The water system used to fight the Palisades fire in Los Angeles buckled under the demands of what turned out to be the most destructive fire in city history, with some hydrants running dry as they were overstressed without assistance from firefighting aircraft for hours early Wednesday.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was pumping from aqueducts and groundwater into the system, but demand was so high that it wasn’t enough to refill three 1-million gallon tanks in hilly Pacific Palisades that help pressurize hydrants for the neighborhood. Many went dry as at least 1,000 buildings were engulfed in flames.
The dry hydrants prompted a swirl of criticism on social media, including from President-elect Donald Trump, against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s water management policies.
But state and local officials and experts forcefully hit back, saying critics were connecting unrelated issues and spreading false information during a crisis. State water distribution choices were not behind the hydrant problems, they said, nor was a lack of overall supply in the region.
In a post on his Truth Social media network, Trump connected it to criticism of the state’s approach to balancing the distribution of water to farms and cities with the need to protect endangered species including the Delta smelt. Trump has sided with farmers over environmentalists in a long-running dispute over California’s scarce water resources.
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said later at a news conference that 3 million gallons of water were available when the Palisades fire started but the demand was four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”
Hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, Quiñones said, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts. Mayor Bass said 20% of hydrants went dry.
“People are literally fleeing. People have lost their lives. Kids lost their schools. Families completely torn asunder. Churches burned down. And this guy wanted to politicize it,” Newsom said of Trump on CNN. He contrasted the former president’s accusations with President Joe Biden standing by the devastated communities.
Peter Gleick, senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on global water sustainability, dismissed Trump’s criticism as well.
“Those fights have been going on for a long time, and they have not affected in any way water supply for firefighting in southern California,” Gleick said.
About 40 percent of Los Angeles city water comes from state-controlled projects connected to northern California, where the Delta smelt live, and the state has
limited the water it delivers this year. Yet the southern California reservoirs these canals help feed are at
above-average levels for this time of year.
Rick Caruso, a real estate developer and former Los Angeles Department of Water and Power commissioner who lost to Bass in the last mayoral race, said officials needed to answer for the system’s failures.
“You got thousands of homes destroyed, families destroyed, businesses destroyed,” he said. “I think you can figure out a way to get more water in the hydrants. I don’t think there’s room for excuses here.”
A widening problem
Los Angeles isn’t the only city to see its public water system stressed by firefighting demand as human-caused climate change makes wildfires worse,
experts say.
Large urban fires can also melt or otherwise damage pipes, causing them to leak large amounts of water, draining pressure from the system, said Andrew Whelton, an engineering professor at Purdue University. Individual homes with water meters that have a remote shutoff can help utilities quickly stem such losses, Whelton said.
In Hawaii the 2023 fire that ripped through the historic town of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people burned so quickly in a dense area that
pipes burst, making it hard to maintain enough water pressure for firefighting efforts. In the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, the city of Louisville’s water department had workers
manually open valves to let untreated water from the Colorado River and Boulder Creek into pipes to restore pressure. That helped firefighters but also led to water contamination.
Greg Pierce, professor of urban environmental policy at the University of California who had a family member lose a house in one of the blazes, pushed back on Caruso’s assertion that the loss of water pressure was a clear sign of mismanagement.
Providing enough water could amount to a subsidy for very high-income areas, he said. “I think the conversation has to be more about whether these areas are habitable.”
John Fisher, a retired battalion chief with San Diego Fire-Rescue, said California is among the best in the world at ensuring communities share resources and staffing to put out big fires.
“We get it done. We pre-position resources, we staff up reserve engines,” he said. “Yesterday, there (was) a lot more fire than there is firefighters. That will start to change as the wind dies out and additional firefighters arrive and we’ll get the upper hand on it.”
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