A company that monitors power activity says faults along Los Angeles’ power grid are increasing sharply in the same area where three major wildfires have been raging this week.
Whisker Labs CEO Bob Marshall told Fox News Digital that the company experienced a sharp increase in the number of failures in the hours before the Eaton, Palisade and Hurst fires.
Marshall said his company has a network of about 14,000 sensors called “ting” sensors in Los Angeles that can pinpoint and identify faults caused by arcs. Through its network of home sensors, Whisker Labs is able to monitor the grid with “extraordinary precision and accuracy.”
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On January 8, 2025, the Palisades Fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Wires were hanging from broken utility poles in the middle of the street. A company that monitors power activity says faults are surging along Los Angeles’ power grid in the same area where three major wildfires have been burning this week. (Jay Clendenin/Getty Images)
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“Failures are caused by branches coming into contact with power lines or wires being blown by the wind. This creates a spark in the malfunction and we detect all these things,” Marshall explained.
Other causes include ignition failures in electrical equipment, sudden surges in demand or earthquakes. Strong Santa Ana winds were blowing through Los Angeles when the fire broke out.
The data the company shared with Fox News Digital is shocking.
In the Palisades area, the largest fire currently raging, 63 faults appeared in the two to three hours before the fire broke out, Marshall said. Eighteen faults were registered in the first hour on Tuesday.
So far, the fires have destroyed 12,300 homes and buildings in the area. The death toll in the county has risen to 11, and authorities expect the number to rise.
“In the case of the Eaton Fire near Altadena, there were 317 grid failures in the hours leading up to the fire,” Marshall said. “Then during the Hurst fire, we measured about 230 faults through the sensor network.”
On a normal day, he said, there are few glitches.
Bob Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Whisker Labs, holds a ding sensor. (Fox News Digital)
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Sparks from faults fall to the ground and ignite vegetation, essentially striking a match across the landscape. Strong winds then carry the flames at extremely high speeds.
Investigators have yet to determine what sparked the raging wildfires that have devastated large swaths of Los Angeles, but a surge in power grid failures could be important clues.
“Importantly, what we can’t say is whether one of these faults caused the fire. We don’t know that,” Marshall said. “We know from the data that there are increasing grid failures around fire areas.”
He said data showed the power was not immediately cut off when the fault occurred.
“But we can’t say definitively at all whether one of the faults caused the fire. I do want to make that very, very clear,” he added.
Whisker Labs has discussed using its data with utility companies, but has not yet shared the data, Marshall said.
Currently, ding-dong sensors notify homeowners of power surges so they can take precautions to prevent house fires. Marshall said the company has about 1 million sensor networks in the U.S.
“Power surges can damage appliances and equipment. In the worst case scenario, they can cause a house fire,” Marshall said.
He said “smart and super advanced” technology could prevent 80% of potential house fires.
On January 8, 2025, the Eaton Fire broke out in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, California, and a house was engulfed in flames. (Josh Adelson/AFP via Getty Images)
When a sensor detects a fault, home sensors are notified via the app, and they can then schedule an electrician to call and make the necessary repairs.
“We make 30 million electrical measurements per second. There’s AI (artificial intelligence) in the sensors, [and] We transmit the data to the cloud specifically designed to detect electrical faults within the home,” he continued. “The network of sensors then detects faults on the grid, because when a fault occurs on the grid, many sensors simultaneously measure that fault in a community. So if a fault occurs in your home, the fault does not propagate to the entire neighborhood, we will 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 reduce the risk of fires ahead of this week’s devastating wildfires, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing regulatory filings.
According to the Wall Street Journal, every other major power company in California has taken precautions after the utility company sparked wildfires in the past.
A LADWP spokesperson told the Journal that they are also taking other safety precautions, such as disabling technology that automatically restores power after an outage. She added that widespread precautionary power outages could also harm emergency services.
Fox News’ Brie Stimson contributed to this report.
