Sunday, January 12, 2025

UPDATED—It Sure Looks Like The Palisades Fire Was Set By Someone

Update: both the Washington and New York Posts are hypothesizing reignition of a fire from January 1 caused by fireworks. update below.

Original post: 

No power lines, no lightning, just off the trail:

Reporter Bill Melugin has been bulldogging the story of the earliest videos to be found:

January 11
An Angeleno Sees The Start Of The Palisades Fire....
....and immediately understands what it means. 

Update - New York Post, January 12: Palisades Fire likely started near the remnants of a blaze believed to have been sparked by NYE fireworks: report

And the WaPo story the NYP mentions as their source:

What caused the Palisades blaze? Visual evidence points to a recent fire nearby.
Did New Year’s Eve fireworks start the largest Los Angeles fire?

LOS ANGELES — About 30 minutes after the Palisades Fire started on Tuesday, the firefighters’ radio crackled: The flames were coming from a familiar sliver of a mountain ridge.

“The foot of the fire started real close to where the last fire was on New Year’s Eve,” said a Los Angeles County firefighter, according to a Washington Post review of archived radio transmissions.

“It looks like it’s going to make a good run,” one chimed into the dispatch.

The Post’s analysis of photos, videos, satellite imagery and radio communications, as well as interviews with witnesses, offers new evidence that the Palisades Fire started in the area where firefighters had spent hours using helicopters to knock down a blaze six days earlier.
Investigators from state and federal agencies descended on this area in recent days, interviewing residents and looking for evidence — including around the burn scar of the New Year’s Eve fire — of what sparked the blaze.

The Post’s analysis showed that the new fire started in the vicinity of the old fire, raising the possibility that the New Year’s Eve fire was reignited, which can occur in windy conditions, experts said.

Residents also told The Post and investigators on scene that firefighters’ response Tuesday was much slower than on New Year’s Eve — a view confirmed by radio transmissions.
From Colorado to California to Hawaii, flare-ups of previous fires, known as reignition, have been the cause of some of the nation’s most catastrophic and deadly wildfires. This past summer, California officials coordinated a social media campaign to warn residents that terrain scorched but seemingly extinguished can spawn deadly new fires for weeks after the old ones appear to have gone out, as fire can smolder almost undetected underground or inside wood. 

Despite that — and warnings of an intense and dangerous wind event last week — a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman told The Post on Friday that it was not the department’s practice to maintain patrols of past fire sites, even for a few days after fires have gone cold.

“We know that fires rekindle and transition from smoldering to flaming,” said Michael Gollner, a professor of mechanical engineering and fire scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who reviewed The Post’s materials. “It’s certainly possible that something from that previous fire, within a week, had rekindled and caused the ignition.”

Investigators are only beginning to hunt for the cause of the Palisades Fire, the first and largest of what became a terrifying, days-long series of firestorms that would touch nearly every corner of the sprawling Los Angeles region.

After a Sunday lull in winds, the death toll citywide remained at 16 people, and more than 12,000 homes had burned. Higher fire risk was expected to return Monday through Wednesday. With speculation ranging from downed power equipment to arson, identifying the origins of the fires will have huge and possibly expensive implications for the state and how it manages growing wildfire risks.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is taking the lead on the investigation, officials said. In a statement, an ATF spokesperson said, “ATF certified fire investigators did an initial survey of the area but the investigation has not begun.” In response to questions about reignition as a possible cause, the LAFD said, “This is an ongoing, active investigation and the team will not comment on an ongoing investigation.”
From the start of the fire Tuesday, authorities have known that the smoke began in a stretch of Temescal Ridge in the Santa Monica Mountains, where the earlier fire, believed by residents to have been sparked by fireworks, occurred.

The Post identified the burn scar of the New Year’s Eve fire using false-color satellite imagery taken before and after the blaze. The technique tracks changes to vegetation in satellite imagery. Healthy plant cover appears red, while the scorched ground appears blue to brown.

In addition, satellite imagery taken Tuesday at 10:45 a.m., about 20 minutes after videos show the Palisades Fire began, indicates that the origin of the smoke overlapped with the burn scar from the New Year’s Eve fire. Smoke extends in the direction of the wind, to the south, away from the previously burned area....

....MORE 

It would probably be a good idea to find the people seen in the video and interrogate them at length.

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