The wildfires in California continue to burn quickly, consuming thousands of acres. But the exact cause of the wildfires remains a mystery at this point.
Well, the company that monitors electrical activity in Los Angeles is providing new insight into a possible cause of the blazes. According to the company, electrical faults were high in the areas of three major wildfires just hours prior to the blazes. Bob Marshall, the chief executive of Whisker Labs, explained via New York Post that the number of faults increased. Eaton, Palisades, and Hurst Fires formed hours later. For instance, there were 63 faults just hours prior to the Palisades fire. At least 18 faults occurred the hour the fire started.
The company uses sensors in the city to pinpoint when faults occur. They're caused by a host of things including major surges and faulty equipment.
"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," Marshall explained. "In the case of the Eaton Fire near Altadena, there's 317 grid faults that occurred in the hours preceding the ignition. And then in the Hurst Fire, there's about 230 faults that occurred that we measured on the sensor network."
California Wildfires
So what does this mean? Well, according to Marshall, this is abnormal activity. On a normal day, typically only a few occur. However, investigators haven't concluded the cause of the wildfires yet.
"Importantly, what we cannot say is one of those is whether one of those faults caused the fire. We don't know that," Marshall said. "What we know from our data is that there were increasing faults in the grid in the area around where those fires ignited."
Marshall wanted to be very clear that this doesn't mean faults caused the wildfires.
"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.
He also explained how they gather their information.
"We take 30 million electrical measurements every second. There's AI (artificial intelligence) in the sensor, [and] we stream data to a cloud that is specifically designed to detect electrical faults inside of homes," he continued. "And then the network of sensors detects faults on the grid because when there's a fault on the grid it is simultaneously measured by many ting sensors in a community. So if there's a fault in your home, that fault doesn't propagate out to the whole community, we only detect it on one single thing sensor in your home."
