So what potential changes could the office be facing to better prepare for the next disaster?
7 On Your Side Investigates spoke with Kevin McGowan, the OEM director who led the team inside the Emergency Operations Center the night of the fires.
He admits that on January 7, his team was what he called "maxed out."
A recent after-action review report said that the L.A. County OEM "faces substantial difficulties in fulfilling its emergency management responsibilities due to ... critical resource deficiencies."
New York City, which has a population of 8.5 million, has an emergency management staff of about 200 people. Cook County, Illinois, which covers the city of Chicago, has an OEM staff of 54.
Los Angeles County, which has a population of 10 million people, had an OEM staff of only 37 people when the fires broke out on January 7.
The after-action review report found L.A.'s OEM is short staffed and short on resources.
"People on my team had to drive their personal vehicles through evacuation areas into command posts, and they shouldn't," McGowan told 7 On Your Side Investigates.
Another example is the county has a relatively new system for sending out crucial evacuation alerts. The after-action report found "at the time of the incident, four OEM staff members had working knowledge of the new system..."
McGowan says everyone in OEM has now gone through months of training on the system.
The county also will now issue evacuation warnings adjacent to zones under evacuation orders.
McGowan says if that policy was in place on January 7, the area west of Lake Avenue in Altadena where 17 people died would have been alerted hours earlier.
"That's been a critical element between sheriff, fire and OEM - to embrace that finding and put that to work right away," McGowan said.
McGowen has now been able to grow his staff size to 41 and is crafting a plan with L.A. County's CEO to revamp his office to make it bigger.
The plan will be presented to the Board of Supervisors in about two months.
"We've learned a lot from this, and the community deserves us to improve so that the next disaster, which will happen, we don't have those same challenges occur again," said McGowen.
But the right size of the county's OEM will also potentially cost millions of dollars during a time when the county is strapped for cash.
"We are well under what is necessary to really have a strong Office of Emergency Management," L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said.
Barger and a majority of the supervisors tell 7 On Your Side Investigates that they support funding a larger OEM even though the county is strapped for cash.
"We may have to make tough decisions about where the funding comes from, but at the end of the day there is no question in my mind that the lessons learned from the Eaton and Palisades fires need to be translated into action," Barger said.
Watch live newscasts and in-depth reporting from ABC7 on your favorite streaming devices, like Roku, FireTV, AppleTV and GoogleTV. Just search "ABC7 Los Angeles."