A company that monitors electrical activity says faults along Los Angeles the power grid skyrocketed in the same areas where three of this week’s large wildfires are currently raging.
Bob Marshall, CEO of Whisker Labs, told Fox News Digital that the company saw a spike in failures in the hours before the fires in Eaton, Palisades and Hurst.
Marshall said his company has a network of about 14,000 sensors known as “ting” sensors throughout Los Angeles that can pinpoint and identify arcing faults. Through its network of sensors in homes, Whisker Labs is able to monitor the power grid with “remarkable precision and accuracy.”
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Power lines hang from broken power poles in the middle of a street caused by the Palisades Fire on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades community in Los Angeles, California. A company that monitors electrical activity says outages along the Los Angeles power grid have spiked in the same areas where three of this week’s large wildfires have occurred. (Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images)
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“Faults are caused by tree branches touching the strings or strings blowing in the wind and touching each other. It creates a spark in the breakdown, and we detect all these things,” Marshall explained.
Other causes include faulty electrical equipment, ignition, sudden demand surges or earthquakes. At the time the fires started, strong Santa Ana winds were blowing through Los Angeles.
The company’s figures, which were shared with Fox News Digital, are staggering.
In the Palisades area, the largest fire currently raging, there were 63 outages in the two to three hours before the fire broke out, Marshall said. At the beginning of Tuesday, 18 breakdowns were recorded.
The fire has so far burned 12,300 homes and buildings across the area. In the entire county, The death toll rose to 11 people. and authorities predict that number will grow.
“In the case of the Eaton fire near Altadena, there are 317 grid failures that occurred in the hours leading up to the ignition,” Marshall said. “And then in the Hurst Fire, there were about 230 errors that we measured on the sensor network.”
He said there are very few mistakes in a typical day.
Bob Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Whisker labs, holds the “ting” sensor. (Fox News Digital)
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Sparks from faults can fall to the ground and ignite vegetation, essentially setting the match on the landscape. Strong winds then carry the flames at high speed.
Investigators have yet to determine what sparked the attack raging forest fires that have decimated large areas of Los Angeles, but a spike in power grid outages can serve as a vital clue.
“The important thing is, we can’t say whether one of those mistakes caused the fire. We don’t know that,” Marshall said. “What we know from our data is that there were more and more grid failures in the area around where these fires started.”
He said the data showed that the power was not shut off immediately when the faults were growing.
“But again, we can’t say definitively at all whether one of those faults caused the fire. I want to be very, very clear about that,” he added.
Marshall said Whisker Labs has talked to utilities about using its data, but currently no data is being shared.
Currently, ting sensors notify homeowners of power surges so they can take preventative measures to prevent house fires. Marshall said the company has a network of about 1 million ting sensors across the US
“An electrical shock can cause damage to appliances and devices. In the worst case scenario, it can cause a house fire,” Marshall said.
He said “smart and super sophisticated” technology can prevent 80% of potential house fires.
A house is engulfed in flames during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, California, on January 8, 2025. (JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)
When the sensor detects a fault, the home sensor is notified via the app, and they can then arrange for an electrician to be called and make the necessary repairs.
“We take 30 million electrical measurements every second. It exists AI (artificial intelligence) in the sensor, [and] we send data to a cloud that’s specifically designed to detect electrical faults inside homes,” he continued. “And then the sensor network detects faults on the grid because when there’s a grid fault, it’s measured simultaneously by many sensors in the community. So if there’s a bug in your home, that bug doesn’t spread to the whole community, we only detect it on one sensor in your home.”
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Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power did not proactively shut off power to mitigate the risk of wildfires before this week’s devastating wildfires, The Wall Street Journal it reported on Friday, citing regulatory filings.
Preventative measures are in place at all other major California power companies after the utility has sparked wildfires in the past, the Journal reported.
An LADWP spokesperson told the Journal they have other safety precautions in place, such as disabling technology that automatically restores power after an outage. She added that widespread preventive power outages could also be detrimental to emergency services.
Brie Stimson of Fox News contributed to this report.
