Within a half-hour of a fire igniting on an Eaton Canyon hillside in the afternoon of Jan. 7, thousands of residents’ phones buzzed in eastern Altadena with a warning from Los Angeles County: “BE AWARE.” Within 40 minutes, a dire alert: “LEAVE NOW.”
But neighborhoods in western Altadena did not see the same urgency, as evacuation orders didn’t arrive until early the following morning — more than nine hours after the Eaton Fire began.
By then, it was too late.
All 17 people who died in the wind-fueled fire were west of Lake Avenue, a major corridor that runs north-south through Altadena. They included an 83-year-old retired Lockheed Martin project manager, a 95-year-old who was an actress in old Black Hollywood, and a 67-year-old amputee who used a wheelchair and died with his adult son, who had cerebral palsy.
Fifteen of the deaths occurred in an area where the first evacuation order wasn’t sent until 3:25 a.m. on Jan. 8; the other two occurred in an area where the order came at 5:42 a.m., according to a review of the alerts as well as data compiled by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office.
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The discrepancy between west and east Altadena is spurring questions among local officials and residents about the timing of the emergency alerts and whether earlier warnings might have saved lives.
“There was not a lot of time to do anything, but our notification system should have been going off long before they were,” Altadena Town Councilmember Connor Cipolla told NBC News on Wednesday. “It’s obvious by the destruction. It failed half our town.”
On Tuesday, two Los Angeles County supervisors introduced a motion calling for an independent review of the emergency notification systems.
While the county evaluates its response following any disaster, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said Wednesday that she wants to accelerate an analysis for the wildfires that have killed more than two dozen people and destroyed over 15,000 structures across the region.
“I know that on the west side, the older part of Altadena, it’s far more concentrated, a lot of homes,” Barger told NBC Los Angeles. “We need to find out what happened, but I do know the fire was traveling fast.”
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She cautioned that additional notifications may not have saved lives, but said “the victims of this disaster deserve our transparency and accountability.”
Her motion, which will be voted on at the county supervisors’ meeting next Tuesday, followed a Los Angeles Times report on the delayed evacuation notices in the Eaton Fire.
In a statement, the county’s Coordinated Joint Information Center said it could not immediately comment on the factors that may have led to the deaths in the fires, and that a comprehensive review will “take months because it will require combing through and validating the call histories of the fire, interviewing first responders on the scene, interviewing incident commanders, and searching and reviewing our 911 records, among other essential steps, including obtaining feedback from all relevant sources. That work may also require a third-party entity to ensure integrity of the investigation.”
Electronic alerts are one method for warning residents, but the county added that it also uses door knocks, patrols with loudspeakers driving through neighborhoods and media coordination.
Jill Fogel said none of that happened in her part of west Altadena.
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She was hunkered down with her two young children and their father on Olive Avenue on Jan. 8 when she got a text after 3 a.m. from a nearby friend north of Altadena saying there were flames in her backyard. Fogel, 43, said she checked the Watch Duty app, which offers real-time updates taken from first responders radio broadcasts, but there were no warnings that her neighborhood might have to evacuate.
Then she looked outside her rental home and saw flames. A few minutes later, she got an alert ordering an evacuation, she said. She told her landlord and then her family scrambled into a car and left. As they made their way out of the neighborhood, joining a stream of cars, Fogel said she saw no firefighting vehicles or police cars and heard no sirens.
Fogel said she realized that the fire was moving very fast in the hours before the evacuation order. But she thinks authorities should have sent alerts much earlier.
“I thought it was strange that the flames were so close and we hadn’t gotten a warning,” Fogel said. “I thought they would have let us know a lot sooner.”
Ari Rivera, rear, and Anderson Hao hold each other in front of their destroyed home in Altadena, Calif., on Jan. 9.John Locher / AP file
More than two weeks after it began, the Eaton Fire is 91% contained, fire officials said Wednesday. The cause remains under investigation.
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Investigators have focused on a high-voltage electrical tower in Eaton Canyon as the potential origin, as fierce Santa Ana winds approaching 100 mph drove the flames into Altadena and Pasadena.
The fire started at about 6:18 p.m. on Jan. 7. The first emergency alert was sent to Altadena residents east of Lake Avenue at about 6:48 p.m., according to the PBS Warning, Alert and Response Network, which tracks public alert system messages. A more urgent message to evacuate was sent to residents in parts of eastern Altadena closer to the fire at 7:26 p.m.
The Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management described the scenario at the time as a “fast moving wildfire in your area.”
Joe Ten Eyck, a former chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said it can be difficult to get the timing of fire evacuation alerts right: Issue them too soon, and you risk mass panic, jammed roadways and more danger, but issue them too late, and you risk people getting stuck in burning neighborhoods.
Those decisions often must be made in an instant, Ten Eyck said, based on rapidly evolving conditions.
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Ten Eyck, who has visited the scenes of devastation wrought by the Eaton and Palisades fires, also cautioned against rushing to judgment in Los Angeles without knowing why some areas did not get evacuation orders earlier.
“I can certainly understand why everybody is upset,” said Ten Eyck, who now runs wildfire training programs for the International Association of Fire Fighters. “But there are a lot of factors involved in this.”
Those can include flames that were advancing extraordinarily fast under hurricane-force winds, limited nighttime visibility and damaged communications equipment, Ten Eyck said. He noted that authorities typically issue evacuations in areas closest to the front of a fire, but they may not immediately recognize when wind-driven embers are sparking catastrophic new fires.
Firefighters extinguish burning embers at a house in Altadena, Calif., on Jan. 9. Chris Pizzello / AP file
Salomón Huerta, an Altadena artist, was at his studio while his wife, Ana, was at their home on the west side when the Eaton Fire erupted. She never got any alerts, he said, but by the time he returned home, he could see the fires in the distance, and the couple decided to evacuate around 9 p.m.
“It was bad already,” Huerta, 59, said.
He later learned a neighbor was killed. Dalyce Curry, 95, was dropped off at her home around midnight by her granddaughter who thought she would be safe. Her granddaughter, Dalyce Kelley, previously told NBC News that it was possible her grandmother didn’t receive emergency alerts and was unaware of the middle-of-the-night evacuation order.
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“Elderly people, they just don’t get into cellphones,” Kelley said. “Not her.”
Many of the victims of the Eaton Fire were elderly and likely unable to evacuate quickly, Cipolla, the town councilmember, added.
“In everyone’s defense, it was a rapidly moving fire and a very fluid situation,” he said. “But when you take into account 17 people lost their lives, a lot of them disabled and elderly, it feels like something failed.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Amazon has been accused of listing products from independent retailers without their consent, even as the ecommerce giant sues start-up Perplexity over its AI software shopping without permission.
The $2.5tn online retailer has listed some independent shops’ full inventory on its platform without seeking permission, four business owners told the Financial Times, enabling customers to shop through Amazon rather than buy directly.
Two independent retailers told the FT that they had also received orders for products that were either out of stock or were mispriced and mislabelled by Amazon leading to customer complaints.
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“Nobody opted into this,” said Angie Chua, owner of Bobo Design Studio, a stationery store based in Los Angeles.
Tech companies are experimenting with artificial intelligence “agents” that can perform tasks like shopping autonomously based on user instructions.
Amazon has blocked agents from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and a host of other AI start-ups from its website.
It filed a lawsuit in November against Perplexity, whose Comet browser was making purchases on Amazon on behalf of users, alleging that the company’s actions risked undermining user privacy and violated its terms of service.
In its complaint, Amazon said Perplexity had taken steps “without prior notice to Amazon and without authorisation” and that it degraded a customer shopping experience it had invested in over several decades.
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Perplexity in a statement at the time said that the lawsuit was a “bully tactic” aimed at scaring “disruptive companies like Perplexity” from improving customers’ experience.
The recent complaints against Amazon relate to its “Buy for Me” function, launched last April, which lets some customers purchase items that are not listed with Amazon but on other retailers’ sites.
Retailers said Amazon did not seek their permission before sending them orders that were placed on the ecommerce site. They do not receive the user’s email address or other information that might be helpful for generating future sales, several sellers told the FT.
“We consciously avoid Amazon because our business is rooted in community and building a relationship with customers,” Chua said. “I don’t know who these customers are.”
Several of the independent retailers said Amazon’s move had led to poor experiences for customers, or hurt their business.
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Sarah Hitchcock Burzio, the owner of Hitchcock Paper Co. in Virginia, said that Amazon had mislabelled items leading to a surge in orders as customers believed they were receiving more expensive versions of a product at a much lower price.
“There were no guardrails set up so when there were issues there was nobody I could go to,” she said.
Product returns and complaints for the “Buy for Me” function are handled by sellers rather than Amazon, even when errors are produced by the Seattle-based group.
Amazon enables sellers to opt out of the service by contacting the company on a specific email address.
Amazon said: “Shop Direct and Buy for Me are programmes we’re testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon’s store, while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales.
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“We have received positive feedback on these programmes. Businesses can opt out at any time.”
President Donald Trump said Tuesday night that Venezuela will turn over 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States, to be sold at market value and with the proceeds controlled by the US.
Interim authorities in Venezuela will turn over “sanctioned oil” Trump said on Truth Social.
The US will use the proceeds “to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he wrote.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been directed to “execute this plan, immediately,” and the barrels “will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.”
CNN has reached out to the White House for more information.
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A senior administration official, speaking under condition of anonymity, told CNN that the oil has already been produced and put in barrels. The majority of it is currently on boats and will now go to US facilities in the Gulf to be refined.
Although 30 to 50 million barrels of oil sounds like a lot, the United States consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil per day over the past month.
That amount may lower oil prices a bit, but it probably won’t lower Americans’ gas prices that much: Former President Joe Biden released about four to six times as much — 180 million barrels of oil — from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022, which lowered gas prices by only between 13 cents and 31 cents a gallon over the course of four months, according to a Treasury Department analysis.
US oil fell about $1 a barrel, or just under 2%, to $56, immediately after Trump made his announcement on Truth Social.
Selling up to 50 million barrels could raise quite a bit of revenue: Venezuelan oil is currently trading at $55 per barrel, so if the United States can find buyers willing to pay market price, it could raise between $1.65 billion and $2.75 billion from the sale.
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Venezuela has built up significant stockpiles of crude over since the United States began its oil embargo late last year. But handing over that much oil to the United States may deplete Venezuela’s own oil reserves.
The oil is almost certainly coming from both its onshore storage and some of the seized tankers that were transporting oil: The country has about 48 million barrels of storage capacity and was nearly full, according to Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group. The tankers were transporting about 15 million to 22 million barrels of oil, according to industry estimates.
It’s unclear over what time period Venezuela will hand over the oil to the United States.
The senior administration official said the transfer would happen quickly because Venezuela’s crude is very heavy, which means it can’t be stored for long.
But crude does not go bad if it is not refined in a certain amount of time, said Andrew Lipow, the president of Lipow Oil Associates, in a note. “It has sat underground for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, much of the oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been around for decades,” he wrote.
new video loaded: Nvidia Shows Off New A.I. Chip at CES
transcript
transcript
Nvidia Shows Off New A.I. Chip at CES
At the annual tech conference, CES, Nvidia showed off a new A.I. chip, known as Vera Rubin, which is more efficient and powerful than previous generations of chips.
This is the Vera CPU. This is one CPU. This is groundbreaking work. I would not be surprised if the industry would like us to make this format and this structure an industry standard in the future. Today, we’re announcing Alpamayo, the world’s first thinking, reasoning autonomous vehicle A.I.
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At the annual tech conference, CES, Nvidia showed off a new A.I. chip, known as Vera Rubin, which is more efficient and powerful than previous generations of chips.
