What Started The California Fires? Investigations Continue, But Clues Are Coming In

Photo by Don Griffin in this screen grab from a San
Francisco Chronicle Video shows the wildfire on 
Temescal Ridge near Pacific Palisades early on
January 1. This fire was quickly contained after
scorching about eight acres, 

 The wind has died down in southern California, so firefighters are taking advantage of the weather to at least attempt to gain the upper hand on these cataclysmic blazes. 

Investigations are starting as to what set these fires off in the first place. Some have been easy to solve. 

One fire started amid gusty winds in San Bernardino County, California Wednesday but firefighters managed to quickly stop it after it consumed 30 acres but no houses. 

A man was just as quickly arrested on arson charges with that fire, but as yet, we have no motive.

It might be harder to ascertain what started some of the other, larger fires. 

PALISADES FIRE

The worst of the blazes was the Palisades Fire, and there's tantalizing evidence that this firestorm has its origins with somebody being dumb within the first few hours of the arrival for 2025.

According to the Washington Post and other sources, some idiot set off fireworks in the dry brush on the Temescal Ridge in the Santa Monica Mountains not far from the Skull Rock Trailhead shortly after midnight January 1.  Firefighters responded and put out their blaze before it could get super out of hand. 

The New Year's Day fire covered eight acres and took about four hours to contain. No buildings were damaged.

The start of the huge Pacific Palisades fire in this
photo by Don Griffin, via the San Francisco
Chronicle, seems to show the origin at the about the
same location a the January 1 blaze,

The Palisades Fire started around 10:20 a.m. local time January 7, right around the same spot as the January 1 blaze. 

Experts say it is absolutely possible for a wildfire to reignite up to 10 days, sometimes even more after it was initially extinguished.  

There could have been a hot, smoldering piece of wood that was missed in the New Years Day incident  partly buried under soil or rocks.  

There it sat, until the 80 mph Santa Ana winds hit on January 7.  Blast your annoying leaf blower on a smoldering camp fire (when you're sure you can't start a forest fire!) and see what you get.

It was basically the same thing with the Los Angeles wildfires. 

Per the Washington Post, the timing of the fire's start was bad for another reason. Firefighter were responding to other incidents around Los Angeles when the first 911 calls came in regarding the Palisades Fire. That might have delayed an initial response, but I'd like to see more investigation into that before drawing firm conclusions. 

If there was a delay in getting firefighters to the scene, some procedures will need to be looked at so that doesn't happen again. 

EATON FIRE

The other large fire, the Easton Fire wiped out much of Altadena, California. The cause of this one isn't confirmed by any fire agency either, but the utility Southern California Edison is under the spotlight.

Lawsuits have already been filed against the utility, saying their equipment is to blame. Specifically, the lawsuits allege the fire "ignited because of SCE's failure to de-energize its overhead wires which traverse Eaton Canyon - despite a red flag (particularly dangerous situation) wind warning)." as KTLA reports.

Utilities have taken to cutting power to wind-prone areas when gusts are expected to reach dangerous levels and are combined with high fire hazards. 

For their part, SCE says that the cause of the fire is still under investigation and that winds in the canyons that day weren't strong enough to  reach the threshold at which power is cut. However, the utility is investigating whether the sensors were wrong. 

 

Did Factory Supervisors Cause Deaths Of Workers In Tennessee Helene Flood?

Managers at an Impact Plastics plant in Erwin, Tennessee
allegedly did not let employees leave as Hurricane Helene
floodwaters rose around them. This resulted in six deaths.

Another huge disaster, another case in which a major employer did not protect their workers from danger as they should have. 

At the Impact Plastics factory in Erwin, a small town in eastern Tennessee, employees kept working last Friday as waters in the nearby Nolichucky River rose.

Erwin is in the western foothills of the Appalachians, very close to the North Carolina border and right next to the tall mountains that collected two to three feet of rain from Hurricane Helene and a torrential rainstorm that immediately preceded the tropical system. 

They kept working into the power went out and water swirled into the factory's parking lot. Ultimately 11 factory workers and a contractor were swept away as they tried to escape and only five of them were rescued. The others are dead or presumed dead. Not all the bodies have been found. 

There's plenty of credible stories emerging there that plant managers wouldn't let people flee the rising flood waters until it was far too late. 

Here's part of a report in the Knoxville News Sentinel:

"Jacob Ingram has worked at Impact Plastics for near nearly eight months as a mold changer. It's a role, he said, that keeps him on his feet for the entire first shift.

As the waters rose outside, managers wouldn't let employees leave, he said. Instead, managers told people to move their cars away from the rising water. Ingram moved his two separate times because the water wouldn't stop rising. 

'They should've evacuated when we got the flash flood warnings, and when they saw the parking lot,' Ingram told Knox News. 'When we moved our card we should've evacuated then...we asked them if we should evacuate and they told us not yet, it wasn't bad enough. 

'And by the time it was bad enough, it was too late unless you had a four-wheel drive.'"

Ingram went on to tell the paper that he and 10 others fought their way through waist deep water when a semitruck driver called them over and helped them get on an open-bed truck, which was packed full of large flexible gas pipes.

A piece of debris smacked into the truck, knocking a woman off and sweeping her away. Then another piece of debris did exactly the same thing. Now two women were gone. 

Then the truck was hit by a much larger piece of debris, overturning the entire vehicle. Ingram thought to grab onto the plastic gas pipes, because he had seen some other pieces of the material floating downstream rather than sinking. 

Ingram and four other employees floated a half mile downstream until they hit a large pile of debris they could hang on to. An hour after that, a Tennessee National Guard helicopter plucked them from the pile to save them.  

We know one of the women who fell off the truck died. The body of Bertha Mendoza, 56, was found on September 29. Others from the truck are missing. 

Ingram managed to post some harrowing videos on Facebook that make it clear at least to me that employees of Impact Plastics should have been evacuated far sooner. 

Impact Plastics officials are circling the wagons on these damning accounts. As the Associated Press reports:

"Impact Plastics said in a statement Monday that it 'continued monitor weather conditions' Friday and that managers dismissed employees 'when water began to cover the parking lot and the adjacent service road, and the plant lost power.'"

But in a separate interview, Ingram told WVLT: "I actually asked one of the higher ups (if we should leave) and they told me, 'No, not yet.'. They had to ask someone before we was able to leave. Even though it was already above the doors of the cars."

 Ingram told WVLT that employees were made to stay on site for 15 to 20 minutes after the power went out. 

CBS News reported another employee, Robert Jarvis, gave exactly the same account as Ingram.  Jarvis also asked this question during an interview with television station WBIR: "Why would you make us stay there? Why would  you keep us there if you knew it was going to be bad, if you were monitoring it? Why were we still there?"

Well, my cynical but possibly accurate answer is some mucky muck with Impact Plastics somewhere was loathe to let their commodity, I mean human beings, get out of harms way. That is until the power failed, at which point the factory could no longer make revenue. By then, of course, it was too late for many of the employees to flee.  

Or, if I'm more charitable, the culture at Impact Plastics is that supervisors were tyrants, and there's not a lot of jobs in eastern Tennessee so employees were fearful of getting fired for, you know, trying to save their own lives. 

Notice how carefully Impact Plastics statements are worded. The statement said that while most employees left immediately, some remained on or near the premises. Yeah, because by then they were trapped by the raging floodwaters. 

The owner of a manufacturing plant near Impact Plastics had sent his employees home before they could become endangered and tried to drive a piece of heavy equipment to Impact Plastics in a rescue attempt. 

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is now looking into the allegations against Impact Plastics at the direction of a local prosecutor. 

EMPLOYEE DISASTER SAFETY OFTEN IGNORED

I admit part of all this might be Monday morning quarterbacking. I'm sure nobody in Erwin could have imagined things would get that bad that fast.  This is why in the same town, close to 60 people ended up trapped on the roof of a small local hospital as rapids raced around and through the building. 

Still, it fits a pattern in which too often, keeping employees safe during dangerous weather is just a drag on profits, sure to make shareholders unhappy. What's a few dead employees it allows you to buy a second yacht, right?

I've covered other examples like what allegedly happened at Impact Plastics. 

After a deadly tornado outbreak in December, 2021, employees of a Mayfield, Kentucky candle factory hit by a powerful tornado that night said managers would not let them leave to seek safer shelter ahead of the approaching twister. Nine people who were in the factory died in the storm. 

During that same, December, 2021 tornado outbreak, six people died in an Amazon distribution center in Illinois when a tornado hit. Employees there said they were not given the opportunity to seek safer shelter when tornado warnings blared.

In that same tornado, an Amazon driver said she was told by supervisors to keep driving instead of taking shelter despite the fact a tornado warning was in effect.

Also, legislators in Texas and Florida prevented municipalities from enacting ordinances that would have mandated water and rest breaks for outdoor workers toiling in those states' excessive summer heat. 

Which proves that lawmakers and Florida and Texas, and too many corporations, regard especially low wage workers that to them, it's no big deal if a worker dies because of dangerous weather. To them, these workers are not human beings. Just machines to replace when they are "defective" and break down in rough weather conditions. 

I really hope those responsible for the deaths at Impact Plastics are held accountable. 

Kentucky Death Toll At Least 64 As Officials Search For Further Answers Into Tornado

A lawyer's office in Mayfield, Kentucky before
and after Friday's tornado. The capriciousness
of the tornado is evident. The building was
torn away and largely blown down the 
street, but books in part of a remaining office
remain neatly arranged. 

UPDATE 1 PM MONDAY

Some updates to the tornado disaster have trickled in since this morning, and the news is not great.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear  late this morning confirmed 64 deaths from the tornadoes, with 105 still unaccounted for.

At least some of those unaccounted for people are probably -hopefully OK, just lost in the confusion of the disaster, moved from damaged homes, unreachable due to a wrecked cellular network in the tornado zone. 

Beshear said the ages of the dead ranged from five months to 86 years old. Three fatalities involved people under the age of 18.

"I'm not doing so well today," Beshear said, "And I'm not sure how many of us are."

Officials are saying the storm might have cost several billion in damages. FEMA is rushing aid to the region, and President Biden said he is going to Kentucky Wednesday for a look-see,

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky has confirmed at least 128 miles of the storm path was caused by one single tornado.

Adjacent National Weather Service offices need to complete their surveys to determine whether the tornado's path was even longer than that. The confirmed path is already among the longest in U.S. history. If it''s determined it was over 200 miles long, it would be the longest continuous path of any recorded tornado in U.S. history.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

The worst and most important part of Friday's Kentucky tornado disaster is of course the death toll, the inured, and the people who lost their homes and businesses. 

We know it's bad, but we still don't know the exact death toll, number of injuries, losses and that kind of thing.  

There's also a lot of meteorological questions out there. Was it one long-lasting tornado that traveled continuously over 200 miles? If so, it would set a grim record for longest tornado track on record. And exactly how strong was this tornado? That's still being investigated.

First the toll, with a glimmer of good news of sorts from that candle factory that was leveled in Mayfield, Kentucky with 110 people inside. 

It looks like eight people died inside that factory during the tornado, which is of course beyond awful. But it's not as bad as first feared. Initial reports said only about 40 of the people inside had been rescued and the rest likely died.

Now it appears 90 people from the factory have been accounted for and are alive.   It appears eight people are still missing.

Due to the scope of the disaster and spotty cell phone coverage due to damaged infrastructure, we still don't know how many people died in the tornadoes.  It could be anywhere between 50 and 100.  In addition to the toll in Kentucky, we know six died in an Illinois Amazon distribution center that was hit by a separate tornado. 

THE TORNADOES

Overall, there were 61 reported tornadoes on Friday in the middle of the nation, but that number still needs to be refined.

The main disaster was the tornado or tornadoes that traveled with one intense supercell thunderstorm from northeastern Arkansas, through the boot heel of Missouri, then clipping Tennessee before moving onto its devastating path through Kentucky.

This is already being called the "Quad-State Tornado" since it hit four states, but was it really one tornado a series?

Most of the time, tornado-producing supercells go through cycles. They'll drop a tornado that travels several miles before lifting, only to produce a new tornado a few minutes later.  Sometimes this cycle repeats itself numerous times.

Investigators with the National Weather Service are now examining the path of this storm to determine whether it was a series of tornadoes or one monster.  I know this doesn't matter much to the victims, but it's still worth the effort.  Anything scientists can do to better understand tornadoes, the better.

Another question is what was the maximum strength of this tornado or tornadoes?  Anyone who glances at the news headlines and pictures knows it was very strong.  But exactly how strong?

Tornadoes are rated on what is called an EF scale from 0 to 5. Category 5 being the most intense, with winds of 260 to 318 mph.  Damage from an EF-5 tornado is described as such: "Strong frame houses lifted off foundations, carried considerable distances, and disintegrated; auto-sized missiles airborne for several hundred feet or more, trees debarked."

Judging from photos in the news and on social media, it's possible the tornado or tornadoes was an EF-5.  I'll leave that assessment up to the experts poking through the wreckage. We'll probably have an answer to this question within a few days.

The last time the U.S. had an EF-5 tornado was on May 19, 2013 in Moore, Oklahoma. That means we've gone more than 3,120 days without such a strong twister. It's the longest such streak on record, but the tornadoes Friday might have ended that welcome break from EF-5 tornadoes.

Strong tornadoes are much more rare this time of year than in the spring. The last EF-5 December tornado was in 1957.

The suction power of the Kentucky storm was beyond words. Debris from the tornado, probably tree branches and bits and pieces of people's homes and belongings, were detected as having been blown aloft up to 30,000 feet in the air.  That's cruising altitude for a 747.

Some of the debris was carried huge distances. One photo from the storm was found in somebody's yard 130 miles away. Another photograph turned up in Indiana, 140 miles from where it originated. Other objects, including photographs, were found more than 100 miles away.  A Facebook page has been set up to reunite tornado survivors with mementoes that traveled great distances in the storm. 

CLIMATE CHANGE?

Inevitably, people are asking if this very strange and extreme December tornado outbreak is a consequence of climate change. 

We don't know for sure, but for what it's worth, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday that her agency is preparing for more of this kind of stuff. "This is going to be our new normal, and the effects that we're seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation," she said.  

Climate change doesn't seem to be causing an increase in overall tornado numbers, but seems to be making individual tornado outbreaks worse. And tornadoes seem to be shifting more to the east, focusing on the Gulf and East Coasts and the Midwest near and east of the Mississippi River, which is where  Friday's tornado outbreak focused.

Waters in the Gulf of Mexico are currently at record high levels for this time of year. Warm, moist air is one of the necessary ingredients for tornado outbreaks. It follows that the warmer the air, the more moisture it can hold. That combination worsens the potential powder keg for tornadoes

It's possible that's part of what happened Friday.

Actually, That Middlebury, Tornado WAS The FIrst March Vermont Tornado On Record

Contrary to databases, this weather map and newspaper 
article unearthed by meteorologist Peter Banacos shows
there could not have been a tornado in Bennington
County, Vermont on March 22, 1955. This means
that the tornado in Middlebury, Vermont last month
was the first confirmed tornado in Vermont on record
during the month of March

 Many of you surely remember that EF-1 tornado in Middlebury, Vermont about a week ago that injured two people and seriously damaged a house.  

At the time, we all said it was only the second March tornado on record in Vermont.  Databases showed another tornado near Shaftsbury, Vermont on March 22, 1955.

Frankly, I was suspicious.  I wondered if there was really a tornado in Shaftsbury in Bennington County back in 1955.  I looked at some sparse weather records from that date and those doubts grew. 

Clearly, there was a storm system affecting Vermont and adjacent New York on March 22, 1955.  

I looked at something called NOW data on National Weather Service pages.  I couldn't find data from very close to Shaftsbury, but the general weather conditions that day regional did not suggest tornadoes.

One ingredient necessary for tornadoes is relatively warm, humid air. It doesn't have to be super warm, but certainly way, way above freezing. In Middlebury just before the tornado, the temperatures was near 70 degrees and dew points were above 50.  That's sufficient for tornadoes, assuming all the other weather ingredients come together correctly, as they did there.

Data from Rutland, Vermont and Glens Falls, New York from March 22, 1955 suggest a raw, stormy day. Temperatures were in the 30s, and melted precipitation from the storm ranged from near a half inch in Rutland to an inch in Glens Falls. Rutland also reported a couple inches of snow, and Glens Falls had 2.4 inches. I bet it was one of those awful schmutzy kind of March days. 

It clear wasn't tornado weather that day in March, 1955.  But something must have happened in Shaftsbury to suggest a tornado.

Meteorologist Peter Banacos solved the mystery.  He found a weather map from that storm in March, 1955, and an article from the Bennington Banner describing a nasty wind storm. 

The weather map from 7 a.m. March 22, 1955 showed a strong storm system centered over the southern Great Lakes. The storm's warm front - really a stationary front in this case - was draped from western Pennsylvania to eastern Virginia.

That placed Vermont on a colder sector of the storm. Which is why temperatures were only in the 30s that day.  Not an environment for tornadoes. The weather map suggest there might have been tornadoes in the southeastern U.S. on that blustery March day in 1955.  But no twisters anywhere close to the Northeast. 

But the relatively intense storm and its fronts were perfectly positioned to create a downslope windstorm on the western slopes of the Green Mountains. Winds from the southeast went up and over the Green Mountains, then gained momentum as they swept downhill into Bennington County

The Bennington Banner article Banacos uncovered described a 35-hour period of mixed precipitation and winds gusting to 60 mph causing widespread damage to power lines, trees, and even some buildings. 

I should have been a forensic meteorologist, I tell ya. I love solving mysteries like this. 

The bottom line: The Middlebury tornado on March 26, 2021 is the first confirmed March tornado on record for Vermont.