equipment

Singer-songwriters Lisa Simmons-Santa Cruz and her husband Francisco Carroll Santa Cruz were going through a challenging time last March when they worked on Snoop Dogg’s 2025 gospel album, “Altar Call.”

“We were actually writing all those songs in a hotel, displaced,” Carroll Santa Cruz said.

The couple, who have worked in the entertainment industry for more than 29 years writing and producing music for artists like Kelly Rowland and television shows such as “Desperate Housewives,” had lost their Altadena home in the Eaton fire a few months earlier.

Still, the platinum singer-songwriters didn’t want to pass up the opportunity, which came up during the final week of their hotel stay when Simmons-Santa Cruz and Carroll Santa Cruz were introduced to Snoop Dogg through artists Charlie Bereal and Point 5ve. Although Snoop Dogg had also set up a donation center for fire victims, the couple chose not to share their own displacement with him or anyone else in the music industry.

“We needed something the fire couldn’t burn and that was our music,” Simmons-Santa Cruz said. “At that time, we needed something separate from the fire — something that the fire couldn’t touch, it was too traumatic to keep revisiting what we’d lost, so our work became our peace and our escape.”

Despite the loss of their home studio and the limitations of working from a hotel room, they successfully completed the project in a short amount of time. Simmons-Santa Cruz later described the experience as “divine intervention in the midst of tragedy,” saying the music gave them space to heal through faith while doing what they loved most.

“It was comforting, we didn’t have to focus on the fire or what was lost, the music gave us a moment to reflect on life, and it became a saving grace,” she said.

The couple had originally resided in the Altadena home with Simmons-Santa Cruz’s 77-year-old mother, who first bought the house in 1974. In the aftermath of the fires, the couple was forced to figure out where they were going to live as they also grappled with the immense paperwork, bills and insurance claims that came with the loss of their home.

MusiCares, a health and welfare charity for musicians founded by the Recording Academy in 1989, offered them assistance.

“They were like, the FEMA of the music industry,” Simmons-Santa Cruz said.

According to Theresa Wolters, executive director of MusiCares, the organization supports the music community through direct financial assistance for basic living, medical, mental health and substance use needs, as well as free preventive healthcare. One year after the Los Angeles wildfires, MusiCares has directed more than $15 million toward relief and recovery, reaching over 3,200 music professionals affected by the disaster.

When MusiCares stepped in to provide emergency funds for Simmons-Santa Cruz and her husband, it also offered to replace an important instrument for her. Her father, who died seven years ago, helped her pick her first guitar, but the guitar was left behind when the fire broke out.

“That guitar was very sentimental for me,” she said.

Nothing can ever replace the personal memory tied to the guitar, but Simmons-Santa Cruz says that MusiCares offered her hope through this deed, and the new guitar represents that.

“I just broke down, I just started crying, because I’m like, who replaces a guitar? … The last thing that was on my mind was replacing our equipment because we’re still in survival mode,” she said.

Drummer Darryl “JMD” Moore” getting fitted for custom ear molds for his live performances at MusiCares Altadena Health and Wellness Clinic at Grammy Museum L.A. Live

(Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

The couple is living in a rental and continuing to deal with the fallout of the fires, still unable to rebuild their house because of the financial costs. Since the fires, many other music professionals have faced similar hardships, like music producer and drummer Darryl “JMD” Moore, who still has to pay the mortgage on the home he lost while rebuilding another one “like for like” as mandated by the mortgage bank.

“I wanted to build a home for my children, and my grandchildren, my descendants, that would serve them financially and in every other way it could, because I know this property is valuable, my house doubled in value, it was worth twice what I paid for,” Moore said. “But our insurance is not paying us enough money to build the same house, it’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars short, so everybody like us, we’re in a scramble to get the money to fill in the gaps.”

After years of renting in Altadena, Moore finally bought his first home there in 2011, a purchase made possible thanks to his success in the music industry. Moore is known in both the jazz and hip-hop music scenes, having produced acts like the Pharcyde and Freestyle Fellowship while also drumming for jazz greats like Horace Tapscott. Moore originally grew up in South L.A., where he started playing drums at 13, focusing on R&B and funk before eventually being mentored by the renowned jazz saxophonist and singer Elvira “Vi” Redd.

When the Eaton fire began to crawl toward Moore’s house, he said he quickly packed his most important possessions. He took an archival hard drive which contained his music from 2004 to the present, but everything else burned: his recording studio, archival tapes and reels, and his favorite drum set, a vintage 1965 Rogers Holiday kit he bought in the ‘80s.

“I played on albums and records with that Rogers kit, when I moved to New York in ’89, I took that Rogers kit with me, and I pushed that kit down the street every night from the East Village to the West Village to work,” Moore said. “I can get one that looks just like it if I was willing to spend the $4,000, but was it in the back of the subway, did I play it on Bleecker Street?” the jazz drummer said.

Immediately after the fire took his home, Moore needed to work, but he no longer possessed the peripherals and equipment he required to record. MusiCares donated thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment he needed, including a drum set, and it also provided grants to help him pay both his mortgage and the rent where he’s currently staying. Moore has a long way to go before he completely recovers financially, but he says the organization made a significant impact in his life this past year, and he’s grateful.

“My studio’s back online, I’m able to practice, I’m able to work and do some gigs … it gave me my voice back, really, that was the beginning of everything,” the hip-hop producer said.

For Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Jay, a married couple raising a 16-year-old and a 9-year-old, the emotional weight has been just as significant as the financial burden that followed. The couple said they’ve been proactive in prioritizing the mental well-being and happiness of their children since losing their Altadena home.

“It was harder for them early on, when we were moving so frequently, we didn’t have any control over it, we were just trying to get somewhere stable to be, and I think they were processing the loss when they were sad that we didn’t have our home,” Sanford said.

Sanford and her husband are singer-songwriters and have scored music for television shows like “Weeds” and “Orange Is the New Black.” The couple is also in a children’s music band called Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, and they recently composed music for the off-Broadway show “Romy and Michele the Musical.”

Like many others, the couple lost their personal recording studio, making work difficult. The stress has been immense for the couple, but they said MusiCares was able to ease some of the financial burden when the organization offered them grants to cover their mortgage, which they are still on the hook for.

Darryl “JMD” Moore in front of his home that burned down in the wildfires, taken in 2023.

(Darryl “JMD” Moore)

“There’s all the red tape and hurdles and things we have to do just to rebuild our home, so that in itself is like a full-time job that we never wanted, on top of just our regular lives raising our kids and doing work,” Jay said. “So, to have the support of someone like that and have them say you don’t have to worry about this one aspect for a while, is invaluable.”

Recently, Sanford was asked to perform at a groundbreaking ceremony her former Altadena neighbor was having for a new house being built there. Sanford’s daughter had not wanted to go back to the neighborhood, but she decided to accompany her mother anyway. The return was cathartic.

“She was able to walk around our lot and have a private moment, and I asked her how she felt, and she said, ‘I feel safe here, this is my home,’” Sanford said.

At the event, Sanford sang a song she penned in 2011 called, “Acorn,” which was inspired by the grandeur of oak trees and what they symbolize in nature. The song has taken on a different meaning for her in the wake of the fires.

“The acorn is a metaphor, and I think that’s kind of where we all are right now, we have to start over, we have to start small, and eventually we’ll get back to where we were,” Sanford said.

Southern California Edison did not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance of its aging transmission lines that it told regulators was necessary and began billing to customers in the four years before the Jan. 7 wildfires, according to a Times review of regulatory filings.

Edison told state regulators in its 2023 wildfire prevention plan that it believed its giant, high-voltage transmission lines, which carry bulk power across its territory, “generally have a lower risk of ignition” than its smaller distribution wires, which deliver power to neighborhoods.

After two of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, The Times takes a critical look at the past year and the steps taken — or not taken — to prevent this from happening again in all future fires.

While it spent heavily in recent years to reduce the risk that its smaller lines would ignite fires, Edison fell behind on work and inspections it told regulators it planned on its transmission system, where some structures were a century old, according to documents.

Edison’s transmission lines are now suspected of igniting two wildfires in Los Angeles County on the night of Jan. 7, including the devastating Eaton fire, which killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 homes and other structures in Altadena.

Twenty miles away, in the San Fernando Valley, terrified Sylmar residents watched a fire that night burning under the same transmission tower where the deadly Saddleridge fire ignited six years before. Firefighters put out that Jan. 7 blaze, known as the Hurst fire, before it destroyed homes.

Roberto Delgado said the 2019 Saddleridge fire started at this powerline in the hillside behind his Sylmar house. He said the January 7 Hurst began with sparks at this and another nearby powerline. Photographed in Sylmar, CA on Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

After the fires, Edison changed course, and began spending more on its transmission lines, according to executives’ recent comments and state regulatory documents.

The utility began installing more grounding devices on its old transmission lines no longer in service, like the one suspected of igniting the Eaton fire. The company says it believes the idle line, last used 50 years ago, may have momentarily reenergized from a surge in electricity on the live lines running parallel to it, sparking the blaze. The official investigation hasn’t been released.

The added devices give unexpected power on the old lines more places to dissipate into the earth.

A helicopter transports workers during the process of removing Southern California Edison’s tower 208, which is suspected of causing the Eaton Fire, on Monday, May 5, 2025, in Pasadena, Calif.

(William Liang/For The Times)

Edison also began replacing some aging equipment. Sylmar residents said they saw workers in trucks and helicopters replacing hardware on the transmission line where they had watched early flames of both the Hurst fire and the 2019 Saddleridge blaze.

“Not until this year did we see repairs,” said Roberto Delgado, a Sylmar resident who can see Edison’s transmission towers from his home. “Obviously the maintenance in the past was inadequate.”

Jill Anderson, the utility’s chief operating officer, told regulators at an August meeting that the company replaced components prone to failure on a certain transmission line after Jan. 7. Edison later confirmed she was referring to equipment on the line running through Sylmar.

In interviews, Edison executives disputed that maintenance on the company’s transmission lines suffered before Jan. 7.

A helicopter transports workers during the process of removing Southern California Edison’s tower 208, which is suspected of causing the Eaton Fire, on Monday, May 5, 2025, in Pasadena, Calif.

(William Liang/For The Times)

“I do not think that our inspections and maintenance in the years leading up to 2025 were at depressed levels,” said Russell Archer, a top Edison regulatory lawyer.

Scott Johnson, an Edison spokesman, said: “The 13,500 people at Southern California Edison show up every day committed to the safety of the communities where we live and work. There is no higher value than safety here.”

Johnson said the utility prioritized safety both before and after the fire. For example, he said, the company increased aerial and ground inspections of transmission lines in areas at high fire risk in 2022 — and kept them at that higher level in subsequent years.

Among the company’s increased spending this year was an expensive upgrade to a transmission line that the state’s grid operator said was required to more safely shut down five critical transmission lines in L.A. County including those running through Sylmar and Eaton Canyon. That work was expected to be finished by 2023 but was still in progress on Jan. 7.

Edison didn’t preventively shut down the lines in Eaton Canyon or Sylmar on Jan. 7, but said the delayed upgrade had nothing to do with that decision. The company said the wind that night combined with other factors didn’t meet its protocol at the time for the lines to be turned off.

Some proposed maintenance changes will take years.

Work crew dismantles a section of Southern California Edison’s tower 208 which will be removed for further examination on Wednesday, May 7, 2025. The idle transmission tower is suspected of sparking the Eaton fire.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

For example, executives recently told regulators that next year they may begin determining whether some of its 355 miles of idle transmission lines in areas at high-risk of wildfire should be removed for safety reasons. The company said 305 miles of those dormant lines run parallel to energized lines, like the one in Eaton Canyon.

Regulators at the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety asked Edison this summer if any of those lines posed a risk of induction, where they become energized from nearby electrified lines. Edison told them it “has not done a line by line analysis.”

Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, the utility’s parent company, acknowledged in a November interview that the company made changes after the fires, including by replacing a steel part called the y-clevis, which was found to have failed in the minutes before the 2019 Saddleridge fire.

“We saw some concerns with that so we accelerated a program to replace them,” he said.

Pizarro said he continued to back the company’s statements before Jan. 7 that it had decreased the risk that its lines would spark a wildfire by as much as 90% since 2018, including by spending billions of dollars for prevention work on its smaller distribution lines.

He called the Eaton fire “a black swan event” — one of “low probability, but high consequence.”

Aging equipment

About 13,000 miles of transmission lines carry bulk power through Edison’s territory. In comparison, it has nearly 70,000 miles of the smaller distribution lines, delivering power to homes.

Because the high-voltage transmission lines are interconnected, utilities must keep the system balanced, trying to prevent sudden increases or decreases in power. An abrupt jump in electricity flowing on one transmission line can cause surges and problems miles away.

In 2023, Edison said in a filing to the state Public Utilities Commission that the average age of its infrastructure was increasing as it replaced equipment less frequently than in previous times.

More than 90% of its transmission towers are at least 30 years old — the age when the first signs of corrosion appear, it said in a filing. Some transmission lines and pylons are nearing 100 years of service and have never had major overhauls, the company said.

Edison said it began looking for corroded transmission towers in 2020, but found so many that it temporarily stopped those evaluations in 2022 to focus on fixing those found unsafe.

In 2021, the commission’s Public Advocates Office warned that Edison wasn’t completing maintenance and upgrades that the utility said was “critical and necessary” and was authorized to bill to customers.

Edison had been under-spending on that work since 2018, staff at the Public Advocates Office wrote. They urged regulators to investigate, saying that “risks to the public are not addressed” and customers may be owed a refund.

That shortfall in spending continued through 2024.

According to a report Edison filed in April, the company did not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on transmission system work that regulators had authorized from 2021 to 2024.

Among the shortfalls was $270 million to fix thousands of deficiencies found more than a decade ago where its transmission lines hang too close to the ground, the report said. Also unspent was $38.5 million authorized for transmission operating maintenance and an additional $155 million for capital maintenance.

Edison planned to perform 57,440 detailed inspections of its transmission poles in those four years, the report said, but performed only 27,941, citing other priorities.

Edison said its inspection numbers still met state regulatory requirements.

A helicopter flies over the downtown Los Angeles skyline during a cloudy day on Monday, May 5, 2025, in Pasadena, Calif.

(William Liang/For The Times)

The utility also replaced 38% fewer substation transformers than it said it would. And while it was authorized to replace 14,280 transmission poles it restored just 10,031, the report stated.

Archer said some uncompleted work was for an inspection program using drones in areas at lower risk of fire. Instead the company focused those aerial inspections in high-risk areas, he said.

He said some shortfalls were for upgrade projects that were delayed for reasons beyond the company’s control.

Utilities are allowed to pass on the costs of approved maintenance projects to customers in the monthly rates they charge. State regulators also give them some flexibility to decide whether to spend the money on approved projects, or something else.

Archer said that most of the unspent money involved capital expenses like purchases of new transmission towers and upgrade projects. Once regulators authorize a capital project, he said, customers begin paying a small portion of the cost annually over the assets’ expected life, which is often decades. If the project is not completed, those annual payments stop, he said, adding that state regulations don’t allow Edison to issue refunds for most unspent funds.

Transmission lines known to spark deadly fires

Before Jan. 7, Edison told regulators in its wildfire mitigation plan that it had focused its prevention efforts on its smaller distribution system. It said transmission lines posed a lower threat because they were taller and had wires more widely spaced.

Yet the deadliest wildfire in state history was caused when equipment on a century-old Pacific Gas & Electric transmission tower failed. The 2018 Camp fire killed 85 people and destroyed most of the town of Paradise.

A year later, the Kincade fire in Sonoma County ignited when a steel part on a PG&E transmission line broke. Like Edison’s line in Eaton Canyon, that transmission cable was no longer serving customers.

Edison is now facing hundreds of lawsuits claiming it was negligent in maintaining its transmission lines in Eaton Canyon and for leaving the old unused line in place — allegations the company denies.

At 6:11 pm on Jan. 7, Edison recorded a fault — a sudden change in electricity flow — on a transmission line running from La Cañada Flintridge to Eagle Rock, according to its report to regulators.

Faults can be caused by lines slapping together, a piece of equipment breaking or other reasons. Edison said it did not know the cause.

The fault caused a momentary surge in current on the four live lines running through Eaton Canyon, the company said, which may have energized the idle line.

Investigators view the Edison electrical lines, transmission towers and surrounding area, which is a location that is being investigated as the possible origin of the Eaton fire in Eaton Canyon in Altadena Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

State regulations require utilities to remove old lines no longer in service. Edison says that even though it hasn’t used the line in decades it sees a need for it in the future.

Edison’s transmission manual dated December 20, 2024 states that it inspects idle lines every three years, while active ones are inspected annually.

Executives said they went beyond the manual’s requirements, inspecting the idle line in Eaton Canyon annually in the years before the fire.

Edison declined to provide records of those inspections.

Sylmar line suspected of two wildfires

Edison says it believes its transmission line running through the foothills above Sylmar was involved in the ignition of the Jan. 7 Hurst fire. But it denies the line ignited the 2019 Saddleridge fire.

The 2019 fire killed at least one and destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes and other structures.

This year, lawyers for victims of the 2019 fire argued in court the two fires started in the same way: steel equipment holding up the transmission lines broke, causing a sudden, massive surge in energy that triggered sparks and flames at two or more towers located miles away.

The lawyers say the line, constructed in 1970, is not properly grounded so that sudden increases in energy don’t disperse into the soil — a problem they say the company failed to fix.

Edison denies the claims, calling their description of the fire’s start an “exotic ignition theory…contrary to accepted scientific principles.”

A judge recently denied Edison’s request to dismiss the case.