Arrest has fire victims asking: Who's to blame?

Experts split on whether LAFD is responsible for reignited blaze

- JAMES RAINEY

THE LAFD responds to the Lachman fire on Jan. 1. Days later, it rekindled to become the Palisades fire.

KeyNews

The sad and apparently troubled young man now being accused of setting the hideous and deadly Palisades fire will be the target of venom, to be sure.

But what’s maddening to many of the people who owned the more than 6,800 homes and other buildings incinerated in January, and to the families of the 12 victims killed, is that fire crews seemed to have the fire licked. Six days earlier. Until they didn’t.

That’s because the Palisades fire now clearly seems to have been a “holdover” fire. That’s what fire professionals call a blaze that reignites hours or even days after it’s first contained.

A FIRE investigator says the LAFD didn't do enough on Jan. 1.

CHRISTINA HOUSE Los Angeles Times

Federal authorities on Wednesday charged Jonathan Rinderknecht with arson, alleging not only that the 29-year-old sometime Uber driver set off that modest fire in the first minutes of 2025 but also that, “unbeknownst to anyone, the fire continued to smolder and burn underground within the root structure of dense vegetation.”

“On January 7, heavy winds caused the underground fire to surface and spread above ground in what became known as the Palisades Fire,” the complaint against Rinderknecht says.

If we didn’t recognize it before, those of us who live in fire country now need to understand how "reignition" presents a clear and present danger.

Some of the worst fires of modern times have actually not been "new" but rather the rekindling of flames that firefighters were sure they had defeated.