You Are on Your Own
Louisville ignores expert advice to prepare for the next big emergency
My neighborhood used to feel so safe, nestled exactly between the Louisville Police Station and Louisville Fire Protection District Station 2. It was such a shock to learn, after the Marshall Fire, that our previous police chief and city manager evacuated the police station on time, but explicitly decided to leave us out of the fire evacuations for over an hour as the flames overtook our neighborhood.
According to the official After Action Report and our deputy police chief, leadership justified leaving us behind to execute a staged evacuation, a method meant to prevent traffic congestion by prioritizing areas for evacuation based on immediate threats. Except, the staged evacuation never happened. Instead, neighborhoods far from the fire—where there was never immediate danger—were evacuated long before our area, where nearly 300 homes were burning and dozens of people were having near-death escapes. While first responders heroically went door-to-door in every neighborhood around us, they never entered ours. We were on our own to survive, an island in a sea of flames.
One by one, 75 families—many of us home with our children on a school holiday—realized that our own homes, or our neighbors' homes, were suddenly engulfed in flames. We ran for our lives, and by some miracle, we all escaped.
Leadership’s Failure to Learn
Let me be absolutely clear: I fully support our police officers and firefighters. They did everything they could that day to save lives and preserve what they could of our community. I also understand that a fast-moving, climate-driven grass fire was not the kind of disaster anyone had planned for. And in events like the Marshall Fire, emergency response will always have its limits.
But what I cannot accept—what none of us should accept—is that the City of Louisville has refused to meaningfully acknowledge or correct the problems with its disaster response. Three years later, inadequate steps have been taken to prepare for the next disaster.
A group of impacted residents tried to start a dialogue with city officials, and it went nowhere. The previous city manager dismissed safety concerns as "disrespectful" and insisted that Louisville didn’t need to coordinate with schools or plan for traffic management because—this is not a joke—people could just drive on sidewalks to escape. The city refused to admit that leaving residents unwarned in their homes as a firestorm overtook their neighborhood was a mistake. With no need for improvements, there is no responsibility to explain. A resilience and recovery lead was hired, and meetings with residents were abruptly cut off. The message was clear: they were done listening.
Priorities Out of Order
What, you might ask, has Louisville’s City Council done to advance preparedness in the three years since the fire? Council has spent time on gas station bans, sugar-free January, proclamations, pet mayors, photography contests, and dumping buckets at the rec center—everything except emergency preparedness. Although Council put preparedness on its work agenda for 2025, for the first three years post fire not a single meeting agenda item was dedicated to emergency operations despite resident complaints.
Meanwhile, Council left emergency planning decisions in the hands of junior, inexperienced staff who have never participated in a disaster response. While most cities are transparent about their emergency operations planning, Louisville staff struggle or outright refuse to answer basic questions about their work.
Roadmap to Safety Ignored
Residents are at a big disadvantage when it comes to understanding if their local emergency operations fall short because it is somewhat technical. I began my advocacy journey by reading other cities' emergency plans and FEMA guides. I learned that Colorado law requires every jurisdiction to have both an emergency operations plan and an emergency manager, but with nothing published it is impossible to gauge whether Louisville might be compliant. A resident who tried to convince a bored councilmember that the city is inadequately prepared based on this information would risk looking hysterical/shrill.
But finally, I found the smoking gun: in 2023 Louisville hired experts to draft an emergency operations assessment. Booya! First priority actions the experts recommended included:
hiring an emergency manager within six months, and
drafting an emergency operations plan within a year.
Two years later, the city appears to have shelved or forgotten the assessment.
Silence and Evasion
A month ago, fire survivors followed up the discovery of this report by asking Louisville’s resilience lead three simple questions:
Does Louisville have an emergency manager?
If so, what training does this person have?
Do we have an emergency operations plan?
Rather than responding to the resident email, the staffer posted some very unsatisfying responses on an obscure city webpage—the equivalent of writing the answer on a post-it note and tossing it into a field on a windy day and saying, go find your answer! The staffer followed up by announcing that she will no longer respond to preparedness questions that come from that group of fire survivors. Moving forward, she will only take questions from individual residents. Apparently our questions made the city so uncomfortable that they are taking further steps to shut down even an email dialog with a fire survivor resident group.
A Dangerous Dereliction of Duty
This is not just bureaucratic incompetence—it is a dereliction of duty.
What happened in my neighborhood could happen in yours next. Louisville is ignoring expert advice, possibly violating state law, and dismissing the concerns of its residents. The city has a legal and ethical obligation to prepare for the next disaster and protect its residents, and it is falling short. If no one holds the city accountable, next time, it could be your neighborhood, your pets, or even your life lost.
Enough is enough, we deserve better. It is time for Louisville to get its act together.