Turns out Southern California Edison basically lit the match
After eighteen months of digging, officials finally confirmed what everyone suspected: the utility company's old tower was the culprit.
Investigators spent over a year looking into the Eaton Fire, and the conclusion is finally out. It wasn't a camper or a rogue cigarette. It was an out-of-service transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison that decided to spark.
The report is pretty blunt: the tower experienced an electrical arc, and burning material fell directly into the dry brush below. It took all of 12 seconds for the mountain to turn into a furnace. The result was 14,000 acres torched, thousands of homes gone, and 19 lives lost.
It is wild that a dormant piece of infrastructure can just sit there, fail, and reshape an entire region’s landscape in an afternoon. Corporations really need to stop treating aging equipment like it’s invisible.
Source: DocumentCloud
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