When the Eaton Fire broke out at 6:11 p.m. on January 7, 2025, Los Angeles firefighters were already contending with the Palisades Fire, which had started at 10:20 that morning and quickly expanded more than 200 acres. When he heard the callout for Eaton that evening, L.A. County fire investigator Captain Rick Yartz made his way to the command post in Altadena and was introducing himself to the battalion chief within the hour. Early the next morning, he and the other investigators were hiking into Eaton Canyon to begin assessing the electrical transmission towers that Altadena residents described arcing just before flames were seen glowing in the chaparral.
Yartz’s step-by-step account is related in the initial investigation report of the Eaton Fire, which was released on May 22, 2025. His supplemental report came out on July 22 after equally detailed examinations were made of spherical globs of metal that Yartz and a number of investigators found on and at the base of a tower in the canyon. One of those examinations was an x-ray diffraction analysis conducted by a research company in Goleta, which helped investigators find that Southern California Edison equipment was the source of the Eaton Fire. In the report, the Goleta company’s name is redacted.
Edison has stated that it agrees its equipment may have started Eaton Fire. Prefacing his remarks by saying, “Our hearts are with the Altadena community,” Edison spokesperson David Eisenhauer said, “We have taken our potential role in the start of this fire seriously from the beginning. As we’ve previously said, SCE believes that it is likely that its equipment was associated with the ignition of the Eaton Fire.” The company has established a Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program that it claims is “comparable to settlements reached in past wildfire litigation.”…