Fact check: What really happened with the Pacific Palisades water hydrants? (original) (raw)

It’s a headline no one would want to see: Fire hydrants being used to fight the Palisades Fire were running dry.

The fast-moving fire tested the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s municipal system: The final tank used to maintain water pressure in the area ran dry by 3 a.m. Wednesday, according to officials.

The news drew ire both on social media and from prominent figures like Rick Caruso. The former mayoral candidate and Pacific Palisades landowner went on local TV news stations to complain about the situation, telling Fox 11 it was an “absolute mismanagement by the city.”

The news triggered Governor Gavin Newsom to announce an investigation into the issue, saying that the lack of functioning hydrants "likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors."

"We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires," Newsom wrote on X Friday.

Officials say they were and are operating in extreme conditions. We looked into how exactly the shortage happened, and what, if anything, could have been done to prevent it.

Water supply was too slow, not too low

LADWP’s explanation for the shortage comes down to three nearby water tanks, each with a storage capacity of about a million gallons. These tanks help maintain enough pressure for water to flow from fire hydrants in uphill areas — but the pressure had decreased due to heavy water use, and officials knew the tanks couldn’t keep up the drain forever.

“We pushed the system to the extreme,” LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”

According to LADWP, the tanks’ water supply needed to be replenished in order to provide enough pressure for the water to flow through fire hydrants uphill. But officials said as firefighters drew more and more water from the trunk line, or main supply, they used water that would have refilled the tanks, eventually depleting them.

“I want to make sure that you understand there's water on the trunk line, it just cannot get up the hill because we cannot fill the tanks fast enough,” Quiñones said.

That decreased the water pressure, which is needed for fire hydrants to work in higher elevations.

A strain on LADWP’s resources

A firefighter drags a hose up a street on a hill as a nearby home burns.

Water pressure became a big issue as firefighters tried to fight the Palisades fire.

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David Swanson

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AFP via Getty Images

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The first LADWP water tank ran out at about 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, while the second ran out at approximately 8:30 p.m. that day and the third and final tank ran out at about 3 a.m. Wednesday. Officials said this was to be expected due to the constraints of the municipal water system, which L.A. County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said is “not designed to fight wildfires.”

“A firefight with multiple fire hydrants drawing water from the system for several hours is unsustainable,” Pestrella said in a news conference Wednesday. “This is a known fact.”

Indeed, fire hydrants have also run dry in the case of other wildfires that spread to urban areas, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire, 2024’s Mountain Fire and 2023’s Maui wildfires.

In these cases, firefighters have to rely on other water sources. For the Palisades Fire, LADWP brought in 19 water trucks, each with capacities of 4,000 gallons.

“There is no lack of water flowing through our pipes and flowing to the Palisades area,” LADWP spokesperson Mia Rose Wong said in a statement to LAist. “Water remains available in Palisades, but is limited in areas at elevation impacting fire hydrants.”

Tanks are commonly used across the LADWP system for both daily and emergency purposes. For reference, the million-gallon tanks are much smaller than LADWP’s major reservoirs, which can hold hundreds of millions, or even billions, of gallons of water (and are miles away from the Pacific Palisades).

Officials said that normally, emergency teams would rely more on air support like firefighting helicopters, which would lessen the strain on water tanks by using more water from other sources like above-ground reservoirs. However, high winds and a lack of air visibility have meant those firefighting operations were grounded Tuesday and Wednesday, Pestrella said.

“County and city water reservoirs — open reservoirs — are available and on standby once [aerial firefighting] support becomes available,” he said.

Hydrants: a known concern

A yellow fire hydrant with an open valve,

An opened fire hydrant in Pacific Palisades on Wednesday.

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Eric Thayer

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Getty Images

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While the news of dry fire hydrants came as a shock to many local residents, it’s a known concern that firefighters have run into in the past: As homes burn and water lines begin to leak, overall water pressure drops, meaning that hydrants can run dry before long.

Generally speaking, wildfires quickly cause strain on local water supplies.

“It happens pretty quickly in almost any wildfire in most contexts, but especially one like this,” said Greg Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group.

In order to have a system that could have handled the demands of continuous firefighting through fire hydrants, Pierce said LADWP would need to keep much larger reserves of water physically on hand near the locations of possible wildfires.

“There is a theoretical world, and maybe a world we're entering into, where we could pay much, much more to have redundant water and power supply — because you need both [to fight fire], especially in terrains like this,” Pierce said. “I'm not even sure that would have made a difference when it comes to these types of wildfires, but that's possible.”

Pierce said that level of financial commitment would be “incredibly expensive,” but that’s what would be needed in order to keep fire hydrants running — especially in mountainous or hilly regions where local agencies also have to contend with pumping water uphill.

“There's no reason to think that DWP was particularly ill-prepared, no one was talking about them being ill-prepared for wildfires,” he said. “This caught everyone off guard, as far as I know.”

Conserving water will help

As in the case of the Mountain Fire, officials are asking LADWP users to limit their water usage.

“I need our customers to really conserve water, not just in the Palisade area, but the whole system,” Quiñones said. “The fire department needs the water to fight the fires, and we're fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”

Since the added stress has decreased the water quality near the Pacific Palisades, officials have issued a 48-hour boil water notice to residents of the 90272 ZIP code and nearby communities north of San Vicente Boulevard.

“Because we're pushing the water system so hard, our water quality is decreasing,” Quiñones said. “We have a lot of ash in our system.”

And one of the biggest ways to reduce stress on municipal systems is for local residents to have their own water supplies — like tanks or even pools — for emergency personnel to use. To learn more about these tanks, see here.

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