One week after the Palisades Fire rushed down a mountainside, swallowing complete communities and killing at least eight people, its trigger stays unknown.
The solutions, after they emerge, will most probably be discovered on a scorched and blackened ridgeline in western Los Angeles overlooking a Pacific Palisades neighborhood that features a fashionable mountain climbing path — an space that was additionally the scene of a small hearth six days earlier.
Understanding the catastrophic Jan. 7 fire may take months, a course of that started with investigators gathering movies and pictures from close by houses and social media, interviewing witnesses and firefighters and inspecting 911 calls, searching for leads.
“All of that is going to take time,” Jose Medina, appearing particular agent in command of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Los Angeles workplace, mentioned at a information convention Tuesday. He mentioned there have been 75 federal and native investigators on the case. “We know everybody needs solutions, and the neighborhood deserves solutions. ATF gives you these solutions, however it will likely be as soon as we full a radical investigation. We haven’t any timeline on when this may happen.”
Investigators haven’t reached any conclusions, although an early focus of the probe has been on potential human causes, in keeping with a number of regulation enforcement sources conversant in the investigation. The potentialities embrace arson, an unintended spark, fireworks, unauthorized tenting exercise or a rekindling of an earlier hearth extinguished on New Year’s Day, the sources mentioned.
The probe has led investigators into the ash-covered space the place the hearth was first noticed, looking for the smallest of clues.
Windblown wildland fires just like the Palisades Fire depart “motion patterns” on the vegetation, bushes, grass, rocks and different objects that, to a educated eye, reveal how the flames unfold. Marking these indicators, the investigators work backward to the suspected begin level.
“If you perceive find out how to learn these patterns, it turns into shortly evident the place the origin of the hearth is,” mentioned Ed Nordskog, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s hearth investigator, who isn’t concerned within the Palisades Fire probe.
Investigators attempt to slim their search all the way down to an space of about 25 sq. ft, then flip the spot right into a grid of zones about 4 sq. ft every, Nordskog mentioned. Using magnets, steel detectors and magnifying lenses, they sift for tiny objects — like fragments of molten equipment elements, a match head, glass, remnants of fireworks — which may clarify or rule out a possible trigger. They could herald a canine educated to smell out traces of accelerants. Nearby electrical gear, like fences or poles, or indicators of gas-powered automobiles additionally information them. All the whereas, different investigators speak to witnesses who could have seen one thing suspicious.
The ATF’s National Response Team is main a joint investigation with native authorities of the Palisades Fire, in addition to different fires that ignited final week throughout Los Angeles County and, fed by excessive winds, ripped via mountainsides and neighborhoods, destroying greater than 12,000 constructions, consuming greater than 40,000 acres and killing at the very least 25 individuals. Some of the fires are nonetheless burning.
The Palisades Fire, which is the most important, could possibly be probably the most troublesome to elucidate due to the myriad of potential elements, which investigators should get rid of on their approach to figuring out a trigger.
The principle that the Jan. 1 hearth was accountable has drawn probably the most public hypothesis.
That brush hearth ignited within the space of the ridgeline someday after midnight, noticed by residents of the close by Palisades Highlands neighborhood, which is a part of Pacific Palisades. Firefighters put it out, and earlier than 5 a.m. it was deemed contained with no constructions broken and nobody harm. The metropolis hearth division didn’t report what triggered it.
The hearth was largely forgotten till six days later.
Around 8:20 a.m. Jan. 7, Darrin Hurwitz set out on his common hike up a mountainside path close to his dwelling within the Marquez Knolls neighborhood. It was very windy — authorities had already issued an alert that the gusty situations put Los Angeles at excessive threat for fires.
An hour into the hike, as he handed a boulder often called Skull Rock, he mentioned, he observed a swath of charred vegetation and caught a whiff of smoke. Remembering the New Year’s Day hearth, Hurwitz mentioned, he didn’t suppose a lot of it, assuming that the scent was left over from it — or that he was detecting fires burning some place else distant.
Hurwitz, 49, a lawyer, mentioned he stopped a couple of couple hundred ft from the burn scar and didn’t see any smoke or the rest exceptional. “It wasn’t sufficient to suppose there was something suspicious,” he mentioned. Hours later, his household escaped the hearth because it swept via the neighborhood, however their home was destroyed.
By midmorning, a gaggle of path runners saw flames and smoke close to Skull Rock and raced away, taking footage and movies as they escaped to security. Residents of Palisades Highlands reported seeing the rising hearth from their houses round 10:30 a.m.
Having two fires in roughly the identical space six days aside has fueled hypothesis that the Palisades Fire was triggered by a rekindling of the sooner one. But consultants are divided over whether or not that could be a viable clarification. A 2023 wildfire that destroyed the city of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui was discovered to have been the results of a rekindling of a smaller fire, though just a few hours separated those fires.
For days or perhaps weeks after a hearth, embers can lodge someplace and stay scorching — and the roots of bushes can burn underground, Nordskog mentioned. This impact is commonly seen in mountainous forests, and it isn’t widespread on the coastal brush of the sort at Pacific Palisades, he mentioned. But it’s doable, he mentioned.
Scott Sweetow, a former ATF hearth investigator, mentioned he doubted that occurred on this case.
The comparatively mild vegetation of the Pacific Palisades panorama and the stretch of six days earlier than the second hearth ignited made rekindling “unbelievably inconceivable,” he mentioned.
