Investigation Sheds New Light On What May Have Sparked Eaton Fire

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, October 7, 2025…

• Nine months have passed since the Eaton Fire ripped through Los Angeles County. It destroyed more than 9,000 buildings and left billions of dollars in damages. At first, attention focused on Southern California Edison’s transmission lines as the likely cause. But a new NPR investigation shows there may have been other failures, too.
• Another immigrant has died in the custody of federal immigration authorities in California, this time in the Imperial Valley. New questions are being raised about the care of detainees under the Trump administration’s ongoing mass deportation campaign.

Hours Before The Eaton Fire, Distribution Lines Failed And Fire Started In Altadena

Nine months have passed since the Eaton fire blazed through neighborhoods of Los Angeles County in January, destroying more than 9,000 buildings and causing an estimated billions of dollars in damages.

Since then, dozens of lawsuits, including two filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, have blamed high power transmission lines managed by the utility company, Southern California Edison, for starting the flames. SoCal Edison acknowledges that its transmission equipment could have been associated with the ignition of a fire that started just after 6 p.m. on Jan. 7, when sparks were spotted near high power lines in Eaton Canyon, in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains.

For months, amongst each other and in groups online, Altadena residents have wondered whether something else might have started fires earlier in their neighborhood. An NPR investigation now reveals that transmission lines were not the only kinds of electrical equipment that caused problems on Jan. 7. Distribution lines that power individual homes malfunctioned in Altadena as early as 11 a.m., NPR found, and at least one fire linked to a problem with a distribution line started in Altadena hours before the sparks near Eaton Canyon. Throughout that morning and afternoon, firefighters were dispatched to different parts of Altadena to respond to problems with power lines. And although SoCal Edison can prevent the damage electrical fires can cause by shutting off the power that flows through power lines, the utility did not turn the power off to most of the circuits in Altadena on Jan. 7, NPR found.

Malfunctions, or “faults,” can happen when falling tree limbs or poles touch power lines and trigger voltage drops in the current running through the wires, said Bob Marshall, the CEO of Whisker Labs, a company that collects voltage activity information from grids across the U.S. Electricity jumping into the air in the form of a spark or arc at points of contact can melt metal parts of the electrical infrastructure that can fall to the ground and ignite wildfires.

In the calmer weather days leading up to the wildfires that started on Jan. 7, distribution power lines never malfunctioned more than 18 times across LA. But on Jan. 7, as winds across the region reached hurricane strength, the distribution lines malfunctioned more than 200 times in the LA region, Whisker Labs estimates. Three of those malfunctions were in Altadena. The first of the three was at 11 a.m on the eastern side of Altadena, well before the Eaton fire started. Another occurred at 9:38 p.m. in West Altadena, hours before satellite imagery appeared to show the Eaton fire front arrived in that part of the neighborhood.

Another Immigrant Dies In ICE Custody In California

Another immigrant died in the custody of federal immigration authorities in California, raising new questions about the care of detainees amid the Trump administration’s historic mass deportation campaign.

In an announcement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said Huabing Xie, an immigrant from China, had a seizure Friday at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico and died that afternoon. Xie had been detained at the Calexico detention center since last month. ICE alleged that Xie was in the U.S. without legal status and said federal agents arrested him on Sept. 12 in Indio.

Staffers at the center gave Xie CPR and used a defibrillator, a medical device typically used to shock a patient’s heart, according to ICE. But Xie was later pronounced dead at El Centro Regional Medical Center.

Imperial County immigrants’ rights advocates said they were saddened and angered by the news. Imperial Liberation Collaborative organizer Marina Arteaga said Xie’s death fit into a pattern marked by dwindling oversight and increasingly harsh conditions at federal detention centers across the country. “This is not an isolated incident,” Arteaga told KPBS on Monday.