As investigators work to determine the cause of the Eaton fire, the focus has narrowed to several parallel power lines just outside Altadena owned by Southern California Edison.
Whether the company was responsible for sparking the Jan. 7 blaze remains to be seen, but company records uncovered by The Times show for the first time that Edison knew some of its towers at and near the likely ignition point were fire hazards.
With evidence still being gathered — and dozens of lawsuits pending — the utility has maintained it did everything possible to prevent a wildfire.
But records the company filed with the state show towers on three lines now under suspicion were considered a potential “ignition risk” and long overdue for critical upkeep.
Two of the lines were still active, delivering power to the area until after the fire broke out. A third line, which a company official said was built about a century ago, had been decommissioned in 1971, meaning it hadn’t carried electricity to customers for decades.
The mystery of how an unused line may have triggered an inferno has puzzled some following the case, but experts said it’s possible given the circumstances.
Edison data reviewed by The Times show that as of Dec. 31, the utility had 94 open work orders along the three lines, portions of which run past the northern edge of Altadena and through Eaton Canyon. Company work order records since the start of the year were not available.
The orders were for a range of tasks, including clearing vegetation that could potentially ignite, fixing damaged or broken insulators, replacing loose connectors and doing tower repairs. Nearly three dozen of the orders carried ignition risk, according to the data.
The company had more than 30 additional open work orders on its two other energized lines that run through Eaton Canyon, the Mesa Vincent No. 2 and Goodrich-Gould lines. Neither of the lines had any open orders close to the suspected ignition point.
But a June 2023 work order for “Weed Abatement” included coordinates pinpointing the location as a tall steel transmission tower where some believe the fire ignited. It’s on a stretch of the active Mesa-Vincent No. 1 line near Altadena where nearly every tower had an open work order at the time.
Edison has described that type of maintenance as trimming trees and plants “so they don’t grow into or fall into high-voltage power lines, which could not only cause a power outage but also spark a fire or be a danger to the public.”
Assigned Level 2 priority, the work should have been completed within six months, according to state regulations, because it would have addressed a fire risk in an area with the highest wildfire threat level.
Six days later, a work order for “Structure Brushing” was created on a parallel tower nearby carrying the Eagle Rock-Mesa line. Edison has said that work “mitigates the risk posed by vegetation at the base of poles and structures which can provide the fuel needed to convert a spark from equipment failure into a fire.”
Both work orders were flagged “Ignition Risk” and remained open as of Dec. 31. Southern California Edison said both orders should have been assigned the less urgent Level 3 priority because they are exempt from a state regulation that governs “vegetation management” around power lines.
A tower a few dozen feet from the Mesa-Vincent No. 1 tower is also being scrutinized as the Eaton fire’s possible starting point. Videos taken by area residents appear to show flames at the bases of all three towers in the moments before the fire surged toward Altadena.
The third tower carries the Mesa-Sylmar transmission line, which has not been connected to a power source for decades. Yet some investigators and attorneys suing the utility believe it may have somehow become energized on Jan. 7.
Seven of the 94 orders that were open on the three lines on Dec. 31 were for work on towers along the decommissioned line.
In May, the company logged an order for work to address an issue with “Hardware/Framing” on a Mesa-Sylmar tower about 400 yards from the suspected ignition point. It was assigned Level 1 priority, which indicates “immediate risk of high potential impact to safety or reliability” and requires utilities to “[t]ake corrective action immediately,” according to state regulators.
Raj Roy, Southern California Edison’s vice president of transmission, substations and operations, said in an interview that the order was “initially identified” as a Level 1 priority during an aerial inspection May 9.
Workers visited the location later that day, he said, and determined that “no repairs were necessary.” The work order “was not closed out administratively,” Roy said, so the records did not reflect the updated status.
The six other orders included one- to three-word descriptions of what needed to be fixed, such as “Connector” and “Insulator,” important pieces of electrical equipment that some experts said could cause arcing or other dangerous issues if the line became energized while broken or damaged.
Ali Mehrizi-Sani, an electrical engineering researcher and director of Virginia Tech’s Power and Energy Center who has studied the roles utility companies play in stopping wildfires, reviewed The Times’ findings.
He wrote in an email that one key question is whether Edison was “negligent in following proper policies related to maintenance of their equipment” before the Eaton fire.
“How did they determine the due date?” he wrote. “It seems some high risk lines had repair due dates quite far into the future.”
The company said in a filing last month that it was evaluating whether the blaze was started by a reenergization of its unused Mesa-Sylmar line.
“We don’t know what caused the Eaton fire, and we’re not seeing any typical or obvious evidence associated with utility-caused ignitions,” Roy said. He added that the company is “going to do a thorough investigation ourselves, and once we know anything that tells us otherwise, we’re definitely going to be transparent.”
Veteran fire safety scientist Vyto Babrauskas said “certainly it’s possible” that the Mesa-Sylmar line could have become energized on Jan. 7 via a principle called induction.
“An electromagnetic field from the transmission line that is operating will basically cut through that dead line and induce a current in it,” he explained.
He said he believes Edison’s work orders cited ignition risks “precisely because of this induction possibility — that high voltages would be induced.”
Babrauskas added that it’s no secret that running electricity through an old tower can cause dangerous sparking.
“I’ve written a whole book on how these things go bad,” he said, referring to his treatise “Electrical Fires and Explosions.”
In a Feb. 6 filing with the California Public Utilities Commission about the Eaton fire, the company wrote that it “is evaluating a number of potential causes, including whether the idle Mesa-Sylmar transmission line could have become energized.”
The company wrote that visual evidence did “not show obvious signs of arcing or material changes in the condition of the tower.”
Edison wrote that around the time the Eaton fire started on Jan. 7, its four active lines through Eaton Canyon — including the Mesa-Vincent No. 1 and Eagle Rock-Mesa lines — experienced an “increase of current” caused by a fault on another line several miles away.
The active transmission lines were de-energized within hours of the start of the fire. But when they were reenergized Jan. 19, workers witnessed “a small flash of white light upon each re-energization, which appeared to be in the vicinity of” the pair of parallel towers carrying the Mesa-Vincent No. 1 and Mesa-Sylmar lines.
In 2020, Edison reported that more than 90% of its transmission towers were at least 30 years old, the “average age” when the company said they start showing signs of corrosion, which can lead to issues that include “structure failure.”
As of Dec. 31, 2022, records show the company had more than 20,200 work orders over 180 days past due, including more than 5,200 that carried “ignition risk.”
Asked about that backlog, Roy said “it’s typical to have a lot of work orders open for utilities because we’re actively working the system in terms of maintenance and inspections, and obviously every utility has a different size.”
He said the company kept the Mesa-Sylmar infrastructure in place because “these are idle facilities on our transmission system, and so we maintain and manage them, because they may have potential use” in the future.
Mikal Watts, an attorney whose Texas-based firm co-filed a lawsuit against the utility last month on behalf of three Altadena residents whose homes were destroyed in the Eaton fire, has been one of the most vocal proponents of the hypothesis that the fire was started by sparking on the Mesa-Sylmar line.
“They still need to eliminate the ignition risk and instead they’ve got work orders that are more than five years old that they did not perform,” he said.
Watts described Edison’s approach to maintenance as “don’t fix it until it fails. And the problem with that is that when it fails it kills 17 people, burns down [thousands of] homes and permanently scars an entire community.”
The Public Utilities Commission requires that utilities remove “permanently abandoned” power lines they deem “to have no foreseeable future use” to avoid them becoming “a public nuisance or a hazard to life or property.”
Another power company, Pacific Gas & Electric, agreed to pay $125 million in fines and penalties after state fire officials determined that a line that had remained energized more than 10 years after it went into disuse sparked the Kincade fire, which burned more than 77,000 acres in Sonoma County in 2019.
Roy told state lawmakers in a hearing last month that “there’s a difference” between “abandoned” and “idle” lines and that “there is an idle line near [the Eaton fire] area that we maintain and inspect regularly.”
During that same hearing, Rachel Peterson, the commission’s executive director, said “there’s not a timeline” dictating how quickly utilities must take down abandoned lines.
But, she added, “there’s a general responsibility to operate their systems safely.”
On Tuesday, Edison provided an update on its investigation into the Eaton fire’s cause.
“The cause remains under investigation as part of our ongoing commitment to a thorough and transparent investigation,” the company said. “Southern California Edison is beginning the next phase of inspections and testing of electrical equipment in Eaton Canyon, which started yesterday.”
