State officials on the front lines of preparing for natural disasters and responding to emergencies say severe cuts to federal security grants, restrictions on money intended for readiness and funding delays tied to litigation are posing a growing risk to their ability to respond to crises.
It’s all causing confusion, frustration and concern. The federal government shutdown isn’t helping.
“Every day we remain in this grant purgatory reduces the time available to responsibly and effectively spend these critical funds,” said Kiele Amundson, communications director at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
The uncertainty has led some emergency management agencies to hold off on filling vacant positions and make rushed decisions on important training and purchases.
Experts say the developments complicate state-led emergency efforts, undermining the Republican administration’s stated goals of shifting more responsibility to states and local governments for disaster response.
In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the new requirements were necessary because of “recent population shifts” and that changes to security grants were made “to be responsive to new and urgent threats facing our nation.”
A new wrinkle tied to immigration raids
Several DHS and FEMA grants help states, tribes and territories prepare for climate disasters and deter a variety of threats. The money pays for salaries and training, and such things as vehicles, communications equipment and software.
State emergency managers say that money has become increasingly important because the range of threats they must prepare for is expanding, including pandemics and cyberattacks.
FEMA, a part of DHS, divided a $320 million Emergency Management Performance Grant among states on Sept. 29. But the next day, it told states the money was on hold until they submitted new population counts. The directive demanded that they omit people “removed from the State pursuant to the immigration laws of the United States” and to explain their methodology.
The amount of money distributed to the states is based on U.S. census population data. The new requirement forcing states to submit revised counts “is something we have never seen before,” said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, a group representing emergency managers. “It’s certainly not the responsibility of emergency management to certify population.”
With no guidance on how to calculate the numbers, Hawaii’s Amundson said staff scrambled to gather data from the 2020 census and other sources, then subtracted he number of “noncitizens” based on estimates from an advocacy group.
They are not sure the methodology will be accepted. But with their FEMA contacts furloughed and the grant portal down during the federal shutdown, they cannot find out. Other states said they were assessing the request or awaiting further guidance.
In its statement, DHS said FEMA needs to be certain of its funding levels before awarding grant money, and that includes updates to a state’s population due to deportations.
Experts said delays caused by the request could most affect local governments and agencies that receive grant money passed down by states because their budgets and staffs are smaller. At the same time, FEMA also reduced the time frame that recipients have to spend the money, from three years to one. That could prevent agencies from taking on longer-term projects.
Bryan Koon, president and CEO of the consulting firm IEM and a former Florida emergency management chief, said state governments and local agencies need time to adjust their budgets to any kind of changes.
“An interruption in those services could place American lives in jeopardy,” he said.
Grant programs tied up by litigation
In another move that has caused uncertainty, FEMA in September drastically cut some states’ allocations from another source of funding. The $1 billion Homeland Security Grant Program is supposed to be based on assessed risks, and states pass most of the money to police and fire departments.
New York received $100 million less than it expected, a 79% reduction, while Illinois saw a 69% reduction. Both states are politically controlled by Democrats. Meanwhile, some territories received unexpected windfalls, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, which got more than twice its expected allocation.
The National Emergency Management Association said the grants are meant to be distributed based on risk and that it “remains unclear what risk methodology was used” to determine the new funding allocation.
After a group of Democratic states challenged the cuts in court, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order on Sept. 30. That forced FEMA to rescind award notifications and refrain from making payments until a further court order.
The freeze “underscores the uncertainty and political volatility surrounding these awards,” said Frank Pace, administrator of the Hawaii Office of Homeland Security. The Democratic-controlled state received more money than expected, but anticipates the bonus being taken away with the lawsuit.
In Hawaii, where a 2023 wildfire devastated the Maui town of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people, the state, counties and nonprofits “face the real possibility” of delays in paying contractors, completing projects and “even staff furloughs or layoffs” if the grant freeze and government shutdown continue, he said.
The myriad setbacks prompted Washington state’s Emergency Management Division to pause filling some positions “out of an abundance of caution,” communications director Karina Shagren said.
A series of delays and cuts disrupts state-federal partnership
Emergency management experts said the moves have created uncertainty for those in charge of preparedness.
The Trump administration has suspended a $3.6 billion FEMA disaster resilience program, cut the FEMA workforce and disrupted routine training.
Other lawsuits also are complicating decision-making. A Manhattan federal judge last week ordered DHS and FEMA to restore $34 million in transit security grants it had withheld from New York City because of its immigration policies.
Another judge in Rhode Island ordered DHS to permanently stop imposing grant conditions tied to immigration enforcement, after ruling in September that the conditions were unlawful — only to have DHS again try to impose them.
Taken together, the turbulence surrounding what was once a reliable partner is prompting some states to prepare for a different relationship with FEMA.
“Given all of the uncertainties,” said Sheets, of the National Emergency Management Association, states are trying to find ways to be “less reliant on federal funding.”
As local and state leaders celebrate the fastest wildfire debris removal in modern American history, the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates — a rent-controlled, 170-unit enclave off Pacific Coast Highway — remains largely untouched since it burned down in January.
Weeds grow through cracks in the broken pavement. A community pool is filled with a murky, green liquid. There’s row after row of mangled, rusting metal remains of former homes.
Yet just across a nearly 1,500-foot-long shared property line, the Tahitian Terrace mobile home park — like thousands of fire-destroyed properties cleared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the last nine months — is now a field of cleaned, empty lots.
The difference in treatment is based on standards used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which directed the corps’ cleanup efforts. FEMA, which focused on providing assistance to local residents — and not properties owned by real estate companies — argued in letters to state officials that since it could rely on the Tahitian’s owners to rebuild the heart of Pacific Palisades’ affordable housing, it would make an exception and include the property. However, it said it could not trust the owners of the Palisades Bowl to do the same.
The Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates, right, and the Tahitian Terrace mobile home park, left, where fire debris has been removed.
(Eric Thayer/For The Times)
Both mobile home parks requested federal cleanup services, records obtained from the corps show. And both Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles lobbied the agency to include the properties in its mission.
In a May letter approving the corps’ cleanup of the Tahitian, FEMA noted that the property, riddled with asbestos and perched above the busy Pacific Coast Highway, was a public health hazard and that the owners, with limited insurance money, probably would struggle to pay for the cleanup. FEMA Regional Administrator Robert Fenton also wrote to the state Office of Emergency Services, saying that he was “confident” including Tahitian “will accelerate the reopening of the park for its displaced tenants and ensure the community retains this affordable residential enclave in an otherwise affluent area.”
When it came to the Bowl, FEMA took a different tone. The agency said in a July letter to the state agency that with flatter terrain, the Bowl did not pose the same health hazard as the Tahitian Terrace did, and with $1.2 million in insurance money already disbursed to the property owners, it had “no indication the owner lacks the financial means to remove the debris independently.”
FEMA’s letter also noted that unlike with the Tahitian property, “FEMA cannot conclude that Palisades Bowl represents a preserved or guaranteed source of long-term affordable housing,” based on the owners’ track record.
The Bowl’s former residents — artists, teachers, lifeguards, boat riggers, bookstore owners and chefs — are now scattered across Southern California and the globe. Speaking to The Times, many felt helpless, frustrated and unsure whether they’ll be able to return. Many, nine months after the fire, are running out of the insurance money and government aid they’ve relied on to pay rent for temporary housing.
“We’re the great underdogs of the greatest American disaster in history, apparently. This little community,” said Rashi Kaslow, a boat rigger who lived in the Bowl for more than 17 years. “The people of the only two trailer parks — the isolated, actual affordable housing communities … you would think that we would be the No. 1 priority.”
“You would think that we would be the number one priority.”
— Rashi Kaslow, Pacific Palisades Bowl resident
The Bowl began as a Methodist camp in the 1890s, and was developed into a mobile home park in the 1950s. For decades, the Bowl and the Tahitian remained among the only places along the California coast still under rent control, preserved by the Mello Act, and consequently, some of the only affordable housing in the Palisades.
“We’re all connected through this legacy of what we had,” said Travis Hayden, who moved into the Bowl in 2018, “and I think our greatest fear is that it goes away.”
Nine months after the fire, the Palisades Bowl’s community pool is filled with a murky, green liquid.
(Eric Thayer/For The Times)
Many longtime residents never planned to leave.
“I was going to have my bed put in the living room, with a large window wall, and lay and watch the sun set and the ocean. That was going to be the end of my life,” said Colleen Baker, an 82-year-old closet designer. “I don’t, of course, have it anymore. … It’s all gone.”
The Bowl was passed among a few families and local real estate moguls over the decades.
In 2005, Edward Biggs of Northern California bought the Bowl. When Biggs, who rarely appeared at the park, died in 2021, his real estate empire was fractured between his first wife, Charlotte, and his second wife, Loretta, further complicating the Bowl’s management.
Since the fire, residents have heard virtually nothing from ownership. Neither Colby Biggs — Charlotte and Edward Biggs’ grandson who began co-managing the park after Charlotte’s death — nor lawyers with Loretta Biggs’ real estate company, responded to a request for comment.
What Bowl residents have seen is the corps descend on other Palisades properties — clearing burned-out cars, piles of rubble and charred trees from single-family homes as well as the Tahitian — while leaving the Bowl untouched.
At the center of FEMA’s reasoning to refuse cleanup for the Bowl: “The prior actions of the owner demonstrate a lack of commitment to reopen the park for its displaced residents.”
“The prior actions of the owner demonstrate a lack of commitment to reopen the park for its displaced residents.”
— FEMA, regarding the owners of the Pacific Palisades Bowl
Over the two decades the Biggs family has owned the Bowl, residents have become painfully familiar with this “lack of commitment.”
In 2006, some residents sued Biggs and the previous owner, accusing them of failing to repair and stabilize the bluff behind the park that, the previous year, crumbled after heavy rain, leaving some units uninhabitable.
A year later, Biggs fell into a legal dispute with city of Los Angeles over a plan to split up the property that residents characterized as a move to circumvent rent control.
It prompted Biggs’ attorney to send residents a letter in 2009, stating that the inability to raise rent and the never-ending series of lawsuits made the park unprofitable and that he may file for bankruptcy. It also claimed that Biggs already had received a $40-million offer from an international hotel developer, the Palisadian-Post reported. No sale ever went through.
In 2013, Biggs decided to build an “upscale resort community” instead, by buying up resident’s homes, demolishing them, and building two-story, manufactured homes on the properties. To do so, he planned to target the homes of the residents suing him over a landslide on the property, the California 2nd District Court of Appeal found.
The residents ended up winning $8.9 million from Biggs. The case with the city eventually made it to the California Supreme Court, which sided with residents and the city.
While residents agonize over FEMA’s decision, the experiences have led many to ultimately agree with FEMA’s reasoning: They cannot trust that the owners intend to preserve their park as affordable housing.
Former Bowl residents met atop the Asilomar bluff overlooking their old community on Oct. 3 — the day after a city-imposed deadline for the owners to remove the debris — to call on local leaders to act.
Most skipped the formality of a handshake, going in for hugs. They reminisced. Many took a moment in silence to look down. Rows of empty dirt lots to the left — the Tahitian — and rows of rubble still sitting to the right — their homes.
Residents of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates meet on a hill above the park in Pacific Palisades.
(Eric Thayer/For The Times)
Nine months after the fire, many former Bowl residents are trying to figure out what to do when their temporary housing insurance money and aid runs dry. They still have little certainty when — or whether — they’ll ever be able to return.
Baker, the closet designer, found a 388-square-foot mobile home in Santa Monica to live in.
“I’m in the very sad stage, and I’m realizing my losses,” she said. “You go to look for something and you go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s gone.’ That’s an everyday occurrence.”
Tahitian’s residents are stuck in a different limbo: With cleared lots, they wait for the property owners to decide whether to rebuild — adding back the concrete slabs for homes and building back the common spaces — or whether to sell the park to its residents, Chase Holiday, a Tahitian resident, said.
“We’re pretty much ready,” Holiday said. Indeed, Tahitian’s homeowners’ association has been in talks with the owners. Barring the complicated paperwork, “we could buy the park tomorrow.”
Although the wait is excruciating, “I feel pretty confident that either we’ll buy it or they’ll rebuild,” she said. But with little clarity over when that would happen, “the bigger question is, will I want to?”
On Wednesday, a handful of Bowl residents — including Jon Brown, a real estate agent who has become one of the Bowl’s leaders in the fight to rebuild — packed a board of Building and Safety commissioners meeting, pushing for the board to finally declare the property a public nuisance, which would allow the city to do the cleanup work and send the owners the bill.
The L.A. County Department of Public Works estimated that, at the end of September, about 20 properties in each burn area, Palisades and Eaton, had failed to clear debris.
In a letter mailed and posted at the Bowl, dated Sept. 2, the department had given the owners 30 days to complete the work or risk being declared a public nuisance.
At the Wednesday meeting, Danielle Mayer, an attorney whose law firm represents Loretta Biggs’ company, asked the commission for more time.
“This community has seen these park owners act with such a lack of integrity for years and years.”
— Jon Brown, Pacific Palisades Bowl resident
“This community has seen these park owners act with such a lack of integrity for years and years,” Brown said to the board. “They never do anything unless they are absolutely forced to.”
The board ultimately declared the Bowl a public nuisance.
It’s a small but significant step, with a long road still ahead. The Department of Building and Safety has yet to provide any details for how and when it will remove the debris. And the Tahitian’s still-empty lots serve as a reminder that debris removal isn’t the end of the battle.
Yet, Bowl residents remain optimistic that, someday, they will be able to buy the park from the owners and finally serve as the caretakers of the eccentric and beloved affordable community.
To residents, the Bowl was something special. They cared for one another. They surfed together, let each other’s cats in and celebrated holidays on the small community lawn. They raised their kids in the Bowl and sometimes bickered over politics and annoyances, as any proper family does.
“If the people were permitted to go back,” saidresident John Evans, “that would just restart — probably with a vengeance.”
Times staff writer Tony Briscoe contributed to this report.
As a major storm rushed toward Florida last October, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time faced a different kind of threat. Police had shown up in force to a rental property she owned as a result of a prank call, in a potentially dangerous attack known as “swatting.”
Back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton had sparked a torrent of online conspiracies, with FEMA officials facing harassment and death threats, according to hundreds of pages of agency emails and other documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Bloomberg News. The records shed new light on how disaster-related misinformation affects the government’s emergency response, sucks up internal resources, and puts staff at risk.
Deanne Criswell, who ran FEMA under President Joe Biden, learned about the swatting situation as she was about to brief TV viewers on Milton, one of the most powerful storms on record to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. “It was a very unsettling feeling,” she said in a recent interview, thinking back on how she juggled her concern for her renters along with preparing Floridians for the storm.
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, November 20, 2024.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Many of the attacks outlined in the documents have not previously been reported, including the doxxing of at least seven senior FEMA staffers. In those incidents sensitive personal information, such as home addresses, was published online for the purpose of harassment. The records also reveal challenges the agency faced as it tried to control the situation.
The incidents followed an online wave of disinformation suggesting FEMA was mishandling the response to the hurricanes that pummeled Florida and North Carolina in the lead up to the presidential election. Among the debunked claims swirling at the time were reports that agency workers had seized property from survivors and confiscated donations.
The offensive diverted agency time and resources to set the record straight and protect personnel. “It made my staff nervous,” said Criswell. “It made people in the community nervous. They didn’t know who to believe. They didn’t know who to trust.”The threat of misinformation continues to loom over the agency at a time when President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have made steep cuts to its staffing and funding, including pulling back on some of the resources FEMA used last fall to combat threats. In the aftermath of deadly Texas floods in July, for example, conspiracy theories online blamed cloud seeding.
“The profit-driven platform model, where sensational falsehoods outperform factual updates in emergencies, ensures this problem persists across political cycles and it can put lives at risk,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
A FEMA spokesperson said in an email the agency “uses internal DHS resources to identify and mitigate any personal threats to employees.”
A trail of disinformation
Workers, community members, and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina, Sept. 30, 2024.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the middle of the night on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 storm, causing historic flooding far inland and killing at least 250 people. Western North Carolina was particularly hard hit. Flood waters swept away small towns and cut off others, while Asheville lost water for more than a month. Almost immediately, FEMA staff had to confront false rumors circulating online, including that it had stopped accepting housing assistance applications from survivors and didn’t have enough funds to help them.
FEMA officials and experts attribute the quick spread of disinformation to historic government mistrust in the area, as well as social media platforms ratcheting back moderation. High-profile figures including X owner Elon Musk and Trump, then in the late stages of his bid to retake the White House, repeated some of the false claims. Trump, for example, said multiple times during his campaign rallies FEMA was directing disaster funds to immigrants.
For example, the agency shared a screenshot taken from a TruthSocial post from Oct. 5 that stated: “Deanne Criswell needs to be executed for crimes against humanity and treason!” An Oct. 6 post on Gab, a social media site favored by the far right, called for the “Mussolini treatment” of various officials. “The only question: Is there enough rope?” read one of the responses.
Jacyln Rothenberg, the agency’s spokesperson at the time, was among the most heavily targeted, leading Homeland Security to loan Customs and Border Protection agents to provide security at her home. “Because the doxxing was so severe and my safety was at risk, I had to stop tweeting,” she said. “I had to stop doing interviews. I had to stop putting myself on the record.”
FEMA staff also found what it called “far-right” users posting possible personal information for numerous officials, including Criswell, Coen and Rothenberg, internal documents show.
Attacks on FEMA Offline
As a second powerful hurricane — Milton — developed off the coast of Florida, the attacks on staffers’ started migrating from the internet to their homes. After Criswell’s rental property was swatted, among other “serious threats,” then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed off on a government vehicle and extra security to protect the embattled FEMA chief.
Then it happened to someone else. “My deputy Jenna Peters’ home was swatted,” Coen told FEMA’s security team in an email on Oct. 11. Peters did not respond to a request for comment.
The most high-profile incident involved a man allegedly “hunting” FEMA staff in North Carolina’s disaster zone. On Criswell’s orders, she said in an email to other top Biden officials: “All FEMA staff and contractors working to interact with survivors and conducting housing inspections, as well as search and rescue teams stood down following the initial reports.”
Elena Gonzalez, 37, looks at their burned-out home after Hurricane Milton’s landfall on October 14, 2024, in Fort Myers, Florida.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/The Washington Post via Getty Im)
Afterwards, FEMA put together a Workplace Protection Task Force involving security, intelligence and communications professionals to manage incoming threats. Protective measures included using specialized software to flag personnel previously targeted online as at risk of more harassment. But there were limits to how far the government could influence content moderation. At the time, outspoken Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were investigating tech companies, alleging that the platforms were censoring conservative viewpoints under federal government pressure.
After initially approving ZeroFox to assist with facilitating takedowns, FEMA later asked that the company end all social media content removal requests. Per internal documents, the move came after staff discussions that it wasn’t advisable for the agency to contract for services that took any action beyond passive threat monitoring. ZeroFox declined to comment.
Supporters of 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attend a boat parade near a house damaged in Hurricane Milton, Siesta Key, Florida, October 26, 2024.
(Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s team has already overseen a massive scale back of FEMA’s staffing, funding and programming. As part of a review of contracts, FEMA ended its agreement with ZeroFox, according to a former official familiar with the situation. A FEMA spokesperson confirmed that it ended the ZeroFox contract in April. For Melissa Ryan, founder of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, the current political climate — in which public officials who attempt to provide transparency are often politicized and attacked — is a bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims. “So many of the new government appointees are Trump loyalists, and attempting to actually respond effectively to disinformation would make whoever made the attempt a target for MAGA and the administration,” she said.
Exposing years-old concerns about California’s resilience to wildfires, a government whistleblower and other witnesses in a recent state trial alleged that cleanup operations after some of the largest fires in state history were plagued by mismanagement and overspending — and that toxic contamination was at times left behind in local communities.
Steven Larson, a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, failed to convince a jury that he was wrongly fired by the agency for flagging those and other issues to his supervisors. After a three-week trial in Sacramento, the jury found Larson was retaliated against, but also that the agency had other, legitimate reasons for dismissing him from his post, according to court records.
Still, the little-discussed trial provided a rare window into a billion-dollar public-private industry that is rapidly expanding — and becoming increasingly expensive for taxpayers and lucrative for contractors — given the increased threat of fires from climate change.
It raised serious questions about the state’s fire response and management capabilities at a time when the Trump administration says it is aggressively searching for “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, proposing cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and clashing with state leaders over the best way to respond to future wildfires in California.
The allegations raised in the trial also come as FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are overseeing similar debris removal work — by some of the same contractors — following the wildfires that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and parts of Altadena in January, and as fresh complaints arise around that work, as The Times recently reported.
Steve Larson poses for a portrait at Elk Grove Park on Sept. 1. Larson, who was a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is a whistleblower alleging widespread problems in California fire cleanups.
(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)
During the trial, Larson and other witnesses with direct knowledge of state fire contracts raised allegations of poor oversight and sloppy hiring and purchasing practices by CalRecycle, the state agency that oversaw multiple major cleanup contracts for CalOES; overcharging and poor record-keeping by contractors; toxic contamination being left behind on properties meant to have been cleared; and insufficient responses to those problems from both CalOES and FEMA officials.
The claims were buttressed at trial by the introduction into evidence of a previously unpublished audit of cleanup operations for several large fires in 2018. They were mostly rejected by attorneys for the state, who acknowledged some problems — which they said are common in fast-paced emergency responses operations. They broadly denied Larson’s allegations as baseless, saying he was an inexperienced and disgruntled former employee who was fired for poor performance.
The allegations were also dismissed by CalOES and by Burlingame-based Environmental Chemical Corp., which was the state’s lead contractor on the 2018 fires and is now the Army Corps of Engineer’s lead contractor on cleanup work for the Palisades and Eaton fires, which is nearing completion.
Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for CalOES, defended the agency’s work in a statement to The Times. While acknowledging some problems in the past, she said the agency is “committed to protecting the health and safety of all Californians, including in the aftermath of disasters, and is unwavering in its desire to maintain a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can feel respected and thrive.”
In its own statement to The Times, ECC said it followed the directives and oversight of state and federal agencies at all times, and “is proud of its work helping communities recover from devastating disasters.”
“We approach each project with professionalism, transparency, and a commitment to delivering results under extraordinarily challenging conditions,” the company said.
Maria Bourn, one of Larson’s attorneys, told The Times that while her client lost at trial — which they are appealing — his case marked a “win for government accountability and the public at-large” by revealing “massive irregularities by wildfire debris removal contractors” who continue to work in the state.
“The state’s continued partnership with these companies when such widespread irregularities were identified by one of its own should alarm every taxpayer,” Bourn said.
A Malibu home lies in ruins after the Woolsey fire. Many questions were raised about the response.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Camp, Woolsey and Hill fires
The allegations centered in large part around the state-run cleanup efforts following the Camp fire in Northern California, which killed 85 people and all but erased the town of Paradise in November 2018, and the contemporaneous Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California, which ripped through Malibu and other parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
FEMA has reimbursed the state more than $1 billion for costs associated with those cleanup efforts.
In a July 28, 2019, email entered as evidence in the trial, Larson wrote to CalOES chief of internal audits Ralph Zavala that he wanted to talk to him about “potential fraud” by Camp fire contractors, including ECC.
“I cannot say for sure, but something sure smells fishy,” Larson wrote in the email. “Either their contract was not in fact the lowest bid or they are creating fraud in the way they collect debris.”
Larson wrote in the same email that ECC was “supposedly the lowest bidder” but was “costing more” than the lower bids, which he wrote “doesn’t make sense.” At trial, Larson and his attorneys repeatedly claimed that instead of properly investigating his claims, his supervisors turned against him.
Other current and former state officials testified that they had raised similar concerns.
Todd Thalhamer, a former Camp fire area commander and operations chief who still works for CalRecycle, testified during the trial that he’d told Larson he believed ECC had low-balled its bid to win the work, then overcharged the state by millions of dollars. He said he had “dug very deep into the tonnage cost that they were charging, how they were charging, how they were cleaning it up,” and believed that ECC had been able to “game the system” by reporting that it was hauling out more of the debris types for which it could charge the most.
ECC denied manipulating bids or overcharging the state, and said that “all debris types and volumes are 100% inspected by and determined by CalRecycle and its monitoring representatives and systems, not by ECC or its subcontractors.”
Thalhamer testified that he’d sent an “email blast” out to top CalOES and CalRecycle officials telling them of his findings. He said that led to internal discussions and some but not all issues being resolved.
Further concerns were raised in records obtained by Larson’s attorneys from the prominent accounting firm EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, which the state paid nearly $4 million to audit the Camp, Woolsey and Hill fire cleanup work.
According to those records, which were cited at trial, EY found that CalRecycle was “unable to produce documentation that fully supports how the proposed costs were determined to be reasonable when evaluating contractor proposals,” and didn’t appear to have “appropriate controls or oversight over the contractor’s performance.”
EY flagged $457 million charged by the contractors through 89 separate “change orders” — or additional charges not contemplated in their initial bids. It said the state lacked an adequate approval process for determining whether to accept such orders, couldn’t substantiate them and risked FEMA rescinding its funding if it didn’t take “immediate corrective action.”
EY specifically flagged $181 million in change orders for the construction of two “base camps” near the burn areas, from which the contractors would operate. It said the state only had invoices for $91 million of that spending, and that even those invoices were not itemized. EY executive Jill Powell testified that the firm believed such large contract changes were likely to be flagged as questionable by FEMA.
ECC — one of two contractors EY noted as having made the base camp change orders — defended its work.
The company said change orders are a necessary part of any cleanup operation, where the final cost “depends on the final quantities of debris that the Government directs the Contractors to remove and how far the material has to be transported for recycling or disposal.”
Such quantities can change over the course of a contract, which leads to changes in cost, it said.
As for the base camps, ECC said the state had explicitly stated in its initial request for proposals that it would “develop the requirements” and negotiate their cost through change orders, because details about their likely location and size were still being worked out when the bids were being accepted.
“Bidders could not know at the time of bid, which area of Paradise they would be assigned, how many properties would be assigned to the bidder, and therefore the exact size of the workforce that the Government would want housed in a Base Camp,” ECC said.
ECC said it “submitted invoices with supporting documentation in the format requested” by CalRecycle for all expenditures, and was “not aware of any missing invoices.”
“We cannot speak to what EY was provided from the State’s files or how the State provided those materials for EY’s review,” the company said. “Any gap in what EY reviewed should not be interpreted as meaning ECC failed to submit documentation.”
ECC said state officials only ever complimented the company for its work on the 2018 fires. And it said it continues to work in Southern California “with the same professionalism and care we bring to every project.”
SPSG, the second contractor EY flagged as being involved in the base camp change orders, did not respond to a request for comment.
Attorney James F. Curran, who represented the state at trial, said in his closing arguments that the work was not “running perfect” but was coming in on schedule and under budget. He said state officials were not ignoring problems, just cataloging non-pressing issues in order to address them when the dust cleared, as is common in emergency operations.
Curran said many of Larson’s complaints were based on his unfamiliarity with such work and his refusal to trust more experienced colleagues. He said Larson was fired not for flagging concerns, but because of “misconduct, arrogance, communication style problems, and performance problems.”
Gore, the CalOES spokeswoman, said CalRecycle awarded the contracts “through an open, competitive procurement process with oversight from CalOES and FEMA,” and that CalOES worked to address problems with contractors before Larson ever voiced any concerns.
Gore said CalOES hired EY to identify any potential improvements in the contracting and reimbursement process, and changed its policy to pay contractors per parcel of land cleared rather than by volume of debris removed in part to address concerns about potential load manipulation.
She said the agency could not answer other, detailed questions from The Times about the debris removal process and concerns about mismanagement and alleged overcharging because the Larson case “remains pending and subject to appeal,” and because CalOES faces “other, active litigation” as well.
The EY audit also flagged issues with several other contractors, including Tetra Tech and Arcadis, according to draft records obtained from EY by Larson’s attorneys and submitted as evidence at trial.
The EY records said Tetra Tech filed time sheets for unapproved costs, without sufficient supporting information, with questionable or excessive hours, with digital alterations that increased hourly rates, and without proper supervisor approvals. It said it also charged for work without providing any supporting time sheets.
The EY records said the company also used inconsistent procedures for sampling soil and testing for asbestos, used billing rates that were inconsistent between its contract and its invoices, charged for “after hours” work without supporting documentation, filed questionable, per-hour lodging costs, appeared to have digitally edited change orders after they were signed and dated, and relied inappropriately on questionable digital signatures for approving change orders.
Tetra Tech did not respond to a request for comment.
The EY records said Arcadis filed change orders for costs that appeared to be part of the “normal course of business,” filed invoices for work that began before the company’s state contract was signed, and relied inappropriately on digital signatures.
Arcadis referred all questions to CalRecycle. CalRecycle provided a copy of its own “targeted” audit of Arcadis’ work, which found the company had complied with the requirements of its nearly $29-million contract with the state. CalRecycle otherwise referred The Times back to CalOES.
A recovery team searches for human remains after the Camp fire.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
North Bay fires
Concerns about cleanup work following major fires in Sonoma, Santa Rosa and other North Bay counties in 2017 — under both CalOES and the Army Corps of Engineers — also arose at the trial.
Sean Smith, a former 20-year veteran of CalOES and a prominent figure in California debris removal operations to this day, alleged in an email submitted at trial that ECC and other contractors hired to clear contaminated debris and soil from those fires over-excavated sites in order “to boost loads to get more tonnage and money.”
ECC denied Smith’s claims, saying it “does not perform excessive soil removal” and that it followed “the detailed debris removal operations plan requirements” of the Army Corps of Engineers, which had its own quality assurance representatives monitoring the work.
In a deposition, Smith also testified that, in the midst of spending more than $50 million to repair that over-excavation, state officials identified lingering contamination at “what would be considered hazardous waste levels.”
“They hadn’t finished the cleanup in all spots, and we found it, and we recorded it,” he said.
Smith testified that those findings were presented to high-ranking CalOES and FEMA officials during a meeting in San Francisco in October 2018. At that meeting, CalOES regional manager Eric Lamoureux laid out all the state’s contamination findings in detail, “but nobody wanted to hear it,” Smith said.
During his deposition, Smith alleged that the “exact words” of one FEMA attorney in attendance were, “We have to find out how to debunk the state’s testing” — which he said he found surprising, given the testing was based on federal environmental standards.
“I don’t know how you’d debunk such a thing,” Smith said.
FEMA officials did not respond to requests for comment. CalOES also did not answer questions about the alleged meeting.
ECC said that Smith, who managed and signed its contracts with CalOES, gave ECC “a very positive performance review” when it completed the Sonoma and Santa Rosa work — describing its work as “exceptional.”
Smith said he quit his post working on those fires after the San Francisco meeting, though he continued working for the agency in other roles for a couple more years. Smith more recently formed his own debris removal consulting firm — which has been involved in soil testing for the state after other recent fires.
CalOES did not respond to questions about Smith’s claims or separation from the agency.
Employees expressed outrage over budget cuts, personnel decisions and other reforms enacted under President Donald Trump.
Some employees at the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been put on leave after they signed an open letter of dissent against the agency’s leadership, according to the nonprofit that published the letter.
The employees were placed on administrative leave on Tuesday after they signed an open letter a day earlier – on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – expressing outrage over budget cuts, personnel decisions and other reforms enacted under President Donald Trump, which they say could recreate conditions that led to the widely criticised FEMA response to the 2005 hurricane.
“We can confirm multiple FEMA employees who publicly signed the Katrina Declaration have been placed on administrative leave,” nonprofit group Stand Up for Science said in a statement on Tuesday.
The development is likely to fuel concerns that US President Donald Trump’s administration does not tolerate dissent. In July, the US Environmental Protection Agency placed 139 employees on administrative leave after they signed a letter expressing criticism of Trump’s policies.
The Stand Up for Science website said the letter had more than 190 signatories as of Tuesday evening, the majority signing anonymously due to fears of retaliation.
“Around 30” employees were suspended, The New York Times reported on Tuesday evening, citing their review of emails.
“Once again, we are seeing the federal government retaliate against our civil servants for whistleblowing – which is both illegal and a deep betrayal of the most dedicated among us,” Stand Up for Science said.
FEMA employee Virginia Case told CNN she received an emailed notice on Tuesday evening that she’d been placed on paid leave from her job as a supervisory management and programme analyst.
“I’m disappointed but not surprised,” Case said, according to the US outlet.
“I’m also proud of those of us who stood up, regardless of what it might mean for our jobs. The public deserves to know what’s happening because lives and communities will suffer if this continues.”
The Washington Post reported that the suspended employees will still continue to receive pay and benefits.
FEMA’s press secretary said on Monday the agency has been bogged down by red tape and inefficiencies, and the Trump administration “has made accountability and reform a priority”.
However, since his return to the White House in January, Trump has stated that he wants to abolish FEMA and let states “take care of their own problems”.
Roughly 2,000 FEMA employees, or a third of its workforce, have left the agency this year through firings, buyouts or early retirements.
Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, killing more than 1,800 people. It was one of the worst natural disasters in US history, in part because of the ineffective response to it. Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act in 2006 to give FEMA more responsibility.
The letter warned the Trump administration was undoing those reforms.
It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina reshaped the city of New Orleans.
Spike Lee examined the disaster with two big HBO documentaries, the 2006 “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” just a year after the event, and a 2010 sequel, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise” and he is involved with a new work for Netflix, “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” arriving in late August. Other nonfiction films have been made on the subject over the years, including “Trouble the Water,” winner of the grand jury prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nova’s “Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City,” “Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of the Children,” and “Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues,” while the storm also framed the excellent 2022 hospital-set docudrama “Five Days at Memorial.” As a personified disaster with a human name and a week-long arc, it remains famous, or infamous, and indelible.
In the gripping five-part “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” premiering over two subsequent nights beginning Sunday at 8 p.m. on National Geographic (all episodes stream on Hulu and Disney+ on Monday), director Traci A. Curry (“Attica”) necessarily repeats many of Lee’s incidents and themes. But she finds her own way through mountains of material in the series that is at once highly compelling and difficult to watch — though I suggest you do.
Though there are many paths to take through the story, they lead to the same conclusions. Curry speaks with survivors, activists, scientists, officials and journalists, some of whom also appear in archival footage, but her eye is mainly on the victims: the people who lost their homes, people who lost their people, those unable to evacuate, for lack of money or transportation or the need to care for family members. If the storm itself was an assault on the city, most everything else — the broken levees, the flooded streets, the slow government response, the misinformation, the exaggerations and the mischaracterizations taken as fact — constituted an attack on the poor, which in New Orleans meant mostly Black people. (“The way they depicted Black folks,” says one survivor regarding sensational media coverage of the aftermath, when troops with automatic weapons patrolled the streets as if in a war zone, “it’s like they didn’t see us as regular people, law abiding, churchgoing, hard-working people.”)
Effective both as an informational piece and a real-life drama, “Race Against Time” puts you deep into the story, unfolding as the week did. First, the calm before the storm (“One of the most peaceful scariest things that a person can experience,” says one 8th Ward resident), as Katrina gained power over the Gulf of Mexico. Then the storm, which ripped off part of the Superdome roof, where citizens had been instructed to shelter, and plunged the city into darkness; but when that passed, it looked briefly like the apocalypse missed them.
Then the levees, never well designed, were breached in multiple locations and 80% of the city, which sits in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, found itself under water. Homes drown: “You’re looking at your life, the life that your parents provided for you, your belongings being ruined, your mother’s furniture that she prided is being thrown against a wall.” Residents are driven onto roofs, hoping for rescue, while dead bodies float in the water. This is also in many ways the most heartening part of the series, as neighbors help neighbors and firefighters and police set about rescuing as many as possible, going house to house in boats running on gasoline siphoned from cars and trucks. A Coast Guardsman tears up at the memory of carrying a baby in her bare arms as they were winched into a helicopter.
When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Malik Rahim, a community organizer, was a resident of Algiers Point in New Orleans. (National Geographic)
Lt. General Russel Honore served as commander of Joint Task Force Katrina and is widely credited for reestablishing order and evacuating the Superdome. (National Geographic)
And then we descend into a catalog of institutional failures — of governance, of communication, of commitment, of nerve, of common sense, of service, of the media — which, camped in the unflooded French Quarter or watching from afar, repeated rumors as fact, helping create a climate of fear. (Bill O’Reilly, then still sitting pretty at Fox News, suggests looters should be shot dead.) More people escaping the flood arrive at the Superdome, where the bathrooms and the air conditioning don’t work, there’s no food or water and people suffer in the August heat, waiting for days to be evacuated. Instead, the National Guard comes to town along with federal troops, which residents of this city know is not necessarily a good thing.
Many speakers here make a deep impression — community organizer Malik Rahim, sitting on his porch, speaking straight to the camera, with his long white hair and beard, is almost a guiding spirit — but the star of this show is the eminently sensible Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré (now retired), a Louisiana Creole who was finally brought in to coordinate operations between FEMA and the military. (We see him walking through the streets, ordering soldiers to “put your guns on your back, don’t be pointing guns at nobody.”) Honoré, who is free with his opinions here, had respect for the victims — “When you’re poor in America, you’re not free, and when you’re poor, you learn to have patience” — but none for foolish officialdom, the main fool being FEMA director Michael Brown, mismanaging from Baton Rouge, who would resign soon after the hurricane.
When buses finally did arrive, passengers were driven away, and some later flown off, with no announcement of where they were headed; family members might be scattered around the country. Many would never return to New Orleans, and some who did no longer recognized the place they left, not only because of the damage, but because of the new development.
The arrival of this and the upcoming Lee documentary is dictated by the calendar, but the timing is also fortuitous, given where we are now. Floods and fires, storms and cyclones are growing more frequent and intense, even as Washington strips money from the very agencies designed to predict and mitigate them or aid in recovery. Last week, Ken Pagurek, the head of FEMA’s urban search and rescue unit, resigned, reportedly over the agency’s Trump-hobbled response to the Texas flood, following the departure of Jeremy Greenberg, who led FEMA’s disaster command center. Trump, for his part, wants to do away with the agency completely.
And yet Curry manages to end her series on an optimistic note. Residents of the Lower 9th Ward have returned dying wetlands to life, creating a community park that will help control the next storm surge. Black Masking Indians — a.k.a. Mardi Gras Indians — are still sewing their fanciful, feathered costumes and parading in the street.
KERRVILLE, Texas — As President Trump heads to Texas on Friday for a firsthand look at the devastation from catastrophic flooding, he has remained conspicuously quiet about his previous promises to do away with the federal agency in charge of disaster relief.
The Trump administration isn’t backing away from its pledges to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency and return disaster response to the states. But since the July 4 disaster, which has killed at least 120 people and left more than 170 missing, the president has focused on the once-in-a-lifetime nature of what occurred and the human tragedy rather than the government-slashing crusade that’s been popular with Trump’s core supporters.
“It’s a horrible thing,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House. That echoes him telling NBC News on Thursday, ”This is a once-in-every-200-year deal.”
Also Friday, Trump approved Texas’ request to extend the major disaster declaration beyond Kerr County to eight additional counties, making them eligible for direct financial assistance to recover and rebuild.
Trump’s shift in focus underscores how tragedy can complicate political calculations, even though Trump has made slashing the federal workforce and dramatically shrinking the size of government centerpieces of his administration’s opening months.
The president is expected to tour some of the hard-hit areas by air. The White House says he will also visit the state emergency operations center to meet with first responders and relatives of flood victims.
Trump will also get a briefing from officials. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are joining the visit, with the senators expected to fly to their state aboard Air Force One.
It’s relatively common for presidents visiting disaster sites to tour the damage by air, a move that can ease the logistical burdens on authorities on the ground.
Trump’s predecessor, President Joe Biden, observed the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and Hurricane Milton in Florida last fall by air before meeting with disaster response officials and victims on the ground.
Trump, though, has also used past disaster response efforts to launch political attacks. While still a candidate trying to win back the presidency, Trump made his own visit to North Carolina after Helene last year and accused the Biden administration of blocking disaster aid to victims in Republican-heavy areas.
First lady Melania Trump is accompanying the president, marking the second time this term that she has joined her husband to tour a natural disaster site.
During his first weekend back in the White House, Trump again visited North Carolina to scope out Helene damage. He also toured the aftermath of devastating wildfires in Los Angeles but used both trips to sharply criticize the Biden administration and California officials.
Trump has promised repeatedly — and as recently as last month — to begin “phasing out” FEMA and bring disaster response management “down to the state level.”
During Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump did not mention those plans and instead praised the federal flooding response. Turning to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, he said, “You had people there as fast as anybody’s ever seen.”
Pressed this week on whether the White House will continue to work to shutter FEMA, press secretary Karoline Leavitt would not say.
“The president wants to ensure American citizens always have what they need during times of need,” Leavitt said. “Whether that assistance comes from states or the federal government, that is a policy discussion that will continue.”
Before Trump left Friday, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, similarly dodged questions from reporters at the the White House about FEMA’s future, instead noting that the agency has billions of dollars in reserves “to continue to pay for necessary expenses” and that the president has promised Texas, “Anything it needs, it will get.”
“We also want FEMA to be reformed,” Vought added. “The president is going to continue to be asking tough questions of all of us agencies, no different than any other opportunity to have better government.”
While the focus is on FEMA at the federal level, local officials in Texas have come under mounting scrutiny over how much they were prepared and how quickly they acted. But not everyone affected has been quick to point fingers.
Darrin Potter, a Kerr County, Texas, resident for 25 years who saw ankle-deep flooding in his home and knew people who were killed, said, “As far as early warnings, I’m sure they can improve on that.”
But he said all the talk about evacuating missed something important. The area where a wall of water ripped through was a two-lane road, he said.
“If you would have evacuated at 5 in the morning, all of those people would have been washed away on this road,” he said.
During the Cabinet meeting, Noem described traveling to Texas and seeing heartbreaking scenes, including around Camp Mystic, the century-old all-girls Christian summer camp where at least 27 people were killed.
“The parents that were looking for their children and picking up their daughter’s stuffed animals out of the mud and finding their daughter’s shoe that might be laying in the cabin,” she said.
Noem said that “just hugging and comforting people matters a lot” and “this is a time for all of us in this country to remember that we were created to serve each other.”
But the secretary also co-chairs a FEMA review council charged with submitting suggestions for how to overhaul the agency in coming months.
“We as a federal government don’t manage these disasters. The state does,” Noem told Trump on Tuesday.
She also referenced the administration’s government-reducing efforts, saying: ”We’re cutting through the paperwork of the old FEMA. Streamlining it, much like your vision of how FEMA should operate.”
Murphy and Weissert write for the Associated Press. Weissert reported from Washington. AP writers Seung Min Kim in Washington and Nadia Lathan in Ingram, Texas, contributed to this report.
Federal agencies must do more to house struggling victims from January’s Eaton Fires, Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) and advocacy groups argued Tuesday.
Chu hosted a roundtable at the Altadena Library with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and other agencies, where a dozen organizations assisting fire survivors pleaded for more assistance.
Even with the availability of federal vouchers and other housing aid, thousands of people remain bouncing between hotel rooms, living out of their cars or in other unstable housing situations, advocates said.
“Survivors of the Eaton Fire are slipping through the cracks,” Chu said at a press conference following the event.
Chu is urging FEMA to authorize a housing program called Direct Lease where FEMA directly rents apartments for disaster survivors who cannot find somewhere to live on their own. The Times reported this month that FEMA hasn’t implemented Direct Lease in Los Angeles even though it’s commonly made available after natural disasters nationwide, including the 2023 wildfires in Maui.
FEMA and CalOES officials have said that their data shows thousands of rental units available across L.A. County, making the program unnecessary.
“We know from anecdotal evidence that that cannot be true,” Chu said. “It is far from the truth.”
Fire survivors have faced numerous barriers to finding permanent housing while they decide on rebuilding their homes, advocates said. Landlords’ income requirements are too high. Potential tenants’ credit scores are too low. Some landlords aren’t accepting the vouchers FEMA is providing survivors. And the agency is including apartments in the Antelope Valley and other areas far from Altadena in its assessment of L.A.’s rental market.
By not taking these factors into account, FEMA officials are ignoring needs on the ground, advocates said.
“There is a huge gap between availability and vacancy and accessibility,” said Jasmin Shupper, president of Greenline Housing Foundation, a local nonprofit.
Chu said that FEMA already has provided $132 million in assistance, including $40 million for help with housing.
She said that money for Direct Lease was available through the existing federal disaster allocation following January’s wildfires. She noted that she supported the state’s request to Trump and Congress for $40 billion for long-term recovery efforts.
FEMA and CalOES didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Chu’s request. After Times reporting earlier this month, state emergency officials said they were reevaluating an earlier decision not to advocate for Direct Lease.
The investigation was launched by Garcia and more than a dozen members of L.A.’s congressional delegation in February after L.A. County sent a series of faulty evacuation alerts on Jan. 9, urging people across a metropolitan region of 10 million to prepare to evacuate. The faulty alerts came two days after intense firestorms erupted in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
The alerts, which were intended for a small group of residents near Calabasas, stoked panic and confusion as they were blasted out repeatedly to communities as far as 40 miles away from the evacuation area.
The new report, “Sounding the Alarm: Lessons From the Kenneth Fire False Alerts,” alleged that a technical flaw by Genasys, the software company contracted with the county to issue wireless emergency alerts, caused the faulty alert to ping across the sprawling metro region.
It also found that, contrary to accounts of L.A. County officials at the time, multiple echo alerts then went out as cellphone providers experienced overload due to the high volume and long duration of the alerts. Confusion was compounded, the report said, by L.A. County’s vague wording of the original alert.
“It’s clear that there’s still so much reform needed, so that we have operating systems that people can rely on and trust in the future,” Garcia told The Times.
The Times was reaching out to Genasys and county officials for response to the report.
A Long Beach Democrat who sits on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Garcia said the stakes were incredibly high.
“We’re talking about loss of life and property, and people’s confidence in our emergency notification systems,” he said. “People need to be able to trust that if there’s a natural disaster, that they’re going to get an alert and it’s going to have correct information, and we have to provide that level of security and comfort across the country.”
To improve emergency warning alert systems, the report urges Congress and the federal government to “act now to close gaps in alerting system performance, certification, and public communication.”
“The lessons from the Kenneth Fire should not only inform reforms,” the report states, “but serve as a catalyst to modernize the nation’s alerting infrastructure before the next disaster strikes.”
The report makes several recommendations. It calls for more federal funding for planning, equipment, training and system maintenance on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, the national system that provides emergency public alerts through mobile phones using Wireless Emergency Alerts and to radio and television via the Emergency Alert System.
It also urges FEMA to fully complete minimum requirements and improve training to IPAWS that Congress mandated in 2019 after the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent out a false warning of an incoming missile attack to millions of residents and vacationers. Five years after Congress required “the standardization, functionality, and interoperability of incident management and warning tools,” the report said, FEMA has yet to finish implementing certification programs for users and third-party software providers. The agency plans to pilot a third-party technology certification program this year.
The report also presses the Federal Communications Commission to establish performance standards and develop measurable goals and monitoring for WEA performance, and ensure mobile providers include location-aware maps by the December 2026 deadline.
But the push for greater oversight is certain to be a challenge at a time when President Trump and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are pushing for FEMA to be dismantled.
In the last few days, the Trump administration fired FEMA’s acting head, Cameron Hamilton, after he told U.S. lawmakers he does not support eliminating the agency. Noem told U.S. Congress members at a hearing last week that Trump believes the agency has “failed the American people, and that FEMA, as it exists today, should be eliminated in empowering states to respond to disasters with federal government support.”
Garcia described the Trump administration’s dismantling of FEMA as “very concerning.”
“We need to have stable FEMA leadership,” Garcia told The Times. “The recent reshuffling and changes that are happening, I hope, do not get in the way of actually making these systems stronger. We need stability at FEMA. We need FEMA to continue to exist. … The sooner that we get the investments in, the sooner that we complete these studies, I think the more safe people are going to feel.”
Garcia said his office was working on drafting legislation that could address some of these issues.
“We really need to push FEMA and we need to push the administration — and Congress absolutely has a role in making sure these systems are stronger,” Garcia said. “Ensuring that we fully fund these systems is critical. … There’s dozens of these systems, and yet there’s no real kind of centralized rules that are modern.”
According to FEMA, more than 40 different commercial providers work in the emergency alert market. But further steps need to be taken, an agency official said, to train local emergency managers and regulate the private software companies and wireless providers that play a pivotal role in safeguarding millions of Americans during severe wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and active shooter incidents.
“Ongoing efforts are needed to increase training with alerting authorities, enhance standardization with service providers, and further collaboration with wireless providers to improve the delivery of Wireless Emergency Alerts to the public,” Thomas Breslin, acting associate administrator of FEMA’s Office of National Continuity Programs, said in a letter to Garcia.
Genasys, a San Diego-based company, said in a recent SEC filing that its “ALERT coverage has expanded into cities and counties in 39 states.” “The vast majority of California” is covered by its EVAC system, it said, which continues “to grow into the eastern United States, with covered areas expanding into Texas, South Carolina, and Tennessee.”
Genasys also noted that its ALERT system is an “interactive, cloud-based” software service, raising the possibility of communication disruption. “The information technology systems we and our vendors use are vulnerable to outages, breakdowns or other damage or interruption from service interruptions, system malfunction, natural disasters, terrorism, war, and telecommunication and electrical failures,” it said in its SEC filing.
As part of its investigation into how evacuation warnings were accidentally sent to nearly 10 million L.A. County residents during the L.A. fires, Garcia received responses from Genasys, L.A. County, FEMA and the FCC.
The report said a L.A. County emergency management worker saved an alert correctly with a narrowly defined polygon in the area near the Kenneth fire. But the software did not upload the correct evacuation area polygon to IPAWS, possibly due to a network disruption, the report said. The Genasys system also did not warn the L.A. County emergency management staffer that drafted the alert a targeted polygon was missing in the IPAWS channel before it sent the message, the report found.
Genasys has since added safeguards to its software, but the report noted that Genasys did not provide details about the incident. . It suggested the independent after-action review into the Eaton and Palisades fire response “further investigate Genasys’ claims of what caused the error, and how a network disruption would have occurred or could have blocked the proper upload of a polygon into the IPAWS distribution channel.”
The report commended L.A. County for responding quickly in canceling the alert within 2 minutes and 47 seconds and issuing a corrected message about 20 minutes later, stating the alert was sent “in ERROR.”
But it also criticized the county’s wording of the original alert as vague. Some confusion could have been avoided, it said, if the emergency management staffer who wrote the alert had described the area with more geographic specificity and included timestamps.
The report also found that a series of false echo alerts that went out over the next few days were not caused by cellphone towers coming back online after being knocked down because of the fires, as L.A. County emergency management officials reported. Instead, they were caused by cellphone networks’ technical issues.
One cellphone company attributed the duplicate alerts to a result of “overload, due to high volume and long duration of alerts sent during fires.” While the report said the company installed a temporary patch and was developing a permanent repair, it is unclear if other networks have enabled safeguards to make sure they do not face similar problems.
The report did not delve into the critical delays in electronic emergency alerts sent to areas of Altadena. When flames erupted from Eaton Canyon on Jan. 7, neighborhoods on the east side of Altadena got evacuation orders at 7:26 p.m., but residents to the west did not receive orders until 3:25 a.m. — hours after fires began to destroy their neighborhoods. Seventeen of the 18 people confirmed dead in the Eaton fire were on the west side.
Garcia told The Times that the problems in Altadena appeared to be due to human error, rather than technical errors with emergency alert software. Garcia said he and other L.A. Congress members were anxious to read the McChrystal Group’s after-action review of the response to the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Local, state and federal officials all shared some blame for the problems with alerts in the L.A. fire, Garcia said. Going forward, Congress should press the federal government, he said, to develop a reliable regulatory system for alerts.
“When you have so many operators and you don’t have these IPAWS requirements in place, that is concerning,” Garcia said. “We should have a standard that’s federal, that’s clear.”
Garcia told The Times that emergency alerts were not just a Southern California issue.
“These systems are used around the country,” he said. “This can impact any community, and so it’s in everyone’s best interests to move forward and to work with FEMA, to work with the FCC, to make sure that we make these adjustments and changes. I think it’s very critical.”
Times staff writer Paige St. John contributed to this report.
