‘Same spot!’: is a small New Year’s morning blaze connected to the Los Angeles fire disaster?
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is investigating the cause of the still-raging Palisades fire.
Six days before the start of one of the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, a smaller New Year’s Day blaze, in the very first hour of 2025, ignited in the same area. Now, officials are trying to determine whether the two might be connected.
On Monday afternoon, units from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is investigating the cause of the fire, and the Los Angeles Police Department arrived at a cul-de-sac near the Skull Rock trailhead in the Palisades. They quickly closed off the area with yellow caution tape.
“We’re looking at every possibility, going down every rabbit hole, and examining video footage from residents in the area,” said Ginger Colbrun, spokeswoman for ATF in Los Angeles. Colbrun said the investigation would include looking at possible connections between the Palisades fire and the one on New Year’s Day.
A Wall Street Journal analysis based on photos, videos, satellite images and interviews with residents shows that both wildfires originated near a trailhead leading to a network of paths in Temescal Ridge in the Santa Monica Mountains. Residents say the area is popular among hikers, dog walkers, bikers and young people who gather with friends and zip through the hills on e-bikes.
ATF and firefighting authorities on-site declined to be interviewed. The agency said Monday that a team that includes special agents, chemists, engineers and investigative research specialists have been deployed to investigate the Palisades fire. The blaze was 17% contained as of Tuesday morning.
Investigative work to determine the fire’s cause will likely include examining the prior, smaller fire to see if that blaze could have been rekindled, said Scott Sweetow, a retired ATF agent and arson expert who served on the agency’s National Response Team. Given the duration of time between the fires, Sweetow said it was unlikely that reignition was to blame.
Other possibilities investigators are likely to consider, he said, were embers from a cigarette or flame from a lighter, or whether anyone had used something flammable in the area. They are also likely to use dogs to check for signs of gasoline or other flammable liquids on the hillside, in addition to examining whether downed power lines from the high winds could have sparked it.
“You’re having to eliminate all of those different things,” he said. Stretches of homes were ruined and in an upscale neighbourhood now blockaded by National Guard checkpoints, residents are desperate to understand whether and how the New Year fire might be related to the one that appeared to start less than a quarter of a mile away.
Jan. 1, 2025 The sound of the New Year’s Eve fireworks brought a familiar feeling of dread for people who lived in the Highlands area of the Palisades: What if the revelry causes a fire?
Soon after, the smell of smoke drifted toward the homes. A WhatsApp group of residents exchanged footage showing a blaze rising from the hills that was captured by a University of California, San Diego camera just before 1am.
“OMG!,” one neighbour texted, according to messages seen by the Journal. From balconies, backyards, and drives home after celebrations, neighbours snapped photos of a fire that was quickly contained. “There are no widespread evacuation orders at this time,” a neighbourhood security alert sent to residents said.
The next morning, a neighbour took a photo of the burn scar.
Jan. 7, 2025
“Smelling fire,” a member of the neighbourhood WhatsApp chat wrote the morning of Jan. 7. Others smelled it, too, but some assumed it was emanating from the relatively fresh old fire.
“I see it,” another person wrote. A group chat member sent a photo of dark smoke rising from a hillside.
“Same spot!!” a neighbour exclaimed a minute before the state fire authority, Cal Fire’s declared start time.
As word of the fire spread and plumes of smoke became visible for miles, schools in the area notified parents to come get their children, prompting harried pick-ups and clusters of children evacuating on foot.
Some families grabbed important belongings and fled, while others returned home and waited for official evacuation orders.
“Possible reignition from earlier fire event on 1/1/25,” a neighbourhood security alert said shortly after noon. The alert service said the Los Angeles Fire Department was advising that at least one home was fully engulfed on a residential street south of Skull Rock. The fire was spreading.
With few major exit routes down from northern hillside neighbourhoods in the Palisades, many evacuees spent hours travelling down Palisades Drive, where some people parked their cars in the median or side of the road and ran for safety.
“Palisades Drive and surrounding streets gridlocked preventing ingress/egress,” another neighbourhood alert said. The abandoned cars and congestion made it harder for firefighters to navigate the streets; they would later bulldoze cars blocking Sunset Boulevard, the major exit route.
Firefighters and residents working to contain the blazes and protect more houses from igniting encountered low water pressure and, eventually, some hydrants that ran dry. Families pumped swimming-pool water onto their houses and nearby brush.
“We did not have enough water to fight the fire,” said Palisades resident Nora Golling. “We were completely forgotten.” The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said there was extreme water demand during a time when it was too windy for aerial support. The issue affected 20% of the hydrants in the area, mostly in the higher elevations. The agency said that as soon as it identified the risk of losing water and pressure in the system, it deployed potable water tankers.
From evacuating hilltop communities in the Palisades, some residents could see the nearby Santa Ynez Reservoir, which sat empty that day. The 117 million-gallon reservoir had been offline since around February 2024 pending repairs to a floating cover meant to keep its water free of contaminants, the second repair needed in two years, the Journal reported Monday.
The difference in the scale and destruction wrought by the two blazes has raised questions among residents about public-safety missteps and infrastructure weaknesses that might have contributed to the spread of the devastating Palisades fire.
“Incompetence at all levels of the government — state, county, and city level, led to this event,” said Forrest Reynolds, a resident of the Highlands area of the Palisades who stayed with his home Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday, he co-ordinated with the city fire department to identify homes that could be saved, and worked with several neighbours, using buckets of water from pools to extinguish fires around homes.
On Monday morning, as city officials prepared for another week of dangerous winds, the community immediately surrounding the trailhead was relatively intact, sitting above lower laying neighbourhoods that had been almost uniformly reduced to rubble.
Several officers stood and chatted at the remote location and said they were instructed to guard the trailhead entrance until their replacements arrived that evening.
The Wall Street Journal
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