"Make everything a secret and you can be sure to lose the trust of the people.'
And if you make everything a conspiracy, you can purposefully destroy their trust. Why are you doing that?
The ridge high above Los Angeles is filled with clues. There are shattered pieces of electrical equipment, and a grove of madrone blackened by fire. Police tape is strung around one section of the sandy soil, now mixed with ash.
Investigators have zeroed in on these rocky bluffs with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean as the ignition point of the Palisades fire, the inferno that has destroyed at least 5,000 homes and businesses and killed at least eight people.
A recent visit by New York Times reporters to the site — near the “crime scene,” as officers for the Los Angeles Police Department who were posted nearby described it — suggested a range of possibilities, some of them contradictory, for the origin of the fire.
Charred wooden utility poles litter the ground. One plot of scorched chaparral is from a previous fire that firefighters thought they had extinguished on New Year’s Day, nearly a week before the Palisades fire broke out. And there is evidence of recent visitors to the area around Skull Rock, the eerily shaped boulder that draws hikers and teenage partyers whose discarded beer bottles remain in a heap of shattered glass.
For now, the answer to what caused one of Los Angeles’ most destructive firestorms may be elusive even to the investigators. The yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the wind near Skull Rock is hundreds of yards across a steep slope from the zone where a New York Times analysis of satellite images and witness photographs suggests the ignition point may have been.
The Area Where the Fire Began
Images suggest the Palisades fire ignited near a hiking trail and an area that had burned six days earlier, on New Year’s Day. Aerial imagery at 3:30 p.m., roughly five hours after the fire began, shows red flame retardant had been dropped from overhead to battle the blaze and smoke billowing from all sides of the scar.
The area is desolate today. The slopes of sand and rock are colorless and moon-like, as if the fire had incinerated every trace of chlorophyll. It’s a far cry from before the fire, when hiking trails in the area were framed by reedy green plants and drought-tolerant bushes.
The fire tore through the steep hillsides on either side of the Temescal Ridge Trail, which runs north-south, roughly the same direction as the fierce winds that propelled the Palisades fire soon after it ignited on Tuesday, Jan. 7, just before 10:30 a.m.
An hour earlier, Ron Giller, a lawyer who lives in The Enclave, an area of Pacific Palisades near where the fire started, hiked with a friend through a patch of ground that had caught fire New Year’s Day. Residents think errant fireworks may have set that one off.
The New Year’s fire was reported just after midnight and burned eight acres before fire crews got it fully contained. Some crew members stayed to monitor for flare-ups.
The burn site from the New Year’s fire, still scarred and blackened, lies less than 100 feet from homes to the west — some of them now destroyed.
On the morning the Jan. 7 fire ignited, Mr. Giller said he saw what resembled smoke or dust wafting in the area. “It had the appearance of smoke around there, but there were no flames,” he said in an interview. “It just raised a question in my mind. What is it? I was thinking, could this thing still be active? But it seemed unlikely, you know — could there still be smoke from a fire that happened six days ago?
That didn’t make sense to me.”
Some of the deadliest wildfires of the past century were blazes that firefighters believed they had extinguished, only to have the remnants flare up into an inferno. They include the 1991 firestorm in Oakland that killed 25 people and the 2023 wildfire on the Hawaiian Island of Maui that killed 102 people.
Investigators concluded that the Maui blaze emerged from the smoldering remnants of a fire near a residential area several hours earlier, perhaps from burning material that was buried under dirt until the wind uncovered it again.
Researchers have found that fires can smolder in plant roots or other organic material for days before conditions let them re-emerge.
Mr. Giller and his friend, Alan Feld, were not the only ones exploring the hills of the Palisades before the fire last week. The panoramic views from the ridge often draw hikers from the neighborhood and beyond.
When the latest fire began to spread on Jan. 7, nearby residents watched in horror as it took hold in the parched grassland and then jumped down the hillside, stoked by rising winds. They called 911 and packed evacuation supplies in case they needed to flee. By then — around 10:30 a.m. — flames were towering over the landscape, according to photos from one resident. Just half an hour later, the fire had already sped down much of the hillside toward houses below.
Fire crews rushed to the scene by ground and air, and one firefighter reported to dispatchers that the blaze had started “just below the old burn scar” — from the New Year’s blaze — and might reach nearby houses within minutes.
“It is pushing directly toward Palisades,” he said on the radio. “This thing is going to make a good run.”
At least one lawyer investigating the fire was looking at whether a downed utility line could have sparked it, since power lines run north and south along much of the Temescal Ridge Trail. California has a long history of catastrophic blazes caused by downed power lines, and early images from the other deadly fire that began last week in the Los Angeles area — the Eaton fire — show flames roaring below electrical transmission lines.
Along the trail near where the Palisades fire began, The Times found bits of power-line debris, including what appeared to be part of a lightning arrester device. But the nearest overhead power line was about a third of a mile to the north. That line, which curves down from the trail and into the neighborhood,was extensively damaged from fire, but witness photographs show it was still intact soon after the fire began.
The poles along that route have a tumultuous recent history. Many of them date from the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power initiated a project in 2019 to replace some of them with stronger metal structures.
The project stalled after environmental regulators said the department had damaged 183 small bushes known as Braunton’s milkvetch, an endangered species.
The department agreed in 2020 to pay a fine, and won approval to resume work, saying the project was “essential in regards to our wildfire mitigation plan.” But the project does not appear to have proceeded.
The Times’s review of the ridgetop showed many damaged and fallen utility poles along the trail heading north — an area that was consumed by fire, but not until a day after the blaze began.
Investigators have made it clear that it could take time to reach firm conclusions about the cause of the fire.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is taking the lead, took more than a year to report conclusions about the Maui fire.
“We are looking at every angle,” Dominic Choi, the assistant Los Angeles police chief, said on Monday about the fires burning across the region. He said that arson had not been ruled out for any of them. In the case of the Palisades fire, he added, “there has been no definitive determination that it is arson.”
For now, the entire area around the investigation site is eerily empty. The neighborhoods near the trail are evacuated and dozens of houses were leveled; — the only signs of life there are a few fire trucks and an occasional police patrol.
Further down the hillsides, toward the ocean, there is utter devastation. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, their subdivisions now just a grid of ash. |
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