It could all have started here

Police call the burnt-out area on the hill the “crime scene”.

This is where the Los Angeles fires may have started.

On New Year’s Eve, four hectares had burned in the same place.

At least 25 people have died in the Los Angeles fires, which have destroyed more than 10,000 homes. Now the place where it all began may have been found.

Police investigators have zeroed in on an area on a ridge high above the Californian giant city, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Here, police tape has been put up around some of the sandy soil in an area that is completely burnt out. It writes New York Timeswhich states that nearby police officers describe the area as the “crime scene”.

Previous fire

On New Year’s Day, nearly a week before the Palisades fire broke out last Tuesday morning, firefighters had been there putting out another blaze. Residents in the area believe fireworks may have triggered it.

The alarm about the fire had come just after midnight on New Year’s Eve. About four hectares before emergency services were on the scene and got control of the situation, writes the New York Times.

The area where the fire broke out on New Year’s is less than 30 meters from a residential area where several homes were destroyed.

Full of “clues”

According to the newspaper, the area at the height is “filled with clues”. Skull rock is a popular destination for hikers and teenage parties, and in addition to smashed electronic equipment, a lot of discarded beer bottles and broken glass are also found between the rocks and the burned-out electricity poles.

At this point, investigators don’t have a specific answer to what sparked one of Los Angeles’ most devastating firestorms ever.

But the cordons near Skull Rock run several hundred meters across a steep hillside where the New York Times’ analysis of satellite and witness images suggests the fire may have started.

Saw something “smoke-like”

At around 9.30am on January 7 local time – an hour before the fire is believed to have started – lawyer Ron Giller was out walking in the area with his friend Alan Feld.

Then he saw something that looked like smoke or dust some distance away.

– It looked like smoke, over there, but there were no flames, he tells the New York Times.

– It made me wonder what it was. I thought, could this thing still be active? But that seemed unlikely. Could there still be smoke from a fire that burned six days ago? It didn’t feel so logical.

Alan Feld says he and Ron Giller saw some people sitting on Skull rock.

– One of us even said that “I hope they don’t smoke or anything, with these winds”.

Running from the fire in video

In a video clip from the morning of January 7 that has been shared on social media, a group of young men can be seen at Skull rock.

The clip begins with the gang running on a path with a cloud of smoke behind them. They talk about smelling smoke and then see a fire moving towards them at a fast speed.

In another clip, the same men are seen a few minutes later. They watch the fire grow and note that “we were standing right there”.

The call from the fireman

The man who posted the clip initially agreed to talk to the New York Times, but stopped responding to messages and deleted his account on X. There is no indication that the men started the fire.

In audio recordings from the first call on January 7, a firefighter reported to the command center that the fire started “right under the old burn”, from the New Year’s fire, and could reach nearby houses in just a few minutes.

Earlier fires a risk

According to the New York Times, some of the most devastating wildfires in recent decades have arisen from fires that emergency services thought they had extinguished – but flared up into something even bigger.

Examples include a firestorm in Oakland in 1991 that killed 25 people and the fire in Maui, Hawaii, in 2023, where 102 people died.

Fires can smolder in plant roots or other material for days before something causes them to flare up again, researchers have concluded, according to the New York Times.