LOS ANGELES — L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone woke up in his San Fernando Valley home Jan. 7 to a swimming pool filled with leaves and roof shingles.

Marrone’s chief deputy, Jon O’Brien, told his boss that his Sierra Madre house felt like it was “going to get blown off the foundation.”

Around 6:30 a.m., the two men consulted Windy, a forecast app popular with surfers and sailors, and made a “seat of the pants” call, Marrone recalled.

None of the 900 firefighters on duty would be going home. At 8 a.m., the next shift would join them.

That meant the county had about 1,800 firefighters available when a fire erupted in Pacific Palisades a few hours later — nearly double the manpower of the city fire department, which decided not to keep firefighters on for a second shift that morning.

“I think we viewed the risk differently,” Marrone said of L.A. city fire officials in an interview.

Marrone’s firefighters poured into Pacific Palisades that morning to assist the city, which had been caught flat-footed after staffing a fraction of its available engines amid a parched landscape and forecasts of life-threatening winds. Later in the afternoon as the fire spread, some county firefighters headed to neighboring Malibu and unincorporated areas.

“We doubled our workforce that morning, and we staffed every available piece of equipment,” said Marrone, whose department is responsible for fire protection across unincorporated parts of L.A. County as well as 60 cities.

But when the Eaton inferno began in the Altadena area, nearly eight hours later and 40 miles away, it’s unclear how many county firefighters were nearby to fight the flames. Many residents in West Altadena say they watched their houses burn with no fire engines in sight.

Firefighters who were already battling the Palisades fire stayed there, raising questions about how much Altadena suffered from the misfortune of being the second catastrophic blaze to break out that day.

Fred Fielding, a spokesperson for the department, said fire officials would only release personnel from a wildfire when the threat was receding.

“Anybody who showed up there was going to stay there,” he said of the Palisades fire. “They were working something like 36 hours straight.”

Three weeks later, Marrone said he did not know how many firefighters and engines were positioned at each fire on Jan. 7. He said his agency plans to do a breakdown of that day’s staffing.

“The second fire is always the hardest fire to staff — then when the third fire happens, oh, forget about it,” he said. “But we always keep people in reserve. We never say, ‘Oh, dump the whole county to the Palisades fire,’ because we always have to be prepared for the second fire.”

At 7:20 a.m. on Jan. 7 — 40 minutes before 800 L.A. County firefighters were supposed to go home from a 24-hour shift— an email went out telling them to stay. They would soon be joined by another 800 firefighters.

The combined force would staff all their usual engines, as well as smaller utility vehicles known as patrols and 42 “reserve apparatus,” typically used when front line engines are out of service.

Others would man county strike teams positioned in Agoura Hills, La Cañada Flintridge and Pacoima. Two additional strike teams were in Santa Clarita, requested by county fire officials from the state that Sunday as wind forecasts grew more dire.

Around 10:30 a.m., the blaze started in Pacific Palisades near a popular hiking trail.

L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley “contacted us. ‘Hey, I need help. I got a bad fire,’” Marrone recalled.

Three of the county strike teams, each consisting of five engines, sprang toward the coast. Marrone said the county also dispatched a “first alarm brush response” to the Palisades. At 6:09 p.m., three additional strike teams responded to the Palisades fire as it moved toward Topanga Canyon, according to a timeline provided by the county fire department.

Despite their efforts, the fire cut a destructive swath, killing 12. Almost 1,200 structures were destroyed in county areas and more than 4,500 in L.A. city, including Pacific Palisades and Brentwood, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis. The city areas were more densely populated and made up 60% of the fire’s footprint.

Marrone credited “personnel and our staffing” with limiting the damage in the county areas.

The first reports of the Eaton fire came in at 6:18 p.m. Radio transmissions show that county firefighters arrived quickly but were soon overwhelmed.

Altadena, which is an unincorporated part of the county, took an unimaginable hit. Most of the community was decimated, with 9,400 structures lost. All 17 people who died were in areas of western Altadena that received evacuation orders hours after the fire started.

Some have asserted that there were not enough firefighters in the area that night. On social media and in interviews, West Altadena residents have expressed anger as they share stories from the hellish evening, with some claiming that the area was purposefully forgotten and others lamenting that it appeared resources were directed elsewhere.

“Why didn’t anyone help us?” said Jon Carmody, an Altadena town councilmember who represents a part of the westside where many residents say they watched their houses burn with no fire engines in sight.

The historically Black area, where many settled because of redlining east of Lake Avenue, “has definitely felt undervalued and overlooked in many ways,” Carmody said. “The fire made it more obvious.”

Others said the flames grew so big so fast, in a nighttime firefight with powerful gusts scattering embers deep into neighborhoods, that no amount of firefighters could have handled it. Fire experts have said that even with more resources, the fast-moving, erratic blaze would have been impossible to fight, given the winds and the dry landscape.

“I don’t know if the firefighters would’ve been able to do anything because the fire was so massive,” said Salomon Huerta, a 59-year-old Altadena resident, who said he never saw any firefighters near his house on Krenz Avenue when he fled with his wife around 9 p.m. The whole block burned down.

Marrone said much of L.A. County fire’s top brass sped to the Eaton fire as soon as it broke out. He headed from the Palisades fire to Eaton Canyon around 6:45 p.m. after being briefly stranded on the ember-filled Pacific Coast Highway because of a flat tire from a fallen utility pole.

Around that time, Marrone said he asked the state’s Office of Emergency Services for 50 strike teams that could be distributed around L.A. County.

“I thought to myself, if I’ve over-ordered, I’m gonna seem foolish, right? Like, ‘Look at Marrone overreacting,’” he said.

“Nobody wants to be the boy who cried wolf,” he added. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

By the time the Eaton fire erupted, new county strike teams had been formed in La Cañada Flintridge, next to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — about seven miles away — and Pacoima, more than 20 miles away, to replace the teams dispatched to the Palisades. Those new teams were sent to the Eaton Fire at 6:35 p.m. and 6:36 p.m., according to the county fire department.

Marrone said crews from county Fire Stations 11 and 12, both in Altadena, were also in the vicinity.

Pasadena city firefighters arrived at the fire at 6:27 p.m., less than 10 minutes after it was first reported. Firefighters from Station 66 near the bottom of Eaton Canyon, which was the closest county fire station, arrived a few minutes later.

As flames encroached on Station 66 at 7:06 p.m., firefighters asked for backup. A minute later, another fire official called for 20 fire engines and 10 strike teams.

“If we can get resources rolling here, that’s what I need right now,” he said.

At 10:35 p.m., the Eaton incident command confirmed that 10 strike teams had been deployed to the fire, according to the county’s timeline.

It was too late — ferocious winds had scattered the embers. Firefighting aircraft that had been shifted from the Palisades fire to the Eaton fire were quickly grounded.

“I get asked that question all the time: why didn’t you squirt the fire out,” Marrone said. “You add fire into Category One hurricane force wind. You cannot put the fire out.”

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(Staff writers Summer Lin and Sean Greene contributed to this report.)

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