The water storage was empty, Dumbass
Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like 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 four 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’s hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.
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An emergency vehicle drives through smoky darkness as flames rise on a hillside.
Flames rising in the hills around Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, on Tuesday.Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times
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, Ore.; Gatlinburg, Tenn.; and Ventura County, Calif.
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, Colo., 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 like 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 like 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 one 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 Mr. Adams, the former leader of the city’s water department.
“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.
