So take the winner of this X prize, give them $500 million, and what are viewed as the next four best teams, and give them each $125 million. That's $1 billion, total.
Tell all five of them to estimate what their system would cost to lower the damages in each of the 20 most expensive fires (adjusted for inflation) in U.S. history by 90 percent. Tell them each to budget $5 million for the effort, because there will be five rounds of questions and answers with updates on costs for each team.
Then have them build prototypes to address a situation similar to those that occurred in the most 20 expensive fires in U.S. history. That would probably involve 70+ mph winds, dry vegetation, and a fire that starts fairly close to a densely populated area. Then find a place that has similar weather and vegetation conditions, and wait until the weather is similar, and call in a "fire" from a random place, and see how their systems respond.
The total cost is a trivial $1 billion, and the U.S. government has five highly refined estimates of cost, and five prototype systems.
One of the competitors for the X Prize I linked to above is the company, "Rain." They're collaborating with Sikorsky, and already have a prototype of a remotely-piloted firefighting helicopter:
“Government agencies, aerial firefighting operators, and investors are coming together to learn and see how both flight and mission autonomy can help prevent high intensity million-acre wildfires,” said Maxwell Brodie, Rain CEO. “Wildfires cost the United States over $390 billion annually, and multiple risk factors are set to grow up to 30 percent by 2030. We look forward to demonstrating to lawmakers how autonomous aircraft can stop fires from breaking out, or continue the fight into the night, and in turbulent and smoky conditions, where crewed aircraft wouldn’t venture.”
They claim the *annual* cost of wildfires in the U.S. is $390 billion. (!!!). Just to speculate on what this means, suppose the cost of the remotely-piloted firefighting helicopters, with full-scale production, is $20 million each. And suppose 20 of those crashed every year, while fighting fires. That's "only" $400 million...or approximately ***1/1000th*** of the claimed annual cost of wildfires in the U.S.
P.S. The claimed cost of $390 billion seems ridiculously high (except maybe for 2025). Here's an estimate of $20 billion for 2023:
Still, if 20 helicopters are lost, at $20 million each, that's $400 million, which is still a factor of 50 less than the 2023 estimated losses of $20 billion.
You mentioned the Marshall Fire. I would like to discuss that fire in very detailed, engineering/science oriented manner. I'm particularly interested in an almost minute-by-minute account of what houses burned at what time, and exactly how the house initially caught fire.
I don't know if you're interested in such a discussion? If you're not (and I can completely understand if you're not), do you know of someone who might be?
I'm interested, as a mechanical engineer, with coming up with new systems that can prevent this sort of thing. City of Louisville, Owl Lane:
444 - Destroyed
446 - Destroyed
448 - Destroyed
450 - Destroyed
452 - Destroyed
454 - Destroyed
456 - Destroyed
458 - Destroyed
Etc. etc., for 23 pages. :-(
To me, this is just not something that should happen in the 21st century United States. (Or any 21st century developed country, for that matter.)
I think one important thing to note in the Palisades and other fires is the truism that if they had been put out immediately, there wouldn't have been...$100+ billion in damages.
So I know that at least *I* will be thinking of, "What would be the cost of a system that would have put out each of these fires in the first 30 minutes or less?"
And if the capital cost of such a system was in the tens of billions of dollars, and the operating cost a billion dollars (or two or three) per year, based on these fires alone, such a system should be judged as worthwhile.
The LA fires have renewed my interest in solutions to significantly reduce the damage from wildfires. (This has been a long-standing interest, going back to Australian Black Saturday fires of 2009, or possibly even earlier.)
This interest interacts well with my interest in preventing damage from hurricanes. (That may seem surprising, but they're actually tied together pretty well, if one thinks about in a metaphorical "view from 20,000 feet." :-)) The hurricane damage reduction interest I can firmly trace back to Katrina in 2005.
Right now, a significant part of my time is unfortunately taken up by trying to help out a young friend who is currently incarcerated. (Don't get me started on the "justice" system in the U.S.! :-( )
But I'll try to comment here as I have available time. To start, here is my *current* assessment of the location of the start of the Palisades fire:
I *currently* think the Palisades fire originally started in Temescal Canyon, somewhere between Skull Rock and the more-famous Temescal Canyon Falls. The coordinates of Skull Rock are 34.07284, -118.54285. Anyone wanting to see that location can simply enter those coordinates into a Google search. There's no need to go to Google Maps, or even enter the words, "Skull Rock." (In fact, there's more than one "Skull Rock" in the U.S., so it's best to enter *only* the coordinates.
I've change my mind (again). The New Year's Day fire was north of Skull Rock, and to the *west* of the Temescal Ridge Trail. Here is my "formerly known as Twitter" posting on my new assessment of the possible fire start location:
The Washington Post false color satellite imagery of the burn scar for the New Year's fire is very helpful in locating *that* fire. As I wrote in my Twitter/X post, I think the center of the burn scar for *that* fire has coordinates of (approximately! ;-)): 34.074322, -118.544466.
When proximal and distal causality are complex or poorly understood, "narrative causality", substituting blame for cause, often fills the knowledge vacuum . Wildfires are a good example. Although lightning and arson have been responsible for many California and other fires, so have utility equipment. From the media's emphasis on blame and on the relative costs of fuels for electrical generation, the public is poorly informed of the very large percentage cost of the transmission infrastructure, its capital and maintenance costs of 20, 30 percent, and more. Lawsuits blaming and fining utilities billions of dollars for wildfires in California is counterproductive if it bankrupts or creates utility financial stress making it less able to maintain and improve the grid which should be a high order, but very expensive policy implementation. The narrative of blame that obscures the very high costs and under financing of grid maintenance and improvement is an example of narrative causality replacing policy causality. So long as we want to have power lines above ground along our roads and not remove all the nearby tall trees, which would be incredibly expensive in many areas, there will be the opportunity to blame fires on utility failures.
An even more egregious example is the narrative promoted by The Guardian and others. It's another blame narrative, but also a marketing narrative. From reading The Guardian, one might think that almost all human problems are resulting from or made worse by an ongoing climate crisis and that the obvious solution to the crisis is eliminating fossil fuels and ramping up use of wind and solar immediately. "Narrative causality" usually violates Occam's razor and the aphorism attributed to Einstein- "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I think that Reason article is generally excellent. There is one statement that's a bit problematic, though:
"Those wildfires will still destroy homes and tragically continue to claim lives. Better policy can mitigate the damage and reduce risk. But those risks can never be erased so long as we live on a planet that occasionally wants to kill us."
I totally agree that the risks "can never be erased"...but stating it like that detracts from the lesson that I think should be learned from these fires. These fires cost $100+ billion. I seems to me that there surely must have been something that could have been done that cost *less* than, say, $50 billion, that would have avoided more than $50 billion in losses. And, as a society, we can do something that avoids more damage losses than it costs to do whatever thing it is, we, as a society, should want to do that.
Just to take one possibility: Human firefighters cost a lot of money, and we understandably don't want to put them in harm's way. For example, suppose a house is on fire, and the wind is blowing at 100+ mph towards adjacent houses, that are very close by. We wouldn't put human firefighters on the *downwind* side of that house, putting water on the sides of the adjacent houses, that face the burning house. And we wouldn't have human firefighters climbing on the roofs of those adjacent houses, putting out fires caused by the embers from the burning house. But we absolutely should be willing to sacrifice robots in both those situations. If the robots are destroyed, and/or fail in their jobs, we just build new robots to do better.
Our "policy" should be to drop politics, and focus on the problem. For example, the in the Palisades fire, Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty, and it shouldn't have been. But look at all the damage that happened before that even came to be an issue. And look at the Marshall Fire in Colorado. There was no empty reservoir there. And look at the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, CA in 2018 . There was no empty reservoir there. The basic problem in these recent fires, and in the Marshall Fire, and in the Camp fire, is that there were very strong winds, in dry conditions, and the houses were close together. How do we deal with those problems, irrespective of politics?
You state “ Similarly, policies focused on risk reduction via controlled burns or altering seasonal precipitation patterns would need to be evaluated for their potential efficacy in actual risk reduction on specific time scales.”
What do you mean by “altering seasonal precipitation patterns”? Is this even possible?
"What do you mean by 'altering seasonal precipitation patterns'? Is this even possible?"
In my mind, "altering seasonal precipitation patterns" is the sort of option that would come out of a "brainstorming" session, in which all options, including those "outside the box" would be put out as possibilities.
In that brainstorming context, it seems to me that "altering seasonal precipitation patterns" would be in the "outside the box" potential solutions, such as filling cruise missiles with water, rather than explosives.
:-)
It may seem like I'm kidding about filling cruise missiles with water. But even though that's way outside the box, something like that potentially has merit. The idea is to get water to places that are difficult to get to by land, and to get there even when conditions would be unsafe for human pilots (e.g. winds of 100+ mph). Probably missiles filled with water would not turn out to be a preferred option...just like "altering seasonal precipitation patterns" would not turn out to be a preferred option.
The word 'why' is interesting as it seems to me to mean - almost always - what and/or how.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' means what factor(s) motivated the chicken to cross the road. Also, what sequence of events brought the chicken to the road, and how did the chicken get there (walk or fly)?
Anyway, when I hear 'why' I immediately translate into 'what' or 'how'...
Michael Schellenberger also has a substack post today about this situation and its also quite good. He is usually good at sorting out the various narratives that are wrong or partly wrong.
This is a good post Roger, but it won't be useful if policy makers and political leaders are incompetent. It does seem that this has become the biggest part of the problem in the deep blue states. This includes Washington state where we are increasingly a high regulation and high cost state. The pandemic really accelerated this trend. Never let a crisis go to waste and all that.
The most effective policies are ones that address the most combinations of circumstances at the least cost. Since putting out a fires is a race against time of marshalling resources, the key is focusing on response time. This means having heightened monitoring for fire and a rapid response available to every location. The more explosive the conditions the more the heightened response monitoring required. The point where the model shows it more economical to build fire breaks than increase response capability then that becomes the favored policy tool. Fire breaks are also more fail-safe than hydrants and firefighters.
Approaching this question as an engineer with a career in a high hazard industry, the question is, really, "what analytic tools are available to help us look at the problem in a logical and structured manner"?
Computational models ain't the answer.
The BowTie analysis method provides a useful structure for thinking about the problem.
If the top event is "ignition of flammable material" them on the left hand side of the diagram are the factors causing ignition, such as power lines, BBQs and deliberate arson (which seems to have been a factor here). Between these factors and ignition are possible barriers, such as burial of power lines / improved maintenance and access control to sensitive areas. Further thought might lead to the conclusion that there is no effective barrier against arson.
On the right hand side of the diagram are the consequences of ignition. Principally, in this case, destruction of property. What are the barriers between ignition and destruction: Prescribed burning to reduce fuel load, creation of sterile areas, zoning of housing, mowing of grassland, intensive monitoring, rapid response capability?
The Bowtie method then allows for the addition of factors (such as politics) which may erode the strength of individual barriers.
Irrespective of the politics, a model-free objective analysis of the problem in a structured manner should be capable of laying out all the options, strengths and weaknesses from which an effective policy response might be developed.
When my doctoral students started running computational models, of systems that produced high densities and high pressures, a large fraction of them spoke and thought as though the model was the reality. A few understood better at the start, but for many of them it took time, energy, and the experience of predictive failures to beat them into a more realistic perspective. Well, we had laboratory experiments to provide them with predictive failures.
Much natural-system modeling, whether regional or global, does not provide good opportunities to learn by failing. Bad conclusions follow.
In my experience, significant event such as this have multiple factors that come together as causes; what in the medical field that call "constellations" of factors.
The fire service has a model called the "fire triangle". It has three elements — heat, fuel and oxygen that come together and you have a fire. Remove and one and the fire goes out. You can take all of the speculative causes for these fires and relate to any one of the three elements.
Hi,
I see that at least some people are already on what I think could be the right approach:
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/wildfire/articles/announcing-the-xprize-wildfire-autonomous-qualified-teams
So take the winner of this X prize, give them $500 million, and what are viewed as the next four best teams, and give them each $125 million. That's $1 billion, total.
Tell all five of them to estimate what their system would cost to lower the damages in each of the 20 most expensive fires (adjusted for inflation) in U.S. history by 90 percent. Tell them each to budget $5 million for the effort, because there will be five rounds of questions and answers with updates on costs for each team.
Then have them build prototypes to address a situation similar to those that occurred in the most 20 expensive fires in U.S. history. That would probably involve 70+ mph winds, dry vegetation, and a fire that starts fairly close to a densely populated area. Then find a place that has similar weather and vegetation conditions, and wait until the weather is similar, and call in a "fire" from a random place, and see how their systems respond.
The total cost is a trivial $1 billion, and the U.S. government has five highly refined estimates of cost, and five prototype systems.
One of the competitors for the X Prize I linked to above is the company, "Rain." They're collaborating with Sikorsky, and already have a prototype of a remotely-piloted firefighting helicopter:
https://verticalmag.com/press-releases/sikorsky-rain-demonstrate-autonomous-flight-capability-to-combat-wildfires/
From the Vertical magazine article:
“Government agencies, aerial firefighting operators, and investors are coming together to learn and see how both flight and mission autonomy can help prevent high intensity million-acre wildfires,” said Maxwell Brodie, Rain CEO. “Wildfires cost the United States over $390 billion annually, and multiple risk factors are set to grow up to 30 percent by 2030. We look forward to demonstrating to lawmakers how autonomous aircraft can stop fires from breaking out, or continue the fight into the night, and in turbulent and smoky conditions, where crewed aircraft wouldn’t venture.”
They claim the *annual* cost of wildfires in the U.S. is $390 billion. (!!!). Just to speculate on what this means, suppose the cost of the remotely-piloted firefighting helicopters, with full-scale production, is $20 million each. And suppose 20 of those crashed every year, while fighting fires. That's "only" $400 million...or approximately ***1/1000th*** of the claimed annual cost of wildfires in the U.S.
P.S. The claimed cost of $390 billion seems ridiculously high (except maybe for 2025). Here's an estimate of $20 billion for 2023:
https://www.iii.org/article/background-on-wildfires
Still, if 20 helicopters are lost, at $20 million each, that's $400 million, which is still a factor of 50 less than the 2023 estimated losses of $20 billion.
Great piece Roger, I found thie attached piece and it says much of what you write about but specifically about Los Angeles https://reason.com/2025/01/14/the-l-a-fires-are-a-natural-disaster-not-a-policy-disaster/
Great piece Roger, I found thie attached piece and it says much of what you write about but specifically about Los Angeles https://reason.com/2025/01/14/the-l-a-fires-are-a-natural-disaster-not-a-policy-disaster/
Hi Roger,
You mentioned the Marshall Fire. I would like to discuss that fire in very detailed, engineering/science oriented manner. I'm particularly interested in an almost minute-by-minute account of what houses burned at what time, and exactly how the house initially caught fire.
I don't know if you're interested in such a discussion? If you're not (and I can completely understand if you're not), do you know of someone who might be?
I'm interested, as a mechanical engineer, with coming up with new systems that can prevent this sort of thing. City of Louisville, Owl Lane:
444 - Destroyed
446 - Destroyed
448 - Destroyed
450 - Destroyed
452 - Destroyed
454 - Destroyed
456 - Destroyed
458 - Destroyed
Etc. etc., for 23 pages. :-(
To me, this is just not something that should happen in the 21st century United States. (Or any 21st century developed country, for that matter.)
Mark
I think one important thing to note in the Palisades and other fires is the truism that if they had been put out immediately, there wouldn't have been...$100+ billion in damages.
So I know that at least *I* will be thinking of, "What would be the cost of a system that would have put out each of these fires in the first 30 minutes or less?"
And if the capital cost of such a system was in the tens of billions of dollars, and the operating cost a billion dollars (or two or three) per year, based on these fires alone, such a system should be judged as worthwhile.
Hi Roger,
The LA fires have renewed my interest in solutions to significantly reduce the damage from wildfires. (This has been a long-standing interest, going back to Australian Black Saturday fires of 2009, or possibly even earlier.)
This interest interacts well with my interest in preventing damage from hurricanes. (That may seem surprising, but they're actually tied together pretty well, if one thinks about in a metaphorical "view from 20,000 feet." :-)) The hurricane damage reduction interest I can firmly trace back to Katrina in 2005.
Right now, a significant part of my time is unfortunately taken up by trying to help out a young friend who is currently incarcerated. (Don't get me started on the "justice" system in the U.S.! :-( )
But I'll try to comment here as I have available time. To start, here is my *current* assessment of the location of the start of the Palisades fire:
https://x.com/MarkBahner/status/1878301240360071363
I *currently* think the Palisades fire originally started in Temescal Canyon, somewhere between Skull Rock and the more-famous Temescal Canyon Falls. The coordinates of Skull Rock are 34.07284, -118.54285. Anyone wanting to see that location can simply enter those coordinates into a Google search. There's no need to go to Google Maps, or even enter the words, "Skull Rock." (In fact, there's more than one "Skull Rock" in the U.S., so it's best to enter *only* the coordinates.
Best wishes,
Mark
I've change my mind (again). The New Year's Day fire was north of Skull Rock, and to the *west* of the Temescal Ridge Trail. Here is my "formerly known as Twitter" posting on my new assessment of the possible fire start location:
https://x.com/MarkBahner/status/1878560523362390088
The Washington Post false color satellite imagery of the burn scar for the New Year's fire is very helpful in locating *that* fire. As I wrote in my Twitter/X post, I think the center of the burn scar for *that* fire has coordinates of (approximately! ;-)): 34.074322, -118.544466.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/12/palisades-fire-origin-new-years-eve-fire/
When proximal and distal causality are complex or poorly understood, "narrative causality", substituting blame for cause, often fills the knowledge vacuum . Wildfires are a good example. Although lightning and arson have been responsible for many California and other fires, so have utility equipment. From the media's emphasis on blame and on the relative costs of fuels for electrical generation, the public is poorly informed of the very large percentage cost of the transmission infrastructure, its capital and maintenance costs of 20, 30 percent, and more. Lawsuits blaming and fining utilities billions of dollars for wildfires in California is counterproductive if it bankrupts or creates utility financial stress making it less able to maintain and improve the grid which should be a high order, but very expensive policy implementation. The narrative of blame that obscures the very high costs and under financing of grid maintenance and improvement is an example of narrative causality replacing policy causality. So long as we want to have power lines above ground along our roads and not remove all the nearby tall trees, which would be incredibly expensive in many areas, there will be the opportunity to blame fires on utility failures.
An even more egregious example is the narrative promoted by The Guardian and others. It's another blame narrative, but also a marketing narrative. From reading The Guardian, one might think that almost all human problems are resulting from or made worse by an ongoing climate crisis and that the obvious solution to the crisis is eliminating fossil fuels and ramping up use of wind and solar immediately. "Narrative causality" usually violates Occam's razor and the aphorism attributed to Einstein- "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Good work Take a look at this https://reason.com/2025/01/14/the-l-a-fires-are-a-natural-disaster-not-a-policy-disaster/
I think that Reason article is generally excellent. There is one statement that's a bit problematic, though:
"Those wildfires will still destroy homes and tragically continue to claim lives. Better policy can mitigate the damage and reduce risk. But those risks can never be erased so long as we live on a planet that occasionally wants to kill us."
I totally agree that the risks "can never be erased"...but stating it like that detracts from the lesson that I think should be learned from these fires. These fires cost $100+ billion. I seems to me that there surely must have been something that could have been done that cost *less* than, say, $50 billion, that would have avoided more than $50 billion in losses. And, as a society, we can do something that avoids more damage losses than it costs to do whatever thing it is, we, as a society, should want to do that.
Just to take one possibility: Human firefighters cost a lot of money, and we understandably don't want to put them in harm's way. For example, suppose a house is on fire, and the wind is blowing at 100+ mph towards adjacent houses, that are very close by. We wouldn't put human firefighters on the *downwind* side of that house, putting water on the sides of the adjacent houses, that face the burning house. And we wouldn't have human firefighters climbing on the roofs of those adjacent houses, putting out fires caused by the embers from the burning house. But we absolutely should be willing to sacrifice robots in both those situations. If the robots are destroyed, and/or fail in their jobs, we just build new robots to do better.
Our "policy" should be to drop politics, and focus on the problem. For example, the in the Palisades fire, Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty, and it shouldn't have been. But look at all the damage that happened before that even came to be an issue. And look at the Marshall Fire in Colorado. There was no empty reservoir there. And look at the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, CA in 2018 . There was no empty reservoir there. The basic problem in these recent fires, and in the Marshall Fire, and in the Camp fire, is that there were very strong winds, in dry conditions, and the houses were close together. How do we deal with those problems, irrespective of politics?
You state “ Similarly, policies focused on risk reduction via controlled burns or altering seasonal precipitation patterns would need to be evaluated for their potential efficacy in actual risk reduction on specific time scales.”
What do you mean by “altering seasonal precipitation patterns”? Is this even possible?
"What do you mean by 'altering seasonal precipitation patterns'? Is this even possible?"
In my mind, "altering seasonal precipitation patterns" is the sort of option that would come out of a "brainstorming" session, in which all options, including those "outside the box" would be put out as possibilities.
In that brainstorming context, it seems to me that "altering seasonal precipitation patterns" would be in the "outside the box" potential solutions, such as filling cruise missiles with water, rather than explosives.
:-)
It may seem like I'm kidding about filling cruise missiles with water. But even though that's way outside the box, something like that potentially has merit. The idea is to get water to places that are difficult to get to by land, and to get there even when conditions would be unsafe for human pilots (e.g. winds of 100+ mph). Probably missiles filled with water would not turn out to be a preferred option...just like "altering seasonal precipitation patterns" would not turn out to be a preferred option.
The word 'why' is interesting as it seems to me to mean - almost always - what and/or how.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' means what factor(s) motivated the chicken to cross the road. Also, what sequence of events brought the chicken to the road, and how did the chicken get there (walk or fly)?
Anyway, when I hear 'why' I immediately translate into 'what' or 'how'...
Michael Schellenberger also has a substack post today about this situation and its also quite good. He is usually good at sorting out the various narratives that are wrong or partly wrong.
Check this out https://reason.com/2025/01/14/the-l-a-fires-are-a-natural-disaster-not-a-policy-disaster/
This is a good post Roger, but it won't be useful if policy makers and political leaders are incompetent. It does seem that this has become the biggest part of the problem in the deep blue states. This includes Washington state where we are increasingly a high regulation and high cost state. The pandemic really accelerated this trend. Never let a crisis go to waste and all that.
The most effective policies are ones that address the most combinations of circumstances at the least cost. Since putting out a fires is a race against time of marshalling resources, the key is focusing on response time. This means having heightened monitoring for fire and a rapid response available to every location. The more explosive the conditions the more the heightened response monitoring required. The point where the model shows it more economical to build fire breaks than increase response capability then that becomes the favored policy tool. Fire breaks are also more fail-safe than hydrants and firefighters.
On the percentage of a percentage trick, at least they also shoes the actual change (.05 to .06).
That is better than just showing the percentage.
Agreed. And a proper showing of the uncertainties would make it clear that this change is not remotely significant, practically or statistically.
Indeed!
Approaching this question as an engineer with a career in a high hazard industry, the question is, really, "what analytic tools are available to help us look at the problem in a logical and structured manner"?
Computational models ain't the answer.
The BowTie analysis method provides a useful structure for thinking about the problem.
If the top event is "ignition of flammable material" them on the left hand side of the diagram are the factors causing ignition, such as power lines, BBQs and deliberate arson (which seems to have been a factor here). Between these factors and ignition are possible barriers, such as burial of power lines / improved maintenance and access control to sensitive areas. Further thought might lead to the conclusion that there is no effective barrier against arson.
On the right hand side of the diagram are the consequences of ignition. Principally, in this case, destruction of property. What are the barriers between ignition and destruction: Prescribed burning to reduce fuel load, creation of sterile areas, zoning of housing, mowing of grassland, intensive monitoring, rapid response capability?
The Bowtie method then allows for the addition of factors (such as politics) which may erode the strength of individual barriers.
Irrespective of the politics, a model-free objective analysis of the problem in a structured manner should be capable of laying out all the options, strengths and weaknesses from which an effective policy response might be developed.
When my doctoral students started running computational models, of systems that produced high densities and high pressures, a large fraction of them spoke and thought as though the model was the reality. A few understood better at the start, but for many of them it took time, energy, and the experience of predictive failures to beat them into a more realistic perspective. Well, we had laboratory experiments to provide them with predictive failures.
Much natural-system modeling, whether regional or global, does not provide good opportunities to learn by failing. Bad conclusions follow.
In my experience, significant event such as this have multiple factors that come together as causes; what in the medical field that call "constellations" of factors.
The fire service has a model called the "fire triangle". It has three elements — heat, fuel and oxygen that come together and you have a fire. Remove and one and the fire goes out. You can take all of the speculative causes for these fires and relate to any one of the three elements.