An electrical company has provided insight into a troubling theory regarding the potential cause of the LA wildfires.
In the LA region, eight fires have been reported, with firefighters successfully containing three of them.
Currently, only three fires continue to burn across LA.
The number of fatalities has climbed to 16, and over 10,000 homes and other structures have been devastated.
According to The Independent, two major fires, Palisade and Eaton, have ravaged more than 30,000 acres of land.
An electrical monitoring company has revealed that faults along the LA power grid saw a significant rise during the same week that the wildfires ravaged California.
Whisker Labs’ CEO, Bob Marshall, spoke to Fox News about the situation, highlighting a noticeable increase in faults in the areas where the wildfires were burning, just hours before they ignited.
“Faults are caused by tree limbs touching wires or wires blowing in the wind and touching. That creates a spark in a fault, and we detect all of those things,” he explained to the outlet.
Marshall’s company collaborates with the electric utility grid using ‘extraordinary precision and accuracy’, which enables him to make informed assessments.
“In the case of the Eaton Fire near Altadena, there’s 317 grid faults that occurred in the hours preceding the ignition,” he added.
“And then in the Hurst Fire, there’s about 230 faults that occurred that we measured on the sensor network.”
While investigations into the origins of the fires are ongoing, the spike in faults may provide authorities with crucial information.
However, Marshall’s theory remains unverified by officials.
Marshall emphasized: “Importantly, what we cannot say is one of those is whether one of those faults caused the fire. We don’t know that.
“What we know from our data is that there were increasing faults in the grid in the area around where those fires ignited.”
The expert also suggested that the power wasn’t immediately shut off once the faults surged.
“But again, we can’t say definitively at all whether one of those faults caused a fire. I do want to be very, very clear about that,” he added to Fox News.
“A power surge can cause damage to appliances and devices. In the worst case, it can cause a fire in a home.”