LA fires likely began as reignition of New Year’s fire that LAFD ignored once it went cold: report

According to the Washington Post, "analysis of photos, videos, satellite imagery and radio communications, as well as interviews with witnesses, offers new evidence that the Palisades Fire started in the area where firefighters had spent hours using helicopters to knock down a blaze six days earlier."

There had been a wildfire on New Year's Eve that authorities had to come and put out and officials have been speaking to residents of the area to see what sparked the Palisades fire. The outlet's analysis suggests that high winds could have reignited the embers or remnants from the older fire just days earlier.

Reignitions are commonplace in states such as California that get frequent wildfires, and officials frequently warn that areas burnt by wildfires that are seemingly extinguished can flare up even weeks afterward if fire smolders underground or inside wood. Despite that, an LA Fire Department spokesman told the outlet that it is not the department's practice to maintain patrols on recently extinguished fires.

Residents of the area said that the response to the Palisades fire was much slower than the previous one on New Year's Eve.

“We know that fires rekindle and transition from smoldering to flaming," professor of mechanical engineering and fire scientist Michael Gollner told reporters. “It’s certainly possible that something from that previous fire, within a week, had rekindled and caused the ignition."

The Post analyzed the burn scar from the New Year's Eve fire and compared the satellite imagery to the Palisades fire to come to its theory. However, it is not conclusive.

“The evidence you have here indicates that it is at least conceivable that remnants from the earlier Lachman Fire gave rise to the Palisades Fire,” former Syracuse Professor Jacob Bendix of geography and the environment said. “While the passage of time reduces the probability of restarting, the elapsed time does not make it unrealistic, especially in the absence of intervening precipitation.”