Armed with drones, long-distance camera lenses and metal detectors, a hillside in Eaton Canyon has become the focus of intense scrutiny over the last month by teams of private investigators now seeking clues on whether Southern California Edison equipment caused the massive fire that destroyed large swaths of Altadena. Some of the findings and theories of these privately hired teams of fire investigators and electrical engineers have emerged in more than 40 lawsuits that residents have filed against the utility. Much of the focus has been centered on a group of transmission towers where the first flames were seen just as the Eaton fire exploded. Earlier this week, a new lawsuit alleged that an idle transmission tower on the hillside -- one that has not been in use for more than 50 years -- might have sparked the devastating blaze. With more than 9,000 homes lost and 17 people killed, liability is going to be a costly question that could affect how Altadena is rebuilt.

As part of the first SAP Esri Spatial Hackathon, GIS developers, enterprise architects, data scientists, BI developers, and students got together to solve a variety of challenges through the use of geospatial analytics and machine learning technology. With the help of NextGen and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab – who ran the technology behind the hackathon – teams were given 40 hours to define the issue at hand and develop compelling platforms that provide an effective solution that can be applied in real-world scenarios while 89% of participants had no prior experience with SAP HANA Spatial. Finalist team, We're Working on It, was a corporate team from Southern California Edison (SCE), the primary electricity supply company for much of Southern California. This team developed a solution to predict grid usage for solar, using SAP HANA, ArcGIS Pro, and R-ArcGIS Bridge to show which parts of the grid may need modernization to maintain reliability and support clean energy. The picture below shows the SAP HANA as the enterprise geodatabase for ArcGIS Pro.