Why the Hydrants Ran Dry in LA

Fire hydrants ran dry as crews battled the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles Tuesday night—and while critics have blamed California's water management policies, officials say infrastructure simply wasn't designed to cope with the scale of the emergency. Those who "designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week," the New York Times reports. In Pacific Palisades, a hillside neighborhood where thousands of structures were destroyed, three high-elevation water tanks held about a million gallons each, but all three were dry by early Wednesday and the pumping system that feeds them couldn't keep up with demand.

• System can't deliver high volume for hours. Martin Adams, former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, tells the Los Angeles Times that the Palisades water supply system is designed to flow with enough gallons a minute to fight building fires, but it can't keep delivering the same volume for several hours. "The system has never been designed to fight a wildfire that then envelops a community," he says.

• Underfunded infrastructure. Traci Park, a city council member whose district includes Pacific Palisades, tells the New York Times that Los Angeles' infrastructure is critically underfunded, with some water mains at least a century old. "There are environmental catastrophes waiting to happen everywhere with our water mains," she says. "As our city has grown, we haven't upgraded and expanded the infrastructure that we need to support it."
• Urban systems are designed for urban fires. Park adds that it's hard to fight a wildland blaze in an urban neighborhood. "Our firefighters were out there yesterday fighting a raging wildfire with fire engines and fire hydrants—that's not how you fight a wildfire," she says.
• No air support. The extreme winds that spread the fires prevented air support from coming in, adding to the pressure on fire crews. "Not having that air support, and then having hurricane-force winds that are driving embers and pushing the fire, is a situation where our priority then is saving lives and evacuation and defending structures," Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Margaret Stewart tells SFGate. "We cannot stop a fire of that magnitude under those weather conditions."

• 'There's not a system that could do it.' Tom Majich, general manager of Kinneloa Irrigation District, which supplies the area hit by the Eaton Fire, tells the Los Angeles Times that they managed to keep pumping water during the fire, but "there's not a system" that could supply enough water. "To fight a wildfire, you have to have Lake Havasu behind you," he says. "You could fill a Rose Bowl with water and it wouldn't be enough water."
• Changes will be expensive. Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy, says it's "fair to question" whether more capacity should have been added in hillside areas in Los Angeles. She tells the Los Angeles Times that it would have been very expensive to add enough capacity "to mitigate or even fight the wildfires in these higher-elevation pressure zones, but right now I'd imagine most people in LA would say it would've been worth the cost."

(More Palisades Fire stories.)