An electrical company has weighed in on a concerning new theory on what potentially triggered the LA wildfires.
Eight fires were confirmed to have been blazing in the LA region, with three having confirmed to have been contained by firefighters.
Overnight, that figure has since dropped to three fires burning across LA.
The death toll has since risen to 16, while more than 10,000 homes and other structures have been destroyed.
Two of the biggest fires, Palisade and Eaton, which, according to The Independent, have covered more than 30,000 acres of land.
The LA wildfires are causing huge devastation (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
A company that monitors electrical activity has since come out and said faults along the LA power grid increased massively in the same week the wildfires wreaked havoc in California.
Chief executive of Whisker Labs, Bob Marshall, has been speaking to Fox News amid the ongoing crisis, where he stated a sharp increase in faults in the same area where the wildfires are burning were reported just hours before the fires started.
“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,” he explained to the outlet.
Marshall’s company is able to work with the electric utility grid through ‘extraordinary precision and accuracy’, allowing him to make judgements effectively.
“In the case of the Eaton Fire near Altadena, there’s 317 grid faults that occurred in the hours preceding the ignition,” he added.
“And then in the Hurst Fire, there’s about 230 faults that occurred that we measured on the sensor network.”
Investigations into how the fires started are underway, but jumps in faults could certainly provide officials with some answers.
Although Marshall’s theory has not been confirmed by officials.
16 people have lost their lives (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
Marshall continued: “Importantly, what we cannot say is one of those is whether one of those faults caused the fire. We don’t know that.
“What we know from our data is that there were increasing faults in the grid in the area around where those fires ignited.”
The electric expert went on to allege the power was not shut off immediately once the faults had skyrocketed.
“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 to Fox News.
“A power surge can cause damage to appliances and devices. In the worst case, it can cause a fire in a home.”
