The ridge above Los Angeles is full of clues. There are broken pieces of electrical equipment and a grove of madrone blackened by fire. Police tape is stretched around part of the sandy ground, now mixed with ash.
Investigators focused on these rocky cliffs with stunning views of the Pacific Ocean as the ignition point of the Palisades Fire, the inferno that destroyed at least 5,000 homes and businesses and killed at least eight people.
A recent visit by New York Times reporters to the site – near the “crime scene,” as LAPD officers stationed nearby described it – suggested a range of possibilities, some contradictory. , as to the origin of the incident. fire.
Electric poles made of charred wood litter the ground. A patch of burned chaparral came from a previous fire that firefighters thought they had extinguished on New Year’s Day, nearly a week before the Palisades fire broke out. And there is evidence of recent visitors to the area around Skull Rock, the oddly shaped rock that attracts hikers and teenage partygoers whose discarded beer bottles remain in a pile of broken glass.
For now, the answer to the cause of one of Los Angeles’ most destructive firestorms may elude even investigators. Yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the wind near Skull Rock lies hundreds of yards up a steep slope from the area where a New York Times analysis of satellite images and witness photographs suggests the point of ignition could have been found.
