- Several fire hydrants ran dry in LA due to high water demand and infrastructure issues.
- President-elect Trump wrongly blamed a separate water dispute from northern California.
- Here’s what you need to know about water supply problems in Los Angeles.
Several fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles ran dry this week after wildfires overwhelmed the local water system.
The issue drew a flurry of criticism, including from President-elect Donald Trump. He accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of refusing to sign a “water restoration declaration” that would have allowed water from northern California to flow into the burning areas of Los Angeles.
“He wanted to protect a fundamentally worthless fish called smelt by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but he didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump wrote on Jan. 8 on his social media platform.
But the reasons the water ran out had to do with local infrastructure, California officials and water policy experts told Business Insider. They also denied the existence of a “water restoration statement” and said Trump used the delta wind as a scapegoat for a separate — and far more complex — debate over water allocations from a northern California watershed.
A spokesman for Newsom called Trump’s claims “pure fiction” and accused Trump of politicizing the disaster. A spokesman for Trump’s transition team pointed to a plan his administration developed in 2019, directing water to the Central Valley and Southern California. But a spokesman for Newsom and California water policy experts said the plan has nothing to do with water in Los Angeles fire hydrants.
Newsom on Friday ordered an investigation into the cause of the loss of water supply and pressure in municipal systems. The order followed a report by the Los Angeles Times that a large reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty and out of service after flames engulfed entire neighborhoods. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said it took the Santa Ynez Reservoir offline in February for repairs to meet safe drinking water rules.
It remains unclear how water from the reservoir may have helped firefighters douse the flames.
Fire hydrants ran dry due to infrastructure
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said urban water systems are not designed to supply enough water to fight fires.
“We had crews trying to mitigate this and they had to evacuate,” Quiñones said during a Jan. 8 news conference. “We’re fighting a fire with urban water systems, and that’s really challenging.”
Quiñones said Demand for water was four times higher than usual for 15 straight hours as firefighters rushed to douse the blaze. This depleted three 1 million gallon water tanks in Pacific Palisades between the afternoon of January 7th and the early morning of January 8th.
“Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants and the Palisades hills,” Quiñones said during a news conference. She explained that without enough pressure in the system, more water could not be pumped up into the tanks from a network of pipes and underground aqueducts, leaving hydrants dry. Officials couldn’t fill the tanks fast enough as the flames engulfed entire neighborhoods.
Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the California Water Policy Center’s Public Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks water use and conservation in California, characterized water supply problems as an “infrastructure bottleneck.”
“The water flows from the reservoirs into this very complicated network of pipes, pumps and reservoirs that stretch all over LA. It’s really like a power grid,” Mount said. “Before the fire, the system was full, but then it was drained.”
However, the Santa Ynez Reservoir – which holds 117 million liters of water – was empty. If the reservoir had been operational, the water pressure in the Palisades would have lasted longer, Martin Adams, former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told the Los Angeles Times. He added that while it would have helped, it wouldn’t have saved the day.
Newsom on Jan. 8 said up to 140 additional water tender trucks were deployed to help fight the Eaton and Palisades fires.
At a Jan. 9 briefing, LA Mayor Karen Bass said fire hydrants are not built to handle such a massive destruction. The water shortage was exacerbated by the fact that planes could not make aerial water drops due to high-speed Santa Ana winds.
“That’s why the destruction was so bad,” Bass said. “The unprecedented wind, the force of the wind and the fact that the air support could not go.”
There is no shortage of water in southern California
Trump blamed Newsom for the lack of water around LA. But Southern California has plenty of water, despite problems with fire hydrants, sources told BI.
Most reservoirs in southern California are full, Mount said. As of Jan. 10, the Castaic Lake reservoir — the largest Southern California State Water Project reservoir — was at 77% of its total capacity, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
Mount said that was due to two years of record rainfall and snow in the northern Sierra Nevada range, which feeds many reservoirs that serve Southern California.
Mike McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District that serves 75,000 people in northwest LA — including the Palisades — told CalMatters on Jan. 8 that the water supply “looked pretty strong.”
What does delta smell have to do with this?
A spokesman for Newsom said Trump “conflated two completely unrelated things: bringing water to Southern California and supplying it from local reservoirs.” The spokesman added that there was no “statement on water restoration”.
Mount agreed, as did Mark Gold, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of water scarcity and a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
“There is no connection between delta melting and the water challenges of fighting a fire in Southern California,” Mount said.
Mount said Trump may have been referring to a separate debate over how to divide water exported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — where water in northern California flows into San Francisco Bay — into both agriculture and land use. urban in the southern half of the state. , including Los Angeles.
In December, the Biden administration and California officials finalized a plan aimed at striking a balance between farmers, urban residents and depleted fish populations by including delta smelt, CalMatters reported. The new regulations replaced those finalized during Trump’s first term, which were opposed by the Newsom administration over concerns that delta trout, salmon and steelhead would be pushed to extinction.
While Los Angeles imports water from the Gulf Delta through the State Water Project, Gold reiterated that there is no shortage in southern California.
The region also receives water from the eastern Sierra Nevada through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River and groundwater.
“The scapegoat for Trump has been the smell of the delta because it’s not exactly charismatic megafauna,” Gold said, noting that salmon, trout and other endangered and threatened fish are at risk.
January 12, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect news that the Santa Ynez Reservoir has been offline since February of last year, though it’s unclear what effect that had on firefighting efforts.
Have you been affected by the Los Angeles wildfires and want to share your story? Email this reporter: Catherine Boudreau cboudreau@businessinsider.com
