Friday, 10 January 2025
Friday, 10 January 2025
Capt. Kevin Easton and his firefighting team had already spent hours battling an out-of-control fire sweeping through Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades area, leaving gutted homes in its wake. Then, around midnight, their water lines started to sputter. Before long, the hydrants had run dry.
“Completely dry — couldn’t get any water out of it,” said Easton, who was part of a small, roaming patrol of firefighters who were trying to protect the community’s Palisades Highlands neighborhood. Even on Wednesday afternoon — hours after the hydrants had gone dry — there was still no water. Houses in the Highlands burned, becoming part of the more than 5,000 structures destroyed by the Palisades fire so far.
Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas such as the Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because 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.
“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly 4 million residents of Los Angeles.
Municipal water systems are designed for firefighters to tap into multiple hydrants at once, allowing them to maintain a steady flow of water for crews who may be trying to protect a large structure or a handful of homes. But these systems can buckle when wildfires, such as those fueled by the dry brush that surrounds Los Angeles’ hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.
As urban growth spreads into wilderness areas around the country and climate change brings more challenging fire conditions, an increasing number of cities have confronted a sudden loss of water available for firefighting, most recently in Talent, Oregon; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; and Ventura County, California.
The problem can be especially acute during high-wind conditions, like those Los Angeles experienced this week, when firefighting aircraft could not safely make their usual aerial drops of water and fire retardant.
In Louisville, Colorado, as firefighters were nearing depletion of water supplies in 2022, crews took the extraordinary step of pushing untreated water through the system. In 2023, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, firefighters battling a wildfire found their hydrants running dry as flames churned through the community of Lahaina, killing 102 people in the country’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century.
In that case, firefighters were confronted with many homes and pipes being destroyed simultaneously, causing water to gush across yards and streets when firefighters needed it in their hydrants.
Municipal water systems such as the one in Los Angeles are designed to handle heavy loads, including those from large fires that might require multiple fire trucks to tap into the system at the same time.
Getting water to the upper reaches of hillside communities such as Pacific Palisades can be a challenge. There, water is collected in a reservoir that pumps into three high-elevation storage tanks, each with a capacity of about 1 million gallons. Water then flows by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.
But the pump-and-storage system was designed for a fire that might consume several homes, not one that would consume hundreds, said Adams.
“If this is going to be a norm, there is going to have to be some new thinking about how systems are designed,” he said.
Before this week’s dangerous weather conditions, the storage tanks above Pacific Palisades and other hillside communities affected by the fires were filled to capacity, officials said. But as the Palisades fire spread Tuesday, the first tank there was quickly depleted. Hours later, the second one was empty. The third one was drained by Wednesday morning.
Janisse Quiñones, CEO and chief engineer at the city’s water department, said so much water was being pulled from the main water line during the fire that there was less water available to pump up toward the storage tanks.
By Thursday evening, Kristin M. Crowley, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said firefighters had stopped tapping into the hydrants altogether.
“Right now, we’re not utilizing the hydrants,” Crowley said.
She said firefighters were used to running out of water while battling brushfires and had trained for that possibility. Instead, she said, the key tool in battling these fires has been the aircraft that drop retardant and water — assets that were unavailable during the initial phases of the fires because of the high winds.
The supply of water ended up being only one of several challenges, as fire crews across Los Angeles County were overwhelmed by fires on so many fronts. In the Altadena area, where the Eaton fire burned through more than 13,000 acres and as many as 5,000 structures, firefighters also dealt with strains to the water system, but Chad Augustin, chief of the nearby Pasadena Fire Department, said crews could not have stopped the fire’s early spread even with more water.
“Those erratic wind gusts were blowing embers for multiple miles ahead of the fire, and that’s really what caused the rapid spread of this fire,” Augustin said.
Rick Caruso, a real estate developer and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor who served two stints as president of the Department of Water and Power, said he had a team of private firefighters deployed in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night, helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, Palisades Village, as well as some nearby homes.
All night, he said, the team was reporting that water was in short supply. He said it would take time to account for the supply problems, but suggested there appeared to be a shortfall in preparation.
“The lack of water in the hydrants — I don’t think there’s an excuse,” he said.
Traci Park, a Los Angeles City Council member whose district includes Pacific Palisades, said the city’s water systems were among several pieces of critically underfunded infrastructure.
“There are environmental catastrophes waiting to happen everywhere with our water mains,” she said, adding that some were a century old. “As our city has grown, we haven’t upgraded and expanded the infrastructure that we need to support it.”
She also raised the issue of the complexity of battling fires that are inherently wildland blazes, sweeping into urban neighborhoods — with firefighters unable to take advantage of wildland firefighting resources, such as aerial drops, that would normally be available to them.
“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 said.
Greg Pierce, a researcher at UCLA who studies water resources and urban planning, echoed the concerns over water systems that are designed for urban fires, not fast-moving wildfires. But redesigning water systems to allow firefighters to take on a broad wildfire would be enormously expensive, he said.
A more fundamental question, he said, is whether it’s a good idea to rebuild neighborhoods adjacent to wildlands, an issue that has been broadly debated across the West as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of fires on what is known as the wildland-urban interface.
Easton, a 19-year fire department veteran, said there were other complications in addition to water supply, such as delays in getting additional support crews from other areas to the scene.
Los Angeles’ water and power department had sent trucks with additional water tanks to the area, he said, but they were in stationary positions, meaning firefighters had to go retrieve the water and bring it back to the fire.
“That causes problems too, because you get 500 gallons of water and you’ve got a house that’s on fire, you knock it down a lot and then you’ve got to go back and get refilled,” he said.
New York Times News Service
