Hydrants in the hills of the Pacific Palisades ran dry amid one of the worst blazes ever seen in Los Angeles County, forcing firefighters to scramble to draw water from pools and ponds or — even worse — watch as homes and businesses burned.
On the other side of the county, water pressure in Altadena dropped to a trickle at times as flames from the Eaton Fire destroyed neighborhoods.
As stories of firefighters struggling to find water circulated on social media and in the news, residents demanded answers. The response from local officials was consistent: municipal water systems just aren’t designed to fight such intense and prolonged wildfires.
But as climate change makes what were once-in-a-lifetime disasters more common and the borders between urban and wildlands further narrow, stakeholders are now questioning if that needs to change.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, Jan. 10, called for an independent investigation into the “causes of lost water supply and water pressure” across Los Angeles County and has asked state and firefighting officials to identify what local governments can do to “provide adequate water supply for emergency responses during future catastrophic events.”
Among his concerns is the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades, which was empty due to a maintenance project and could have potentially provided much-needed additional water on the first days of the Palisades fire.
“The ongoing reports of loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and the community,” Newsom wrote in a letter to the leadership of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and L.A. County Public Works.
“While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish wildfires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors. We need answers to how that happened.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, when asked about the dry hydrants at a press conference, pledged to complete a “deep dive” into the water supply issues once the fires are out. In the meantime, DWP deployed 19 mobile water tankers each carrying up to 4,000 gallons and the state later mobilized 140 more to augment the struggling water systems.
“We will look at what worked, we will look at what didn’t work and we will let you know,” Bass said.
LADWP welcomes review
In a Jan. 11 statement, LADWP stressed that the water system serving “the Pacific Palisades area and all of the Los Angeles meets all federal and state fire codes for urban development and housing.”
“As we face the impacts of climate change and build climate resilience, we welcome a review and update of these codes and requirements if city water systems will be used to fight extreme wildfires,” the statement reads. “LADWP is initiating our own investigation about water resiliency and how to enhance our posture to respond to the impacts of climate change.”
LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir offline to comply with safe drinking water regulations while the city put a project to repair its cover out to bid early last year, documents showed.
Fixes won’t be cheap
Experts agree that any upgrades to the water systems in these foothill communities won’t come cheap or easy.
Gregory Pierce, a water researcher and co-director of UCLA’s Water Resources Group, said residents of Pacific Palisades, for example, might need to bear the cost for special protections, which could include building more storage tanks to keep pressure up and backup power sources to sustain water pumps during outages.
Three reserve tanks used to supply hydrants at higher elevations and holding about a million gallons each were overwhelmed and drained one after another Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. Those systems are typically overbuilt by as much as 40% specifically to provide capacity for fighting fires, Peirce said, but the demand during the first day of the Palisades fire was four times higher than usual and stayed at that level for 15 hours straight, according to city officials.
In its Jan. 11 statement, the LADWP pushed back against claims that any hydrants were broken and said only about 20% of the hydrants, mostly at higher elevations, ran out because of the surge in demand.
“If Palisades residents really want a super robust system to handle fires like this one, it would be unlike anything that exists in the world,” Pierce said. “That’s going to cost an incredible amount, and that cost can’t reasonably be borne by the entire city of Los Angeles.”
Even if there had been more water, unusually high winds grounded air support and accelerated the spread of the fires beyond what the available ground force could control, Pierce said.
“I’m not sure any level of preparedness from the water side would’ve stopped the fire,” Pierce said. “DWP is doing an analysis on this now. No one can say exactly what condition the pieces of infrastructure were in except the DWP, but there’s no good reason to think that they performed anomalously. They were just overwhelmed because they aren’t built for wildfires, and this was a very quick and ferocious start to a wildfire.”
At a press conference Wednesday, Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin told reporters he wasn’t surprised to hear water pressure dropped during the initial fight against the Eaton fire in Pasadena and unincorporated Altadena on Tuesday night. Winds reached up to 100 mph, launching embers as far as two miles away, he said.
“When you have multiple fires, multiple city blocks on fire, with — I’ll throw a number out — a hundred fire engines flowing water, we are going to stretch our water system,” Augustin said. “On top of that, we had a loss of power temporarily, which impacted our water system. I’ll be clear, we could have had much more water, but with those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire last night.”
Rethinking water, power distribution
The water shortages at the Palisades and the Eaton fires make it clear that municipalities prone to wildfires need to rethink how they distribute water and power as extreme weather events become more frequent due to climate change, said Laurie Huning, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Engineering Management at Cal State Long Beach. Hydrant systems designed around fighting one or two house fires may no longer cut it, she said.
“Much of the infrastructure we have was developed well before people were thinking about, or even considering, climate change,” she said.
Climate scientists have attributed the explosive nature of these fires to what some are calling “hydroclimate whiplash,” a phenomenon in which significant years of rainfall — and subsequent vegetative growth — are followed by extremely dry periods, effectively turning hillsides into tinderboxes.
These types of system failures during wildfires aren’t new, unfortunately. Most recently, firefighters experienced an almost identical issue with hydrants at higher elevations running low during the Mountain fire in Camarillo in November, according to the Ventura County Star.
Technical assessments needed
Still, the cities and the county should bring in outside technical experts to assess the pressure issues and to determine how to prevent recurrences in the future, said Michael Stenstrom, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA.
While the Santa Ynez Reservoir may have helped out if it had been operational, there also are other reservoirs and dams abandoned throughout Los Angeles County because “we didn’t want to spend the money” to complete seismic retrofitting, he said. Each of those could potentially supply water in emergencies if they were returned to operation.
Other obvious improvements could be made systemwide as well, he said, such as accelerating the City of Los Angeles’ replacement of century-old pipes or building more pump stations — and more resilient power sources — near fire-prone areas to ensure reliable water pressure during emergencies. It will require political will, significant financing, likely decades of time and stronger, and perhaps unpopular, regulations, he said.
Stenstrom is hopeful this disaster will serve as a catalyst to spur city and county officials to take bold action.
“After a big earthquake, there’s always more willpower to increase codes and improve building safety,” Stenstrom said. “We’ll probably see that with respect to fire safety after this one, at least I hope we do, and I hope we can be very aggressive about it.”