A independent review of Santa Monica's response to the January 2025 Palisades Fire found the city's emergency operations were "coordinated" and "highly collaborative," but identified 36 recommendations for improvement, including governance gaps at the top of city leadership during the fire's onset, according to a report presented to the City Council on May 5.
The After-Action Report, produced by consulting firm Jacob Green & Associates (JGA) at the direction of the Santa Monica City Council, evaluated the city's response to the wind-driven wildfire that burned within 0.4 miles of Santa Monica's northern boundary, destroyed 6,833 structures and killed 12 people, without ever crossing into city limits.
The report found Santa Monica's Office of Emergency Management activated the city's Emergency Operations Center on the morning of Jan. 7, 2025, ahead of the fire reaching the area — a decision the report credited with establishing "a centralized coordination structure before impacts reached the City." The EOC remained active until Jan. 18, when the last evacuation warnings in the city were lifted.
Among the report's notable findings was a "governance gap" created when both the city manager and assistant city manager were out of the country when the fire broke out, leaving the deputy city manager as acting city manager. The report said this "resulted in an increased demand for OEM leadership and department heads to manage both the emergency response and elected official expectations, potentially leading to delays and confusion."
The report also found that four of the seven Santa Monica City Council members had been in office less than a month when the fire hit and had received no exposure to the EOC during onboarding. Several council members, including longer-tenured ones, told JGA interviewers they did not know where the EOC was located. During the fire, the report said, one elected official released "unvetted information regarding a potential fire within Santa Monica City limits" that had to be corrected by the city's communications team.
The report's 36 recommendations were organized into nine categories, including public information and elected official coordination, EOC governance and staffing, and evacuation planning. Specific recommendations included developing a formal Red Flag weather staffing policy for the fire department, expanding EOC staffing depth, and creating mandatory crisis communications training for elected officials. The city's Office of Emergency Management, at the time of the fire a function of the City Manager's Office with a vacant emergency services administrator position, has since been renamed the Emergency Management Division and placed under the Santa Monica Police Department's Deputy Chief as of Dec. 28, 2025.
The report also detailed the scope of Santa Monica's response, including deployment of a Santa Monica Fire Department task force to patrol the city's northern boundary, National Guard troops augmenting Santa Monica police at traffic checkpoints, and removal of roughly 445 tons of wind-related debris. The city secured $1.48 million in FEMA reimbursement for disaster-related costs, according to the report.
The Santa Monica report arrives amid a broader, still-unfolding landscape of official reviews into the Palisades Fire response across multiple jurisdictions.
No standalone after-action report has been produced by CAL FIRE. Instead, Gov. Gavin Newsom's office commissioned UL Research Institutes' Fire Safety Research Institute to conduct a state-level review. The institute released the first of two planned reports, a "Southern California Fires Timeline Report," on Nov. 20, 2025, establishing an evidence-based timeline beginning just before the fire's start on Jan. 7, 2025, at 10:30 a.m. A second report containing findings and recommendations has not been released, and no date for its publication has been announced.
The Los Angeles Fire Department released its own 70-page after-action review on Oct. 8, 2025 — the same day federal prosecutors announced the arrest of Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, on allegations he started the fire. The LAFD report, covering the first 36 hours of the incident, described a "perfect storm" of leadership and communication problems, limited resources, water-supply failures and the loss of aerial firefighting support that hampered the initial response, even as firefighters were credited with saving "thousands of lives."
The LAFD report said a 2017 policy change made pre-deployment of firefighting resources ahead of storms discretionary rather than mandatory, with decisions driven "overwhelmingly by perceived financial constraints." It found that command staff allowed firefighters to return home before the fire broke out and that an error on a reimbursement worksheet meant only about a third of deployable resources were used. Hydrants and hilltop water tanks ran dry during the firefight, forcing crews to siphon water from swimming pools, and delayed evacuation orders led to abandoned vehicles causing gridlock. Interim Chief Ronnie Villanueva said the report was intended to "provide greater clarity and accountability." Mayor Karen Bass said the department had "already implemented many changes," including 19 leadership changes.
The LAFD report drew controversy over its drafting process. Current Fire Chief Jaime Moore told the city's Fire Commission that "multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of the department leadership." Fire Commission President Genethia Hudley Hayes said a draft was sent to the mayor's office, which requested "refinements," though she said "material findings" were not altered.
Separately, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors commissioned the McChrystal Group, led by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to conduct an independent review focused on public alerts and evacuations during both the Eaton and Palisades fires. That report, released Sept. 25, 2025, found "no single point of failure" but identified "a series of weaknesses, including outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities." Only four county staff members were trained on the county's new Genasys alert system when the fires broke out. The report found the Palisades Fire response benefited from strong interagency coordination and pre-positioned resources, in contrast to west Altadena, where residents reported receiving little warning during the Eaton Fire. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said the county would "take these findings and turn them into action."
The McChrystal review was explicitly "not intended to investigate or assess blame" and excluded city, state and federal agencies from its scope. A dispute over LAFD staffing levels on the morning the fire broke out remains unresolved: Bass has said 1,000 firefighters who could have been on duty were sent home "on Chief Crowley's watch," while former Chief Kristin Crowley told the City Council the department "did not have enough apparatus to put them on," citing more than 100 broken-down engines, trucks and ambulances. CAL FIRE was part of the unified command structure that took over the incident but has not issued its own separate response review.