vast majority of the requests for information under GRAMA. Utahns care deeply about keeping government open, transparent and accountable to the people it serves. Citing a “loss of public confidence,” Herbert called lawmakers into special session just two weeks later to repeal HB477.

“I don’t think there’s any question, never should have been any question before or since, that people want to have access, have openness and transparency to what their elected officials are doing,” the former governor said in a recent interview.

Besides offering access to a host of public records, GRAMA created an appeals process for when a government agency denies a request. The State Records Committee — a seven-member panel comprised of the director of the Division of Archives and Records Services, a Utah League of Cities and Towns representative, two citizens, a media representative, a private sector records manager and an electronic records and databases expert — settles the dispute. If the parties don’t like the committee’s decision, they can take the case to state court.

Lawmakers target GRAMA again

State lawmakers are this year once again targeting what some observers have deemed a model for open records laws.

At least two bills under consideration in the current legislative session — SB277 and HB69 —could affect public access to information under GRAMA.

Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell’s SB277 would do away with the “balancing test” used to determine whether public interest warrants releasing records that would otherwise be classified as protected or private. The Spanish Fork Republican told reporters that there are some records that need to be protected and “we’ve missed the mark on that in many cases.”

The public interest balancing test — in the law since it was enacted — is the “beating heart” of GRAMA, according to the Utah Media Coalition, a consortium of news outlets that works to keep government records open. Without it, government could withhold records even if the public interest in disclosure was compelling and the interests favoring secrecy were nonexistent or minimal.

SB277 would also replace the State Records Committee with an attorney who has “knowledge and experience relating to government records” and is appointed by the governor and approved by lawmakers. The person’s title would be records office director. The bill notes the governor can remove that person “with or without cause.”

McKell rejected the idea that the seven-member panel brings diverse perspectives to records disputes. He said following the law is the priority and having somebody with legal training “just it feels like a better process to me.” An attorney, he said, would be bound by ethical rules and the Utah State Bar.

“I want the law followed. When you look at the seven members today, that just leads to subjectivity,” McKell said. “I want some consistency.”

Courts have affirmed the records committee’s decisions 98% of the time, so law-trained judges think the panel is getting it right, according to the Utah Media Coalition.

Joel Campbell, an associate teaching professor at the Brigham Young University School of Communications and an expert on sunshine laws, said the records committee has especially benefited ordinary people who can’t afford to go to court to wage a legal challenge to denial of access to records.

For instance, students at Weber State University had questions about the school’s student body election some years ago but their records request was denied. The committee allowed them access to information that forced an election do-over.

Under the proposed SB277, the records office director would have total discretion to reject holding an appeals hearing where someone could speak to a request, relying instead solely on paperwork submitted with the request for an appeal.

The bill also lets a court order confidential treatment for a record that isn’t covered by a GRAMA exception if the judge believes there is a compelling reason. The judge would not be allowed to consider whether there’s a compelling public reason to disclose the record or try to weigh the for-disclosure, against-disclosure interests even if the record has never been classified as not public.

SB277 will be discussed Tuesday at 4 p.m. by the Senate Government Operations and Political Subdivisions Committee at the Capitol.

First Amendment attorney David Reymann called McKell’s proposal “as bad as I’ve seen in over a decade. And the attitude towards the public and the public’s right to know and the public’s ability to hold the Legislature accountable for what it is that they do is the most cavalier that I’ve seen,” per KSL-TV.

Hunt said the bill is a solution in search of a problem, “unless you think the problem is open and transparent government.” Utahns have a right to know how their elected officials and government entities are conducting the public’s business,” he said.

“This bill seriously undermines that right by abolishing the State Records Committee and prohibiting release of records even if a court determines there is no good reason to keep them secret,” he said.

The Utah Media Coalition issued a statement over the weekend noting that the State Records Committee has served the public well. The group said that the public interest balancing test protects the public’s right to know. “Public transparency laws should serve the public interest, not discard it in favor of categorical secrecy, which is what SB277 does,” per the statement.

The group noted a number of cases where the public interest balancing test led courts to order release of records. They include the names of lobbyists and subcontractors who received more than $5 million in taxpayer money, records in a criminal investigation of campaign finance violations, public corruption charges against an elected official, a lethality assessment protocol record, sexual harassment allegations in a government office and records related to officer-involved shootings.

Another bill, HB69, sponsored by Sen. Calvin Musselman, R-West Haven, could also affect the public’s access to government records. Among provisions, it prevents someone who successfully gets access to records on appeal from recovering what it cost them to make that appeal, unless the government showed bad faith. That means they could incur an expense opposing the government even if it’s decided they should have been given access in the first place.

When GRAMA took effect in 1992, it was lauded for achieving balance between transparency and the need to keep some records confidential, such as those involving trade secrets or the identity of confidential informants. In 2005, a joint study by the Better Government Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors ranked Utah No. 3 in the U.S. for its records-access law.

Not all of the bills being proposed were criticized by the media coalition.

Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, has introduced legislation, SB163, that requires government entities to annually review their records retention policies and make sure they’re complying with the law. It contains penalties for those that don’t.

Harper told the Deseret News he wants to clarify the process and make sure it’s cleaner, more precise and more understandable.

“I’m trying to make sure that things are open and accessible,” he said, adding his proposed legislation makes the process “more transparent and more responsible.”

Hunt called the annual review provision good public policy. The coalition supports the bill in its current form.

Changing the law midstream

The State Records Committee has overturned some government agency’s denials of records requests, which has riled legislators. It’s not unusual for legislators to make changes to GRAMA when they disagree with a records committee decision or when a government agency doesn’t want to share requested records. It happened at least twice last year.

The Deseret News sought college athletes’ name, image and likeness agreements between athletes and third parties submitted for review to public universities in the state, largely as a check against undue influence and in protection of Title IX and women’s sports. The schools denied the request and the case made its way to the records committee. That panel unanimously ruled in the newspaper’s favor and ordered the schools to release the records. The universities appealed to state court.

In the meantime, the Legislature passed a law making NIL deals private and made the law retroactive, voiding the records committee’s order that the schools divulge the records. That took the appeal out of the court’s purview, as well, and slammed the door on challenging the denial.

Interestingly, a bill this year would make direct NIL payments from universities to athletes public records subject to GRAMA. HB449 would treat direct payments differently because the contract doesn’t involve a third party such as a business that compensates an athlete for NIL.

So legislative proposals can go both ways, though most often the attempt is to decrease rather than increase access.

In another instance, KSL-TV was in a prolonged legal fight with former Attorney General Sean Reyes over his work calendar. While a judge ruled in the station’s favor, lawmakers passed a bill concealing all elected officials’ schedules going forward.

“We work with legislators and leaders in the Senate and House to establish fair procedures for public access that results in good law and transparency. GRAMA and the records committee are good results of that work,” said Doug Wilks, Deseret News executive editor. “But there’s no other way to say it: Lawmakers who disagreed with the decisions of the records committee and didn’t want to leave it up to the courts said, ‘Let’s just change the law.‘”

Hunt fears transparency and open access to records in Utah is dying from a long series of alterations that makes how government functions more opaque and dims the vitality of the sunshine law.

Slowly obscuring transparency

GRAMA was created by a committee that included members of the public, the legislature and other stakeholders, such as media representatives, local governments and nonprofits. It originally contained about 50 exceptions — categories of information that were not deemed publicly accessible because their release could cause tangible harm.

In the Open Government Guide, Hunt and other attorneys from Parr, Brown, Gee and Loveless note two constitutional rights that were recognized by the Legislature within the law: “the public’s right of access to information concerning the conduct of the public’s business and the right of privacy in relation to personal data gathered by governmental entities.” Lawmakers also recognized that the public’s interest is served by restricting access to some records.

But when “countervailing interests” are about equal, the law is supposed to lean toward making records available.

Former Utah legislator Curt Bramble served 24 years in the state Senate before retiring last year. Bramble told the Deseret News that earning Utah GRAMA Watch’s “Shining Light” Award in 2012 was among the highlights of his time as a state lawmaker.

That distinction came in the aftermath of HB477, thanks to a Bramble-sponsored bill from the 2012 legislative session, SB177, that made improvements to GRAMA. Changes included clarifying distinctions between the personal and public calendars of public officials and strengthening a test that gave more weight to the public-interest factor in open records decisions.

There are now more than 230 exceptions to GRAMA, created by amendments that add new categories to the information the public can no longer learn. That count only includes information set behind a wall of secrecy by the act itself. There are other rules that govern different types of information, like child welfare records or those pertaining to consumer complaints to the Division of Consumer Protection. At least 30 statutes have restricted access to information outside of GRAMA.

There’s a lot the public now has no right to know. Lawmakers keep adding items to the list.

Transparency is fading, Hunt told the Deseret News, the balance tipping to government secrecy.

“You just keep cutting and cutting and cutting, creating all these exceptions, and eventually the patient dies,” Hunt lamented, likening the situation to “death by a 1,000 cuts.”

Kate Lahey was one of the principal authors of the original GRAMA legislation and a private lawyer working on behalf of a consortium of media outlets when the bill was crafted.

The work group that collaborated on the law in the early ‘90s included a wide range of stakeholders representing both public and government interests, Lahey said. The panel’s task was to craft rules that guaranteed robust public records access while ensuring appropriate protections where they were necessary.

Lahey said a common dynamic in that work was for state agencies to bring records forward that they believed should be “locked down” in their entirety from public access. When the work group dug into the specifics of those concerns, Lahey said it was frequently determined that only an aspect of the document, like the name of an individual or company or a reference to some proprietary information, justified redaction and the majority of the record remained accessible for public review.

She said among the scores of exceptions that have been added since the passage of GRAMA, there are some that are “probably appropriate” but she believes many of the carve-outs represent a grievous erosion of the public’s right to access records that account for the work and conduct of public officials and agencies.

For example, state lawmakers have added additional exceptions under GRAMA restricting access to, among other things:

• Official calendars of public officials
• Garrity reports, which involve internal investigations after officer-involved shootings
• Initial police reports
• Police body camera footage, particularly in cases deemed sensitive or ongoing
• Correspondence and internal memos between government agencies about policy recommendations or the decision-making process
• Information regarding “at risk government employees.”

“I’m really concerned about the constant efforts to restrict access,” Lahey told the Deseret News. “There seems to be a deep opposition on the part of legislators that the public really shouldn’t be putting its nose in that sort of business. And that’s dangerous. Government operates better with more public involvement … it’s not like we don’t have an investment in how things are run.”

The outcry from the public in 2011 — not just the media or organizations like Eagle Forum and the American Civil Liberties Union — was so ferocious that elected officials walked the action back almost immediately. Members of the public clearly felt protective of their right to know and to govern the governing bodies created to represent them. They expressed it loudly with public protests and complaints about the action.

Confidence in government

Records that are not deemed part of GRAMA don’t even have to be kept, Hunt said. If the rules were to change to favor transparency, they might not even be available.

Garrity reports — the internal investigations after an officer-involved shooting or other serious law enforcement event — are among records walled off from public access, a legislative move taken just two years ago. Before that, they were public, though they have never been admissible in court. That possibility was removed to encourage officers to be open and honest about the event being examined.

“That’s different than saying the public can’t find out about them,” Hunt said of making them inadmissible in court. He added that Garrity reports are designed to help law enforcement improve procedures and learn from interactions. “How is the public supposed to know whether they’re actually learning from these and putting new procedures in place if you don’t get those kinds of records?”

Although members of the public testified the Garrity process should be open, Hunt said the Legislature walled it off.

Along the way, access to body camera footage in some cases, notes or internal memos that are part of judicial (or quasi-judicial) deliberation and booking photos, among other things, have been removed from public view.

Some GRAMA-related changes may be prompted by a constituent request or complaint, as well. Harper told the Deseret News that SB163’s origin story began with a conversation with a constituent who was displeased with an experience in an open records appeal.

When the United Kingdom was considering its own freedom of information law, the biggest selling point was that it would improve both confidence in government and government systems, Campbell said. The U.K. pondered academic research showing freedom of information raises accountability and lowers corruption, improves the quality of decision-making and how the public understands it, and also increases public participation. It also, researchers noted, improves security.

“Transparency I think is good,” Campbell said. “We call them sunshine laws. We say sunshine and showing how things happen is good. I think it also makes sure there’s balance in government.”

But Campbell said the other freedom of information law, the Open Meetings Act, has also seen its list of exemptions grow. It started out with about nine, he said, and now there are at least 20.

In Utah, Campbell can think of only one time lawmakers expanded access to records or broadened what counts as public information. Usually, they narrow it down. The exception was when the Legislature decided information on the five finalists for any Utah university presidential search must be open. While critics of the move predicted candidates might drop out rather than have current employers know they’re considering a job change, it allows people to see how diverse the candidate pool is and what those making the decision seek. And Utah universities have never not hired a suitable candidate because the process was open.

Campbell remembers when young reporters on the “night police” beat regularly looked through police reports at the local police station to see what had happened that day in their communities. Access to information about arrests and crimes and related issues that the public unquestionably cares about was available.

“I’ve seen police reports kind of disappear,” Campbell said. “Instead, police departments may write their own summary, containing what they want to put in it. It’s like a press release,” he said. “It’s not the original police report. We can no longer get access to that.”

If someone does manage to get an initial report, it’s often heavily grayed out and it’s hard to tell what kind of information has been redacted or if the redaction is appropriate, he added.

He said access should be a concern for people who care about safety in their communities, among other reasons.

Raising the cost of open government

Government bodies also sometimes block records access simply by making it very expensive to obtain. GRAMA allows for reasonable charges to copy material and even for staff time, but reasonable seems subject to interpretation.

Campbell said he knows of cases where reporters were told the cost would be thousands of dollars. He cites a specific recent request where $7,300 was the announced charge. Most members of the public — who are again the most apt to make a public records request — can’t afford that. There are provisions for fee waivers and the State Records Committee can allow that, too. But the panel itself is under attack.

Sign of the times or of politics?

When asked about the increasingly long list of exceptions that have been passed by Utah lawmakers since 1992’s landmark GRAMA legislation, Bramble said he believes many changes have been attempts to keep up with innovations in technology.

“This is a statute that must remain current as technology, business models and processes change,” Bramble said. “Look at calendars as an example. When GRAMA was introduced, most of us were still using Franklin day planners. No one was anticipating body cameras, Ring doorbells or cellphone text messages.”

But Bramble also acknowledged that some of the backslide in records access and government transparency could be due to the “ebbs and flows of the political landscape.”

He said the current effort to remake the State Records Committee could be a response to some manner of perceived bias or tendency and that “sometimes perception becomes reality.”

“When there is a perception from various political factions, and this is true whether you’re a liberal or conservative, when there’s a perceived weaponization of government, a perceived slanting or tipping the scales based on particular membership or affiliation, you lose confidence in the system,” Bramble said.

Utah was at the forefront, protecting the public’s right to know from the moment GRAMA was enacted, said Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah. From the beginning, however, tension has existed between public access and the right to privacy, she said.

Parent organization the U.S. League consistently supported open meetings and open records as a “hallmark of our democracy.” Biele shared the group’s position, adopted in 1988. It heralds the public’s right to know, understand and be part of decisions around health, the environment and education, among other issues.

While much of the statement focuses on environmental issues, it states that “public records should be readily accessible at all government levels.” And it adds, “Mechanisms for citizen appeal must be guaranteed, including access to the courts. Due process rights of the affected public and private parties must be assured.”

Rick Hall, whose career as a Utah journalist spanned four decades before his retirement as managing editor of the Deseret News, called the right to know when it comes to government records “part and parcel to our Republic,” adding that “if we’re not an informed people we are in trouble.”

Hall added that all the institutions, including those of the government and the media need to be accountable.

Bramble echoes that. The longtime senator said he believes transparency is a critical element of government operations and that with “freedoms and authority comes responsibility and accountability.”

“I think our system provides for enduring polices to begin with,” Bramble said. “We have these skirmishes, but long term, the system tends to survive and prevail. I think what we’re seeing now is a manifestation of a whole bunch of dynamics happening in the political landscape.”

All or nothing solution?

Lahey said she believes some of that all-or-nothing viewpoint has been in play when it comes to the creation of new GRAMA exceptions, an approach in which entire records or categories of records are deemed out of reach for public access, due to one objectionable item or subset of information.

“I think sometimes the Legislature does the same thing,” Lahey said. “It gets agitated about the release of some part of a record, or doesn’t like the fact that they are not winning with the records committee, and there’s a knee-jerk reaction to just shut things down.”

Lahey said the constituent response to 2011’s HB477, and what she’s heard from members of the public before and since that time, reflects an ongoing concern about government transparency issues and public records access and it’s one she believes transcends the lines of partisan politics.

“I think people do believe that access to public records is important and I also think trust in our Legislature has been greatly eroded, and appropriately so,” Lahey said. “It’s a bipartisan sentiment, as far as I can tell. Both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, think they should have access to and be able see what the government is doing.

“And they don’t like it when things are concealed.”

When flames bellowed up out of Eaton Canyon on the evening of Jan. 7, west Altadena did not, at first glance, seem to pose the most urgent challenge for evacuations.

The area was about 2½ miles from the fire’s ignition point. Unlike Pacific Palisades, a community built on the steep bluffs and canyons of the Santa Monica foothills with narrow — and limited — roads in and out, west Altadena presented few glaring topographical hurdles. The bulk of homes were in the flatlands, built on a grid with multiple escape routes.

Yet 17 people died in west Altadena, and many residents told harrowing tales of just barely escaping as flames converged around their homes, down their blocks.

What went wrong with L.A. county’s warnings and evacuations is now the subject of two different investigations after Times reporting found that emergency wireless alerts went out to west Altadena almost five hours after fire began to engulf homes in the neighborhood. In some areas, it took even longer.

Experts in emergency management said the struggle to coordinate evacuations is puzzling given the time and geography. But they also stressed that fast-moving fires in urban areas can be incredibly challenging and that we do not know enough yet to jump to conclusions about tactics.

Some law enforcement officers were spotted driving through west-side neighborhoods around 2 a.m. — before the formal alerts were issued — with loudspeakers telling residents to leave, but at that point, it appeared they did not have enough manpower to facilitate all necessary evacuations.

For some experts, the delay in wireless evacuation orders in west Altadena — and the ensuing lack of an explanation to the public — is confounding.

“There should have been all sorts of red lights on the dashboard for west Altadena, based on what was happening on the ground and the timeline of reports about fire in the neighborhood,” said Thomas Cova, a professor of geography at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who specializes in emergency alerts during wildfires. “Why were the boots on the ground warning people before the people in the office, whose job it is to warn them? That’s upside down.”

More than five weeks after the blaze swept through Altadena, officials have yet to explain why nine hours passed between the outbreak of the fire in Eaton Canyon just after 6 p.m. and the first wireless cellphone alert issued to the west side of Altadena.

The problem does not seem to be technical: A large swath of Altadena’s east side received multiple electronic evacuation orders, starting at 7:26 p.m, while those on the west side did not get orders until 3:25 a.m — well after the first radio reports of fire in west Altadena came in at 10:51 p.m.

For residents, Cova said, it can be frustrating when officials take so long to explain what went wrong.

“This is not that complicated,” Cova said. “There’s somebody who’s supposed to do this — and we know they did it for eastern Altadena, so it’s not like a technical malfunction. … The person knew how to use the system. They had already used the system a few hours before. Why didn’t they continue to use it?”

But Kevin McGowan, director of L.A. County’s Office of Emergency Management which sends out the wireless alerts, said there is not a simple answer.

“I don’t want to get into the details,” McGowan told The Times earlier this week. “I think there’s a lot to unpack between what is being reported by news organizations, what is understood within the different structures — both evacuations and alerts and warnings.”

McGowan characterized The Times’ reporting on the delayed alerts in west Altadena as an issue beyond just the alerts. “It’s evacuations in totality,” he said. He declined to elaborate further, citing the ongoing investigations.

For national emergency scholars like Cova, it is startling to see Los Angeles — home to some of the nation’s most experienced and highly trained emergency responders — struggle to issue timely emergency alerts and evacuate residents.

“They’re responsible for overseeing millions of people and have dealt with many fires,” Cova said. “They have a lot of resources, maybe the most. I mean, how much wealthier can you get than L.A. County? Not much. They have all the training. … they have the rock stars of emergency management, in fire, police and the EOC.”

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna — whose agency played a key part in coordinating evacuations the night of Jan. 7 but was not responsible for sending wireless alerts — said conditions during the height of the Eaton fire were particularly challenging. Not only were deputies facing strong winds pushing large, flying embers that were erratically shifting the fire, they were doing so in the dark.

“It was complete chaos that night,” Luna said in an interview with The Times. “There was no electricity, it was in the middle of the night or the middle of the morning — not only is it pitch dark, but the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see two houses ahead of you.”

Dark evacuations are always harder, Luna said, because every neighborhood is different. Deputies have to make sure they don’t miss backyard ADUs or any apartments in a multiunit buildings, not to mention help with vulnerable residents in senior homes.

“There were deputies who said they were disoriented,” he added. “This fire was crazy, this was literally a hurricane of flames without water.”

Typically in a major fire, sheriff’s officials work in step with fire and county Office of Emergency Management officials on evacuations, but Luna said fire personnel take the lead because they are tracking fire behavior, the blaze’s movement and associated weather.

“We are included in the decision making, but they’re the lead,” Luna said. “Even though it’s unified command, I depend on the experts.”

Once a decision is made to evacuate an area, Luna said, there’s a two-layered process: OEM sends out the electronic alert and deputies in the field are alerted to begin making sure the order is carried out.

“Our deputies are literally going down the streets, they’re on public address systems, they are getting out of their cars, they’re knocking on doors,” he said. “They’re doing everything they can to alert the public that they need to go.”

But they also don’t have to wait for that order to be formally issued.

“If they’re in the field and they see something burning … they’re taught to take action,” Luna said. “The deputies have discretion as they’re making evacuations. If they see another neighborhood or another block burning that’s outside of their area, they’re going to do everything they can to try and prioritize life … and that’s what happened this night.”

Some residents told The Times that some deputies were seen trying to to evacuate parts of western Altadena around 2 a.m. — before the area’s first evacuation order was issued — but it’s unclear how widespread those efforts were. Many west Altadena residents said that when they ended up evacuating, they didn’t see any emergency officials or sirens nearby.

Luna declined to comment on specific timing, location or manpower issues in the Eaton fire evacuations, choosing to wait for the ongoing after-action review. But he said that when deputies decide on the ground to begin evacuations due to dangerous conditions, it would be standard procedure for them to call in the situation to the fire’s unified command. He declined to say if that happened in this specific circumstance.

However, Luna did say he is not yet aware of any Sheriff’s Department missteps or issues from the first 12 hours of the Eaton fire.

L.A. County Deputy Fire Chief Al Yanagisawa, who became one of the lead incident commanders for the Eaton fire at about 10:30 p.m. on Jan. 7 and remained in that post for the next 42 hours, said the Eaton blaze was the worst he had seen in his 24-year career.

“The most destruction, chaos,” Yanagisawa said. “Difficult decisions.”

While Yanagisawa was not on the team that determined where evacuation alerts were needed or the team sending them out, he said that process was a team effort between L.A. County Fire, the Sheriff’s Department and the OEM.

“We recommend [evacuation alerts] to law enforcement by standing next to each other at the command post and saying, ‘Look, this is what the fire’s doing, this is where it’s projected to go, we need to get these people out,’” he said.

Yanagisawa said there was a clear division — and coordination — of responsibilities. The operations team in charge uses paper and digital maps to continuously draw out the fire’s movement and evacuation zones. Then, it reports that back to a representative from the OEM, either in-person or over dispatch, and the OEM sends out any wireless alert and updates the county’s online notification system, operated by Genasys.

He declined to comment on why alerts appeared to have been delayed in west Altadena.

Mark Ghilarducci, the former director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services who developed the state’s 2019 Alert and Warning Guidelines, said there are many ways in which evacuations and sending of timely and accurate alerts can be hampered during erratic, fast-moving wildfires.

Sometimes officials are reluctant to alert too many people. Other times they do not coordinate quickly enough and get overtaken by a rapidly changing firestorm. They could also be stymied by technological failures such as power outages and disrupted cellphone signals.

Some west Altadena residents said they lost cellphone service and power on the night of Jan. 7. However, in this case, that doesn’t mean emergency responders sent alerts that didn’t get through: If officials sent out alerts, they would still show up in the PBS WARN database, which they do not.

But cellphone outages indicate that west Altadena evacuation failures did not hinge entirely on officials’ failure to send wireless alerts; even if they had tried to send evacuation orders, some or many residents would not have received them.

“The public, they’re basically use these cellphones for everything now, and we’re pushing data and information over these systems, but it’s only as good as the system that supports it,” Ghilarducci said, noting that lawmakers have pushed cellphone companies to have backup power for towers in high risk fire areas.

While it is tempting to think a single person made a mistake or forgot to push an alert, Ghilarducci stressed that alerts involve coordination from multiple emergency managers and responders.

“It does take a team to do this,” Ghilarducci said. “It’s not like one person sitting in a closet who makes the decision they’re going to issue an alert.”’

While Ghilarducci stressed he did not know how commanders made decisions during the Eaton fire, he said he could imagine a scenario where commanders were looking at polygons about where fire is going to move and then quickly had to pivot as new fires erupted.

“Things are changing by the second. And I think that — I don’t know this for sure — what will end up coming out in the after-action report is that the conditions were such that maybe situational awareness was lost on the part of what areas were impacted and what areas weren’t impacted. Things were moving so rapidly that that area got missed.”

A key lesson from the Eaton fire and other powerful and erratic fires that have swept through California in the last decade, Ghilarducci said, is that officials should act more swiftly to alert and evacuate.

“We’re erring more on the side of do it sooner rather than later to take into account these extreme events,” Ghilarducci said. “But we’re still learning in this particular area, and there’s more to do, more training to be done.”

Over the last month, Luna said, he’s continued to hear stories of “absolutely heroic work” from his deputies in unprecedented conditions, but many have also expressed guilt about the 17 lives lost. One is always too many.

“They wanted to believe they saved everybody,” he said of conversations with deputies who were out that night.

Luna said he looks forward to the after-action report.

“If something comes up that’s absolutely legitimate,” he said, “we’ll learn from it so we can get better.”

Times staff writer Summer Lin contributed to this report.