When the first flashes of fire and billows of smoke grabbed the attention of people living in the foothills of Eaton Canyon in Los Angeles County, residents recorded videos of the same cluster of transmission towers high on the chaparral-covered hillside, illuminated by flames.
California fire officials pinpointed the start of the Eaton Fire on the evening of Jan. 7 to that area, but more than a week later, the exact source remains under investigation, fueling speculation over whether a high-voltage transmission tower is what set off the deadly wildfire.
“I still see the fire investigators right now, crawling up there around the poles,” said Brendan Thorn, 28, who recalled witnessing flames at the tower’s base and stayed behind at his Pasadena home while his family fled.
So far, at least three lawsuits filed on behalf of people living in the ravaged communities of Altadena and Pasadena blame Southern California Edison, accusing it of failing to de-energize all of its power equipment and clear the dense brush along the steep canyon prone to igniting.
In interviews this week, the chief executive of Southern California Edison’s parent company said that while power distribution lines that serve homes were de-energized about two hours before the Eaton Fire started, the transmission lines in Eaton Canyon were not shut off because those towers are stronger and can operate at heavier winds. Gusts in the region that evening approached 100 mph.
“As we do our telemetry, our monitoring of the system, we do not see any electrical anomalies,” Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro said on CNBC of the company’s review of how the transmission lines reacted in the period before and after the fire began. “It’s pretty typical you see that when you have a spark coming from equipment.”
He added that “there may be some other mechanism here” but that workers “have not been able to get close to those towers.”
Transmission lines in wildfires
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says it is in the early stages of an investigation into how the fire originated in the canyon. The Eaton Fire — one of a number of significant blazes raging in the Los Angeles area, fanned by Santa Ana winds and producing massive destruction — has burned through more than 14,110 acres and is about 45% contained, fire officials said Wednesday. At least 16 people have died as a result of it.
While federal data shows that people cause the vast majority of wildfires — an early focus of the ongoing Palisades Fire is potential human causes — it is not unheard of for utilities’ transmission lines to be the root.
The 2018 Camp Fire in the Northern California town of Paradise, which killed dozens of people, was caused by electrical transmission lines owned and operated by Pacific Gas & Electric, state investigators concluded.
The next year, a PG&E transmission line also sparked a blaze known as the Kincade Fire, which prompted the largest evacuation in Sonoma County’s history, investigators said.
The utility reached an initial $13.5 billion settlement with Camp Fire victims and agreed to pay millions of dollars as part of a settlement to avoid criminal prosecution in the Kincade Fire.
Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University, said the investigation into the Eaton Fire will rely on what is known about the high-voltage transmission tower in the area where the video and photo evidence appears to show the flames strengthened.
“Edison has probably climbed that tower, inspected it, but we don’t know yet if there was a problem with it,” Wara said. “How old was the power line?”
Stephanie Chase, a research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization, said investigators trying to determine whether a power line was the culprit will look at whether the line itself was energized, the condition of the line and debris in the area, as opposed to seeking evidence that would point to a human cause, such as an accelerant.
Transmission towers, which carry electricity over long distances, are much taller than lower-voltage distribution poles, which are used to deliver power to homes and businesses. They are more easily de-energized during weather events and more likely to come into contact with tree limbs and other vegetation.
Given their size, the transmission towers can withstand the elements, Wara said, and the decision to power them down to potentially prevent a wildfire requires planning and thought.
The four transmission lines in the area where the Eaton Fire is believed to have started are part of the backbone of a larger delivery system.
“You can’t isolate this decision to this one line,” Wara said. “There were four lines in this corridor, and it’s part of a system of lines coming over the mountains from the Central Valley.”
De-energizing certain transmission lines throughout the region would have a cascading effect on the entire system, potentially plunging millions of people into darkness and creating “a disaster in and of itself,” Wara added.
If anything, he said, a larger discussion about how best to modernize transmission lines is warranted when many of them may be weather-worn and “fatigued in ways you can’t see in a visible inspection.”
The California Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, an agency dedicated to reducing utility-related wildfire risk, noted in a report in October that Southern California Edison will continue assessing its transmission lines for issues with splices, which are used in repairing lines; it is critical that the splices are adequately functioning, or a line could fall. The utility said Tuesday it is inspecting splices using X-ray technology that “complements visual inspections with a method that can detect conditions the naked eye cannot.”
Last year, it said, it “spent more than $1.8 billion mitigating wildfire risks, including inspecting and upgrading transmission and distribution infrastructure more frequently than required by state regulators.”
’34 minutes of terror’
For now, residents like Thorn are left to consider what could have been to done to prevent this wildfire, such as shutting off the transmission lines or adequately clearing vegetation.
“We live with the dangers, right?” Thorn said.
His family’s home, built in the mid-1950s, survived, along with the other houses in his neighborhood, while two blocks over, the homes were incinerated.
Less than a quarter-mile away, another Pasadena resident, Pedro Rojas, 70, recorded video of a smaller fire casting the hillside in an orange glow.
Rojas, a retired journalist, said he had been watching a basketball game on television on Jan. 7 when a neighbor knocked on his door to alert him about the flames. He went to a window in his kitchen at 6:21 p.m. and captured the scene, about three minutes after the first reports began pouring in.
In a dispatch call, fire crews were told: “We have an approximately 10-acre brush fire across canyon, underneath high-tension power lines.”
Within 20 minutes, Rojas said, he and his wife had packed up their belongings as four fire trucks and two sheriff’s cruisers arrived at their cul-de-sac. He would later learn his home survived.
“I never imagined that that kind of small fire that we saw at that tower was going to be so devastating,” Rojas said.
Jeffrey Ku, 50, of Altadena, said the Ring camera at his house a couple of streets from Rojas began recording around 6:19 p.m. His wife, Cheryll, had returned home around that time and had already seen glimpses of the fire as she was driving on the nearby freeway.
He said what the camera captured was “34 minutes of terror.”
By 6:28 p.m., the transmission lines were engulfed in smoke and flames.
The couple packed up their two chihuahuas, Beckham and Bellamy, and evacuated safely even as the dangerous winds rained down embers. To learn that their home was spared was a bright spot during a “hellacious” experience, Jeffrey Ku said.
“It’s going to be a long road to recovery, and I know we will come out of it stronger,” he added, “but it’s not going to be without the help of people here and people seeing from afar.”
