February 6, 2025 | Wildfire News Updates
Southern California Edison officials conceded today that the company’s equipment may be associated with the ignition of the Hurst Fire… By Denise Petski, Tom Tapp, Deadline.com February 6, 2025
UPDATED with latest: Southern California Edison officials conceded in a regulatory filing today that the company’s equipment may be associated with the ignition of the Hurst Fire, which burned nearly 800 acres in the Sylmar area during the height of the January windstorm in Los Angeles.
The Hurst Fire, which erupted Jan. 7 and was fully contained on Jan. 16, did not result in any structures being destroyed or cause any deaths, but did force the closure of the 5 and 210 freeways and prompted evacuations. It preceded the Hughes Fire, which broke out in the area near Castaic Lake on January 22, burned over 10,000 acres and prompted further evacuations.
The region’s two other massive fires, the Palisades and Eaton fires, killed a combined 29 people and damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of structures.
In a filing with the state Public Utilities Commission, Paul Pimentel of SCE wrote that while the Los Angeles Fire Department is continuing to investigate the cause of the fire, “Absent additional evidence, SCE believes its equipment may be associated with the ignition of the Hurst Fire.”
The filing notes that the fire originated in the vicinity of an SCE transmission tower north of Saddle Ridge Road. SCE concedes in the filing that a conductor failure occurred on the tower the night of Jan. 7, causing damaged equipment to fall to the ground at the base of the tower.
In the past 30-plus years, more than 3,600 wildfires in the state have been in some way related to power generation, transmission or distribution, according to U.S. Forest Service data as reported by the New York Times. California’s two most destructive and deadly fires, the Camp and Tubbs blazes which collectively killed more than 100 people and destroyed more than 20,000 structures, were caused by failures of power systems. More locally, the deadly Thomas and Woolsey Fires which destroyed thousands of structures in L.A. and Ventura counties in 2017 and 2018 were also caused by SCE equipment failures.
SCE has already been targeted in multiple lawsuits accusing its equipment of sparking the Eaton Fire, which burned 14,021 acres in the Altadena and Pasadena areas. The cause of that fire is still under investigation, but attorneys have recently pointed to surveillance video that appears to show SCE power lines arcing in the vicinity of the fire’s origin on Jan. 7.
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