An L.A. county employee who allegedly had “a long history of sleeping on the job” was in charge of emergency workers sending evacuation alerts during critical moments of the Eaton Fire, according to a whistleblower complaint filed with the county.

The complaint was filed late last year by Nick Vaquero, an associate director in the county’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) since 2023. The county’s Chief Executive Office confirmed to LAist that it received the complaint.

Vaquero reiterated the details of his written whistleblower complaint in interviews with LAist. He said he was speaking out now because he believes OEM’s leadership decisions about staffing during the emergency were shortsighted, and he was upset that his oral complaints to his bosses and to the team working on a major after-action report released in September were ignored. He filed his written whistleblower complaint in October.  

Vaquero said he saw Steve Lieberman, a nearly 40-year county employee, asleep at work more than a dozen times in two years prior to Lieberman supervising OEM’s overnight shift from the evening of Jan. 7 through the morning of Jan. 8, 2025. The whistleblower complaint alleges Lieberman was “sleeping in his office” during his overnight shift.

By the time Lieberman’s shift began, the Palisades Fire had devastated whole neighborhoods, multiple new fires had started, including the Eaton Fire, and the National Weather Service had the region under critical fire weather warnings. That night, the Eaton Fire went on to devastate Altadena, killing 19 people. The lack of any evacuation alert for West Altadena before 3:25 a.m. Jan. 8 has spurred state and local investigations.

LAist spoke with several witnesses to Lieberman’s on-the-job sleeping who corroborated Vaquero’s account about Lieberman’s history. LAist is not naming these sources, who said they fear their careers and reputations could be seriously harmed by speaking out publicly.

Lieberman told LAist in a phone interview that he was not asleep on the overnight shift from Jan. 7 to 8. He acknowledged that he may have fallen asleep at work at times over the years.

“I’m not going to say that never happened in 38 years,” Lieberman said. “I’m 63 years old. I’ve got some health issues. We worked a lot of overtime.”

He said he didn’t sleep at work “as a general rule, hell no.”

Lieberman, who retired two months after the fires, told LAist he had no specific recollections from the night he was on duty during the fires. He denied he would have been sleeping during a major disaster, calling Vaquero’s assertion “bogus” and saying it’s “amusing” that this issue is coming up more than a year later.

Kevin McGowan, OEM’s director, said in a statement: “It is unacceptable for anyone in the midst of an emergency response to fall asleep, and during the night in question, both I and my deputy only saw Steve [Lieberman] fully awake and doing his job. For LAist to imply otherwise is irresponsible and unsupported by the facts.”

A county response — sent via email from an OEM address and labeled “County Response to Media Questions” — stated McGowan and his deputy, Leslie Luke, said they “do not believe that Steve Lieberman regularly slept on the job.”

The county response also noted Lieberman had successfully served in the same role “during numerous prior disasters, including during the pandemic.”

Instead, they pointed to the McChrystal Group’s findings in an after-action report released last year that the extreme and chaotic nature of the Eaton Fire exacerbated long-running systemic challenges at the office, including a small staff and a lack of training and formalized procedures.

Vaquero, for his part, said he worries that despite recent and proposed changes at OEM, the public remains at risk. In his complaint and in interviews, he said systems and leadership in OEM aren’t ready for the next major emergency.

“There is an entrenched pattern of mismanagement within the Office of Emergency Management,” Vaquero wrote in the complaint.

“The agency’s [OEM’s] ability to perform its emergency management mission and safeguard county residents” has been “materially degraded,” he wrote.

The days leading up to the fire

In the week before the Eaton and Palisades fires sparked, Vaquero said he was acutely aware the weather forecast could present a nightmare scenario. At the time, his job included creating a staff roster spelling out OEM staffers’ roles in an emergency, he said.

He said he put together a roster in case a fire started and the Emergency Operations Center needed to activate, meaning they’d need to staff up to monitor and respond to the situation 24/7.

Vaquero was already concerned the office was stretched thin. The office had 37 staffers. Last year’s budget was about $14.5 million. Its mandate is to comprehensively plan for, respond to and recover from “large-scale emergencies and disasters” in a county of more than 10 million residents.

The McChrystal after-action report noted significantly larger departments in other metropolitan areas. New York City, with a population of about 8.5 million, has some 200 staffers in its emergency management department and a budget of about $88 million. San Diego County, with 3.3 million people, has an emergency department of 43 people with a budget over $12 million.

There were additional factors at play in L.A. County at the time of the fires. Vaquero said coming out of the holiday season meant available staff was thinner than usual.

He said his initial plan for staffing, which he shared with leadership Jan. 3 after warnings about dangerous fire weather coming, is not the one implemented. The initial plan drafted by Vaquero and documented in emails reviewed by LAist had him taking on daytime director duties at the Emergency Operations Center. That would put him in person at the building in East L.A., where OEM staff and partner agency representatives can monitor disasters, coordinate and send alerts to the public. He said he assigned McGowan, his boss, as lead on public communication.

The National Weather Service forecast on Jan. 2, 2025.

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National Weather Service/Fire Safety Resource Institute report

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For the night shift, the emails show Vaquero scheduled Luke, the department’s No. 2, as the center’s director. In both shifts, Vaquero said he assigned staff who he believed to be best trained on the county’s new alerts and warnings systems in the relevant roles. According to the McChrystal report, only two OEM staff were fully trained on the new systems.

One staffer fully trained on the new Genasys system was scheduled to be in Mississippi the week of Jan. 6 for a pre-approved training.

Vaquero said he suggested invoking OEM’s practice of canceling trainings in case of a potential major emergency to argue for keeping that staffer in L.A. He said he was told leadership had fought too hard for the person to go to the training to cancel.

“Everything that was lining up showed that this was going to be the most catastrophic wind storm that we'd ever had, like even worse than the 2011 windstorm,” Vaquero told LAist. “So the fact that we were kind of going back and forth about, ‘Oh, well who's available?’ No, every person should have been available.”

In its statement to LAist, the county wrote that at the time of the fires, there was no official policy to cancel all trainings in the case of significant weather forecasts and that staffing and activation decisions “scale to the incident.”

“OEM has to balance those with the tradeoffs of having a very small staff and having the staff trained and capable of performing very complex tasks,” the county statement said. They noted that one of the recommendations from the McChrystal Group after-action report “is to establish clearer staffing protocols and greater surge capacity so those decisions can be made more consistently in future events, and that work is underway.”

They added that the staffer left for the training Jan. 5 and that the following day, the National Weather Service issued its warning of a “particularly dangerous situation.”

“Had that rare forecast been issued before her departure, the training would have been canceled,” the county said.

Vaquero told LAist that after he made the initial schedule, McGowan and Luke told him to take them both off the Emergency Operations Center staffing roster altogether. Instead, he said they told him to designate them as agency administrators, meaning they could be at incident command posts with county sheriff and fire officials. The county told LAist assigning those roles to top leadership has become a common practice, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020.

Vaquero said Luke told him to put Lieberman, another associate director, on the night shift.

Vaquero told LAist he expressed his concerns about Lieberman being on the night shift to OEM leadership. In his whistleblower complaint, Vaquero wrote: Lieberman “was a known liability that was allowed to continue leading OEM as an Associate Director despite years of documented disregard for the work. Steve [Lieberman] sleeping in meetings became a running joke in the office, with Kevin [McGowan] even acknowledging the issue, and little action had been taken against him leading up to this incident."

Nick Vaquero's 12-hour shift at the county Office of Emergency Management was ending as the Eaton Fire began on the evening of Jan. 7, 2025. He awoke to what he called "the doomsday scenario" in Altadena.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Vaquero described one instance a few months before the fires, in which he said Lieberman fell asleep during a meeting led by McGowan. Vaquero told LAist that McGowan asked the sleeping Lieberman a question, then joked to those in the room that he’d ask again when he woke up.

In another instance in early 2024 when Vaquero said he witnessed Lieberman asleep in a meeting, Vaquero told LAist he approached McGowan afterward to express his frustration, and he said McGowan joked that Vaquero didn’t understand the context. Vaquero said McGowan told him that in the past Lieberman would sleep all day, not just a few hours.

Others with knowledge of the situation told LAist they also witnessed Lieberman asleep during meetings on at least three occasions, as well as in his office.

McGowan declined an interview request but said in a written statement that “no performance concerns of that nature were raised through supervisory channels.”

Lieberman was assigned to the Office of Emergency Management after county supervisors merged his previous department, the Office of Public Safety, with the county Sheriff’s Department in 2009. Lieberman retired in March 2025.

Lieberman told LAist that in the months before his retirement, he was “burning time,” using up sick days, vacation and holidays.

When asked about sleeping at work, he said he thinks it’s not uncommon for people to occasionally sleep at work.

“It’s the reality of being human,” Lieberman said in a phone call. “When you’re sitting in a chair, I might close my eyes, doesn’t mean I’m asleep. I think that’s true for a lot of people.”

The firestorm 

The day before the 2025 fires sparked, the National Weather Service upgraded its warning. The upcoming fire weather conditions were “life-threatening,” forecasters said, and they warned of a “particularly dangerous situation,” or PDS — a term reserved for only the most worrisome weather.

The county’s Emergency Operations Center in East L.A. was officially activated by Tuesday, Jan. 7.

Vaquero was set to be on duty from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Lieberman would take over for the next 12 hours.

Vaquero said he arrived early Jan. 7 — about 6 a.m. At about 10:30 a.m., the WatchDuty app — a volunteer-led disaster monitoring service that emergency managers have also come to rely on for eyes in the field — was surfacing reports of a fire near Pacific Palisades. Soon after, Vaquero said, he and his team had a call with the city of L.A. and started to prepare evacuation alerts for nearby unincorporated areas. McGowan headed to the incident command post on the Westside.

Throughout the day, Vaquero said, he managed the OEM staffers on duty — including those whose job was to ensure areas in the county’s jurisdiction got timely evacuation warnings and orders.

At 6:23 p.m., the first reports of the Eaton Fire starting began to ping in Watch Duty.

Vaquero sent an agency representative to the newly established incident command post at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, he said. The county would be in charge of alerts for the Eaton Fire because the fire started in an unincorporated area.

Vaquero said he stayed past the end of his shift, helping with the transition to night shift staff. Vaquero said he watched as a night shift staffer gave a crash course on how to use the new alerts software to the person Vaquero had assigned, with leadership’s approval, to alerts and warnings. The first advisory alert for the Eaton Fire was sent to eastern parts of Altadena, as well as parts of Pasadena, a little before 7:30 p.m.

Vaquero told LAist that at that point he passed off his duties to Lieberman and headed home around 8 p.m. He said he was exhausted.

The next day

Vaquero woke up before dawn on Jan. 8 and immediately turned on the news.

“ I'm like, ‘Oh shit, this is the doomsday scenario,’” Vaquero told LAist in a recent interview.

He rushed to work, arriving a little before 5:30 a.m. and went to find Lieberman for a briefing.

“ And the first thing he says is, ‘I don't know why we're activated. Nothing's even happening,’” Vaquero recalled to LAist. “So I went off. ... I was just absolutely pissed.”

In the whistleblower complaint, Vaquero wrote that Lieberman “was making inflammatory comments like ‘why are we even activated!?’ for all in the room to hear.”

By his own account, Vaquero said, a colleague had to calm Vaquero down because he was visibly upset with Lieberman.

In his whistleblower complaint, Vaquero said he then talked to the other night shift staffers, who told him Lieberman “was sleeping in his office.” A person in the office early the morning of Jan. 8 also told LAist they witnessed Lieberman asleep in his office before the end of his shift.

Lieberman told LAist that as director of the Emergency Operations Center, he would not have been involved in the details of every alert and warning and denied that he would sleep during an active emergency.

“If [L.A. County Fire] sent OEM something about the alerts, that would’ve been handled immediately,” Lieberman said. “I seriously doubt that anything that was sent to the EOC wasn’t acted upon.”

In its statements to LAist, the county reiterated that the Emergency Operations Center director is not typically directly involved in sending or approving alerts and warnings.

During the night shift, evacuation warnings and orders were sent to areas of Altadena east of Lake Avenue between 7:55 and 9 p.m.

Meanwhile, around 11 p.m., radio and 911 dispatch calls indicated that the fire was moving in multiple directions, including westward, according to a timeline produced by the Fire Safety Research Institute at the California governor’s request. Multiple reports of fires west of Lake Avenue were reported just before midnight.

Notably, the McChrystal after action report’s timeline differs, citing the first reports of flames west of Lake at 2:18 a.m. on Jan. 8.

The county sent the first evacuation order to West Altadena at 3:25 a.m. An evacuation warning, alerting people to prepare to leave, was never sent.

According to the L.A. County statement to LAist, both McGowan and Luke were at the Emergency Operations Center at “various times” throughout that night, “including during the consequential period when emergency notifications for west Altadena were issued during the Eaton Fire.”

“Steve Lieberman was actively working throughout the times Director McGowan and Deputy Director Luke saw him and there aren’t observations that Steve Lieberman’s performance impacted the execution of alert and warning,” the county wrote.

People work in the L.A. County Emergency Operations Center in December 2024 during the Franklin Fire.

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L.A. County Office of Emergency Management

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Ultimately, the decision to order evacuations, and the responsibility to communicate that need, rested with the L.A. County Fire Department that night. The county statement said that incident command notified the Emergency Operations Center to send an evacuation order to West Altadena at 3 a.m., about 25 minutes before the alert officially went out. The 25-minute turnaround time was noted in the McChrystal report as an improvement from previous emergencies. L.A. County Fire did not respond to a detailed list of questions from LAist, citing ongoing independent investigations into the response.

According to the McChrystal after action report, L.A. County firefighters recalled suggesting to incident command around midnight that an evacuation alert be sent to the foothill areas of Altadena and neighboring communities, as far west as La Cañada Flintridge, but staff at the command post did not recall this request.

The report pointed to the overall chaos of multiple fires and extreme conditions, as well as general concern at this time of the catastrophic impacts if the fire overcame the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to materials that could cause “toxic fumes if ignited.”

“No official form or documentation was used by LACoFD [the L.A. County Fire Department], LASD [the Sheriff’s Department] or OEM to jointly and formally record which zones should receive evacuation orders or warnings, the time the decision was made, or the time the zones were communicated to OEM staff at the EOC,” the report states.

All but one of the 19 Eaton Fire deaths occurred west of Lake Avenue.

The morning of Jan. 8, Vaquero said he angrily told McGowan about his experience with Lieberman. “I immediately requested that Kevin [McGowan] remove Steve [Lieberman] from the incident operations and this change took place,” Vaquero wrote in his whistleblower complaint.

The county’s statement to LAist attributed the change to another factor. It said Lieberman “was in the process of retiring and requested leave based on accrued leave and compensatory time, which was approved in connection with his retirement.”

The aftermath

Vaquero said he believed the details he laid out in his complaint should have been a part of the McChrystal after action report. He told LAist he shared the same details in his interviews with the McChrystal group.

He also said OEM could have acted sooner and been better prepared.

It’s not the first time OEM’s response to a disaster has come under criticism. In 2023, OEM’s own internal after action report about the response to Tropical Storm Hilary identified "opportunities for improvement.” That report, which LAist reviewed, documented confusing and inconsistent information sharing from management to staff, a lack of “established and codified processes” for activating the county’s Emergency Operations Center, lack of staff training on alert and other systems, and that leadership should have a roster of personnel with credentials “to allow for better staffing decisions.”

Since the McChrystal report was released in late September 2025, OEM has publicly acknowledged these “systemic weaknesses.”

“OEM faces challenges related to limited organizational autonomy, fragmented authority, resource constraints, and insufficient staffing and technology for a jurisdiction as large and complex as Los Angeles County, while facing catastrophic disasters,” the county’s statement to LAist said.

Since the fires, the office said it has restructured staff and is working to increase personnel, as well as expand training and joint exercises with the fire and sheriff’s department, and modernize its technology systems.

The Office of Emergency Management has been reorganized, officials said. County supervisors are also considering a proposal to add 44 positions to the office, increasing its size to about 80, as part of the first phase of a three-year expansion plan in response to the recommendations in the McChrystal Group after action report.

Nearly a third of the budget has historically come from federal grants, the Washington Post has reported, and that “pot is shrinking” under the Trump administration, said the county Chief Executive Office’s acting chief, Joe Nicchitta, at a recent budget hearing. So the county is largely looking to fulfill the McChrystal Group’s recommendations to expand the office via limited local funding.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena and some of the most disaster-prone unincorporated areas of the county, said, among other things, the county has shifted the OEM to report directly to the Chief Executive Office, instead of another branch within that office.

“Since last year’s fires, my priority has been strengthening our emergency management system so it is better equipped to respond to increasingly complex disasters,” Barger wrote in a statement. “I believe this change will help streamline decision-making, strengthen accountability, and position OEM to evolve in a way that meets the 21st century emergency management needs of Los Angeles County.”

Helen Chavez, a spokesperson for Barger, added that the supervisor “is not aware of Mr. Lieberman. Personnel performance management is a duty that falls to county department leadership and typically does not rise to the attention of the Board of Supervisors.”

Vaquero says he worries that if he doesn't speak out, nothing will change at the Office of Emergency Management.

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Carlin Stiehl

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For LAist

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Why speak out now?

Vaquero was born in Lancaster and raised in Santa Clarita, he said, and today lives there with his family in a hillside neighborhood near wildfire-prone wilderness.

“ We could easily be Altadena next,” Vaquero said.

He said that speaking publicly could put his career and reputation at risk, but he’s worried nothing will change if he doesn’t sound the alarm.

“My kids, I always teach them the most important thing is to have integrity, to be kind and to do the right thing,” Vaquero told LAist. “And if I'm not going to live by that example, then I'm just a hypocrite. And I hate hypocrites.”