Gavin Newsom is scheduled to ease building restrictions for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires – part of a reconstruction effort that he said on Sunday would need a California version of the Marshall Plan, the US-led effort to rebuild western Europe after the second world war.
The California governor ordered the state’s tough environmental laws and permitting requirements to be suspended to help wildfire victims rebuild their homes and businesses, with costs so far placed at $135bn to $150bn over 10 years, according to AccuWeather.
“I find that strict compliance with various statutes and regulations specified in this Order would prevent, hinder, or delay the mitigation of the effects of these fires and windstorm conditions,” Newsom wrote in the executive order.
“California leads the nation in environmental stewardship. I’m not going to give that up,” he later told NBC’s Meet the Press. “But one thing I won’t give into is delay. Delay is denial for people: lives, traditions, places torn apart, torn asunder.”
The building code suspensions apply only to properties and facilities in “substantially the same location” as before the fires, and whose height and footprint do not exceed 110% of their original size, the order says.
Newsom also called for a California version of the Marshall Plan. “We already have a team looking at reimagining LA 2.0,” he said, “and we are making sure everyone’s included, not just the folks on the coast, people here that were ravaged by this disaster.”
Meanwhile investigators are searching for clues as to why the major fires – Palisades and Eaton – were ignited, even as Santa Ana winds are expected to pick up overnight on Sunday and through Tuesday with no rain anticipated until later in the week.
One theory gaining traction is that overhead transmission and distribution lines, rocked or brought down by the winds, may have sparked, igniting the dry vegetation below. It is routine for utilities to shut off power during “red-flag events” but the power lines were on near the Eaton and Palisades fires started on Tuesday last week.
Power lines and utility equipment have been identified as the cause of California’s 2018 Camp fire, killing 85 people and destroying the town of Paradise, the 2023 Maui fire in Hawaii and a 2021 fire in Otis, Oregon, that began when a utility pole fell and ignited a wildfire, destroying 300 homes.
Los Angeles department of water and power reportedly does not have a program in place to pre-emptively shut off power in urban areas when fire risk is high. Robert McCullough, a electric utility consultant, told the New York Times that the department’s shut-off plan was “woefully inadequate”.
The analyst also said that the utility’s electric grid was designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 56mph, which is considered “quite low in today’s climate”. The department has said it did not cut power in advance of the fires in the city despite the wind speeds.
“Impacts to critical city services, including emergency response, the ability to fight fires, traffic and streetlights, as well as impacts to vulnerable people at home, are risks of widespread power outages, as are hospitals, dialysis centers and care centers,” the department explained in a statement to the outlet.
Theories that the power supply could have triggered the blazes have been bolstered by data from Whisker Labs, a tech firm that uses a sensor network to monitor power grids.
Whisker has said some homes in the Altadena area still had power at the time the fire started. Company CEO Bob Marshall said the grid showed considerable stress before the fire erupted, suggesting a power line could have come into contact with vegetation or touched another line.
A spokesperson for Southern California Edison (SCE), the utility that supplies power to Altadena, the area ravaged by the Eaton fire, said it would review “all information available to us as part of our investigation” in the fires.
Insurance companies have asked SCE to preserve evidence, according to a company filing to regulators. SCE has said it had found “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire”.
The Washington Post pointed to a photo by a resident close to Eaton Canyon, where the Altadena blaze ignited, showing a transmission tower that it said was still energized when vegetation ignited below.
