The Palisades fire and the Eaton fire erupted in Los Angeles County on Jan. 7, quickly destroying more than 10,000 homes and killing at least 29 people. The scale of the disaster required a huge response from the newsroom, and my colleague on the Graphics desk Blacki Migliozzi and I were sent to Los Angeles almost immediately.
Our task as graphics journalists is a little different than that of other reporters and photographers. We make maps, charts and other data visualizations. A lot of times our work involves analyzing data and writing code on a computer. But once in a while, we get the chance to go out in the field to do on-the-ground reporting. On this assignment in Los Angeles, we did a whole lot of hiking to report on the origins of these terrible fires.
A Vista Flagged With Police Tape
One of our first tasks was to look into the start of the Palisades fire, which tore through parts of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles with astonishing speed. We studied eyewitness photos and videos, and read reports from Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. After marking some points of interest, we drove to the residential hills near where the fire was first reported.
It was near sunset, and smoke was still emanating from the mountains. Street after street was lined with houses burned to the ground.
At the end of one road, a police officer approached Blacki and I and told us we were in an active scene of investigation and needed to turn around. The road behind the officer was blocked off with police tape. This piqued our interest.
Later that night, we learned that another Times reporter, Thomas Fuller, had been studying the origin of the fire as well. We made plans to meet up with him the next morning. The three of us hiked up to the Temescal Ridge Trail, where evidence of the recent fire was everywhere.
We looked around Skull Rock, a popular hangout spot and one of the places investigators were looking into. Police tape scattered around the area confirmed this as a point of interest.
From there, we walked all the way to Green Peak, where we found a number of burned power poles. There was no real way for us to tell whether the power poles started the fire, or whether the fire caused the poles to burn down. But we walked the length of the ridge until we couldn’t see any more downed poles, marking their locations.
After we got down from the mountain, we pieced together all the information we had, with help from more colleagues on National and Visual Investigations, and published an article the next morning. We produced two maps that showed the evidence we found and the locations the police were investigating.
The Origins of the Eaton Fire
We went down a similar rabbit hole looking into the origins of the Eaton fire, which destroyed more than 9,400 homes and businesses in Altadena.
Our Times colleagues had interviewed a number of residents around the area who said they first saw the fire at a transmission tower in Eaton Canyon, in the mountains above town.
A number of lawsuits have been filed against Southern California Edison, the investor-owned utility that operates the transmission towers in the area, accusing it of causing the fire. But official investigations and lawsuits take months, sometimes years. We wondered what information we could provide to people sooner.
Again, Blacki and I pulled up Cal Fire reports and maps, pinned points of interest and headed up the trail.
It’s strange visiting such beautiful places under these circumstances. We walked along the Eaton Canyon Trail, with mountains to our left and Altadena on the ridge to our right. If not for our bulky camera equipment, respirators and helmets, it would have been a nice afternoon hike.
The trail led us to the base of the mountainside where the transmission tower in question sat. Blacki took photos, capturing every inch of detail. With his telephoto lens, he could see several fire officials at the tower, working the area over with metal detectors. We knew we were in the right spot.
We resumed hiking to try to get closer, but at some point we diverged from the trail and ended up scrambling up a mountainside. The terrain was sandy and loose, nearly impossible to walk on.
It was a bit frantic, but slowly we made it on top of the mountainside near the base of the towers. As we approached, an investigator from the Cal Fire team stopped us and told us we had to leave. We tried to ask questions but he was adamant about not answering anything. We were discouraged that we couldn’t look around more, but at least we could confirm that spot was significant to the investigation.
We quickly typed up a draft of our reporting with the photos we took.
But our reporting kept throwing us in different directions. New evidence would pop up, and sources would back out. It was a complicated story with dozens of eyewitnesses, a large utility company, lawyers representing Altadena residents and independent researchers.
I had headed home after almost two weeks on the ground, but Blacki stayed behind. He went out to every witness site to confirm the view from each vantage point and climbed to the transmission towers multiple times, once even at the crack of dawn in an effort to get closer then we had ever before. Our colleagues from National and Business continued to chase down sources from utility companies and energy consulting firms.
Then we obtained new video evidence. A security camera at an Arco gas station had captured footage of sparks at the base of a transmission tower in the hills above Altadena on Jan. 7, the day the fire started.
With this new footage, we were able to publish an article with all evidence pointing to a fire that started at the transmission towers.
After our story, Southern California Edison stated in a public filing to the California Public Utilities Commission, that they first became aware of the video because of our story and provided the footage as evidence to the county investigator, who had not yet received it.
Last week, our colleague Ivan Penn reported that in a lawsuit filed against Southern California Edison, Los Angeles County blamed the utility’s equipment for starting the fire. The lawsuit cited the video we published.
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