LA County officials flooded residents’ phones with emergency alerts as the Bryson Fire burned through Malibu, a dramatic reversal after years of deadly warning failures.
The blaze erupted around 4:41 p.m. Thursday near Encinal Canyon Road on Malibu’s western edge. By Friday, it had scorched 146 acres, with more than 414 emergency personnel battling the flames and containment at just 17%. Two evacuation zones were under mandatory orders, while 12 others faced warnings.
Gina Marcione, owner of The Blue Table restaurant in Agoura Hills, lived through the opposite problem during the 2018 Woolsey Fire. She lost her home at Malibou Lake and relied on frantic calls from neighbors, text chains and social media posts to figure out what was happening.
“There was no text or warnings,” Marcione told The Post. “There was really no PulsePoint back then or like a fire alert app that we all have now.”
She fled around 2 a.m. And spent the night at her restaurant, alongside birds and chickens her neighbors had rescued from the flames. Today, she can track nearby fires on her phone, a technological leap she welcomes.
“I’m happy that we do have the PulsePoint and all these other apps,” she said.
But Marcione worries that repeated alerts could send too many residents fleeing at once, overwhelming narrow canyon roads already squeezed by construction.
“They need to get their communication a little bit better aligned,” she said.
Images posted on social media Thursday night showed bumper-to-bumper traffic out of the canyons as residents headed toward safety. That visual evidence supported Marcione’s concern about road capacity during mass evacuations.
Meg Gallagher, who nearly lost her home in the Woolsey Fire, experienced the deadly silence of that 2018 disaster firsthand. When flames raced toward her property in Cornell, a rural community in the hills above Malibu, no one called. No one knocked.
Her first warning came when her son’s school called to announce it was closing because of smoke. By 7 a.m., she was frantically loading her car when firefighters driving along Mulholland Highway spotted her.
“They were shocked that I was still here,” Gallagher told The Post.
The fire partially destroyed her home and damaged several neighboring properties. She gave officials a stark assessment of their performance back then.
“An F for the Woolsey Fire, and I think a lot of people in this area would feel the same way,” she told The Post.
This week, Gallagher gave officials a much better grade.
“I would give them a B+ this time around, because ample notice, days in advance, notice of that day, so people really had time to prepare,” she said.
Gallagher used the extra time to charge her generator, replace flashlight batteries and prop open her electric gate in case the power went out. With four dogs and chickens to evacuate, every extra hour mattered.
Yet just miles from the traffic jams, other residents weren’t going anywhere. When The Post knocked on doors near the fire, a woman living directly across from the blaze shrugged off the danger, despite the warnings.
“We’re used to it,” she told The Post.
At Agoura High School, the county’s designated evacuation center, not a single evacuee was present when The Post stopped by. Workers reported that some residents had come and gone, apparently waiting to see whether conditions would get worse.
That wait-and-see attitude was exactly what emergency officials warned against Friday.
“If someone comes to your home and says there’s an evacuation order, that means you need to leave now because there is an immediate threat to your life,” LA County Sheriff Robert Luna said at a morning news conference.
LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone warned that Santa Ana winds, low humidity and bone-dry brush would keep fire danger elevated through Saturday night.
The county’s aggressive alert strategy comes after a catastrophic warning failure during the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, when a review found emergency alerts were again delayed and confusing. That same week, the county’s warning system suffered a spectacular blunder when an evacuation warning intended for Calabasas and Agoura Hills was mistakenly blasted to nearly 10 million phones countywide. A 2018 county review of the Woolsey Fire had already exposed serious problems with the emergency response, finding that officials lacked a clear, coordinated evacuation strategy and failed to use all available warning systems. That fire tore through the same mountains, destroying more than 1,600 structures and killing three people, with some residents learning the fire was coming only from frantic calls from neighbors or when they saw or smelled smoke.
Seven years after the Woolsey Fire and months after the Palisades and Eaton disasters, officials appear determined not to be caught flat-footed again. But the flood of alerts has raised a new question of how much warning is too much, leaving the county navigating between the deadly cost of silence and the chaos of over-alerting.