What caused the Palisades fire? The location of the ignition point contains traces

The ridge high above Los Angeles is full of clues. There are broken pieces of electrical equipment and a grove of madronas blackened by the fire. Police tape is stretched around a section of sandy soil, now mixed with ash.

Investigators have zeroed in on these rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean as the focus of the Palisades Fire, an inferno that has destroyed at least 5,000 homes and businesses and killed at least eight people.

A recent visit by a New York Times reporter to the site — near a “crime scene,” as described by Los Angeles Police Department officers stationed nearby — pointed to a number of possibilities, some of them contradictory, for the origin of the fire.

Charred wooden poles are scattered on the ground. Some of the blackened remains are from a previous fire that firefighters thought they had put out on New Year’s Day, nearly a week before the Palisades fire. And there is evidence of recent visitors to the area around Skull Rock, an eerily shaped boulder that attracts hikers and party-goers whose discarded beer bottles are left in a pile of broken glass.

For now, the answer to the question of what caused one of the most destructive firestorms in Los Angeles may be elusive even for investigators. The yellow crime scene tape blowing 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 photos suggests the ignition point may have been.

The area is deserted today. The slopes of sand and rock are colorless and like the moon, as if the fire had burned away every trace of chlorophyll. It’s a far cry from pre-fire times, when hiking trails in the area were framed by green reeds and drought-tolerant shrubs.

The fire tore through steep hillsides on either side of the north-south Temescal Ridge Trail, roughly in the same direction as the fierce winds that fueled the Palisades Fire shortly after it ignited on Tuesday, January 7, just before 10:00 a.m. :00 30 am

An hour earlier, Ron Giller, an attorney who lives in The Enclave, an area of ​​Pacific Palisades near where the fire started, had been hiking with a friend through a patch of land that had caught fire on New Year’s Day. Residents think it may have been caused by a faulty firework display.

This year’s fire was reported just after midnight and burned eight acres before fire crews could fully contain it. Some crew members stayed to watch for flames.

The site of the New Year’s fire, still scarred and blackened, is less than 30 feet from homes to the west — some of which are now destroyed.

On the morning of January 7, when the fire broke out, Mr. Giller said he saw what looked like smoke or dust floating in the area. “It looked like smoke, but there was no flame,” 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 the fire that happened six days ago? That didn’t make sense to me.”

Some of the deadliest wildfires of the last century were fires that firefighters believed they had extinguished, only for the remains to flare into an inferno. They include a 1991 firestorm in Oakland that killed 25 people and a 2023 wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui that killed 102 people.

Investigators concluded that the Maui fire started from the smoldering remains of a fire near a residential area hours earlier, perhaps from burning material that had been buried underground until wind re-exposed it.

Researchers have found that fires can smolder in plant roots or other organic material for days before conditions allow them to start again.

Mr. Giller and his friend, Alan Feld, were not the only ones exploring the Palisades Hills before the fire last week. The panoramic views from the ridge often attract hikers from the neighborhood and beyond.

During their walk that day, Mr. Feld, they saw several people sitting on Skull Rock.

“And one of us even said, ‘I hope it’s not blowing or something, with these winds,'” said Mr. Feld.

A video posted on social media since that morning shows a group of young men near Skull Rock, mostly dressed in sneakers and athletic shorts, with one carrying a portable speaker. The clips, posted by one member of the group, begin with the men running along a path next to a cliff, with a faint plume of smoke coming from the hills above them. The men, still running, express concern at the smell of smoke and then see fire moving quickly towards them.

Another shot shows the same people minutes later, looking back as the fire continues to grow and smoke rises into the sky.

“Dude, that’s right where we were standing,” says one. “We were literally there,” says another.

The man who posted the video initially agreed to speak with The Times, but then stopped responding to messages. His account on X appears to have been removed. At this time, there is no indication that either man is responsible for starting the fire; you can’t see them smoking on the videos.

When the latest fire began to spread on January 7, nearby residents watched in horror as it engulfed parched grassland and then leaped down the hillside, driven by rising winds. They called 911 and packed evacuation supplies in case they needed to escape. By then — about 10:30 a.m. — flames towered over the landscape, according to photos from one resident. Just half an hour later, the fire had already engulfed most of the hill towards the houses below.

Fire crews rushed to the scene by land and air, and one firefighter told dispatchers that the fire started “right below the old burn scar” — from the New Year’s Eve fire — and could engulf nearby homes within minutes.

“He’s pushing directly toward the Palisades,” he said on the radio. “This thing will show well.”

At least one attorney investigating the fire questioned whether a downed power line could have caused it, since power lines run north and south along much of the Temescal Ridge Trail. California has a long history of catastrophic fires caused by downed power lines, and early images from the second deadly fire that broke out in the Los Angeles area last week — the Eaton fire — show flames roaring beneath power lines.

Along a trail near where the Palisades fire started, The Times found pieces of power line debris, including what appeared to be part of a lightning protection device. But the nearest transmission line was about a third of a mile north. That line, which descends from the trail toward the neighborhood, was heavily damaged by the fire, but witness photos show it was still intact shortly after the fire broke out.

The posts along that route have a turbulent recent history. Many of them date back to the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power launched a project in 2019 to replace some of them with stronger metal structures.

The project was halted after environmental regulators said the department had damaged 183 small bushes known as Braunton’s milkvetch, an endangered species.

In 2020, the department agreed to pay the fine and was given the go ahead, saying the project is “critical to our wildfire mitigation plan.” But the project does not seem to have continued.

A Times inspection of the ridgetop showed many damaged and downed poles along the trail heading north — an area that was engulfed by the fire, but only a day after the fire started.

Investigators made it clear that it could take some time to reach firm conclusions about the cause of the fire.

The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is taking the lead, took more than a year to report its findings on the Maui fire.

“We’re looking at all angles,” Dominic Choi, assistant chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said Monday of the fires raging across the region. He said that arson was not ruled out for any of them. In the case of the fire in Palisades, he added, “there was no final decision that it was arson.”

For now, the entire area around the investigation site is eerily empty. Neighborhoods near the track were evacuated and dozens of houses were razed to the ground; — the only signs of life there are a few fire trucks and the occasional police patrol.

Further down the slopes, towards the ocean, there is complete devastation. Entire settlements were razed to the ground, and parts of them are now just a network of ashes.

Christian Triebert, John Penn, Danny Hakim and Claire Moses contributed reporting.