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The ridge high above Los Angeles is filled with clues. There are shattered pieces of electrical equipment, and a grove of madrone blackened by fire. Police tape is strung around one section of the sandy soil, now mixed with ash.
Investigators have zeroed in on these rocky bluffs with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean as the ignition point of the Palisades fire, the inferno that has destroyed at least 5,000 homes and businesses and killed at least eight people.
A recent visit by New York Times reporters to the site — near the “crime scene,” as officers for the Los Angeles Police Department who were posted nearby described it — suggested a range of possibilities, some of them contradictory, for the origin of the fire.
Charred wooden utility poles litter the ground. Some of the blackened remains are from a previous fire that firefighters thought they had extinguished on New Year’s Day, nearly a week before the Palisades fire broke out. And there is evidence of recent visitors to the area around Skull Rock, the eerily shaped boulder that draws hikers and teenage partyers whose discarded beer bottles remain in a heap of shattered glass.
For now, the answer to what caused one of Los Angeles’ most destructive firestorms may be elusive even to the investigators. The yellow crime scene tape fluttering 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 photographs suggests the ignition point may have been.
Source: Aerial image by Nearmap
Note: Approximate start of fire determined through a New York Times analysis of Nearmap imagery, Sentinel 2 imagery, NASA VIIR detections and eyewitness photographs. Jan. 2 image from 12:01 p.m.; Jan. 7 image from 3:38 p.m.
By The New York Times
Sources: Cal Fire
Times shown on the map are Pacific time.
By The New York Times
