XPost: alt.wildland.firefighting, ca.water, alt.los-angeles
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics
https://nypost.com/2025/01/08/us-news/how-la-ran-out-of-water-in-the- middle-of-the-palisades-fire/
As Los Angeles firefighters faced down the most destructive blaze in the
city’s history, they ran out of water.
“The hydrants are down,” a firefighter said over the radio, according to
the Los Angeles Times.
Another chipped in: “Water supply just dropped.”
Fire crews were forced to watch as entire blocks of the Pacific Palisades
— one of the most scenic and celeb-packed neighborhoods in LA — were incinerated in a matter of hours late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Rick Caruso, who owns the
Palisades Village mall in the heart of the devastated area, fumed to local media. “The firefighters are there, and there’s nothing they can do —
we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. …
It should never happen.”
The water shortage was the result of years of mismanagement of LA’s water system — including a federal indictment of a leader and high profile resignations — as well as major operational problems that drained reserves
too quickly.
The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses. By Wednesday night, it had spread to 16,000 acres, bigger than the island of Manhattan in New York —
and crews had not managed to contain any of it.
LA residents voiced their outrage over the conditions that allowed the
fire — and two other blazes in Los Angeles County — to rage out of
control. Five people died as of Wednesday night, several others were
injured and at least 70,000 were told to evacuate their homes across the
LA area.
Adding insult, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass was 7,400 miles away in Africa,
and months earlier she had approved an $18 million cut to the fire
department.
“RESIGN! WHY ARE YOU IN GHANA?!,” one person commented on an X post by
Bass’ office giving an update on the wildfires.
https://nypost.com/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/2181418214.jpg?resize=1536,1031&quality=75 &strip=all
LA Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.6 million in funding to the fire department.
Getty Images
One angry Angelino told Fox News: “I’m born and raised in Los Angeles, I
spend my life worrying about when the earthquakes come, when the Santa Ana Winds come. I plan my trips around this. For someone to be in charge of my town… where were you?”
A legacy of terrible fire management by the state of California and Gov.
Gavin Newsom also hangs over the smoky skies of LA.
LA’s water system simply could not handle the demand of the multiple
blazes — which was four times normal and last for 15 hours, Janisse
Quiñones, the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told
the LA Times.
The city has 114 massive water tanks that store water for and help ensure consistent flow. All were full when the fire started Tuesday. Three 1 million-gallon tanks supply the hydrants in the Pacific Palisades.
The first was empty before 5 p.m. The last was trained by 3 a.m.
Wednesday, Quiñones said.
Without the water tanks, the city’s system was simply not able to maintain pressure to the hydrants.
The problem was not isolated to the city of LA.
Malcom Stewart, who lives near Pasadena, had not seen a single fire truck
on his street as he watched the Eaton fire — a huge blaze east of Los
Angeles — swallow his neighbors’ houses one by one, creeping closer to his childhood home.
The water supply to his house had been cut, leaving him and his brother
without so much as a garden hose to douse spot fires and keep the flames
from spreading to their property.
“The county did nothing. He’s literally out there with dirt and a shovel
and hope,” his wife Charlene Stewart told The Post, hours after she had
lost contact with him.
When the same thing happened in neighboring Ventura County in November, humiliated officials blamed damaged pumps and overall lack of water —
despite backup systems and protocols that allow firefighters to draw water
from other sources, the LA Times reported.
In LA, those fail-safes should have been working, the hydrants should have stayed full, and a water shortage on this scale “should never happen,”
Caruso, a former utility commission head and candidate for LA mayor, told
the newspaper.
The failure of LA’s water system comes after years of criticism from President-Elect Donald Trump and others that California’s leaders are not managing their water — or their fire risk properly.
Trump pinned blame for the water shortage on Democratic Gov. Newsom — who derailed a 2020 Trump admin order redirecting water from the verdant north
of the state to parched SoCal.
Newsom’s excuse, a tiny endangered fish that has already been declared functionally extinct.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt… but
didn’t care about the people of California,” the incoming president ranted
on his Truth Social Platform.
Trump has also slammed Newsom for failure to clean up underbrush and dead
trees that can fuel forest fires — though it’s not yet clear whether that
is a factor in these latest blazes.
“I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest
floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of
him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,” Trump posted to X in 2019.
Trump was referring to measures such as prescribed burns and fuel breaks,
or firebreaks, which help keep wildfires from spreading.
Newsom has bragged about his forestry accomplishments, but a 2021
investigation by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found that he overstated the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed
burns by a whopping 690%.
But LA’s utility system has its own massive institutional problems.
Bass, who has touted her DEI appointments, ousted Cynthia Ruiz, the department’s first-ever Native American commissioner, after less than a
year of service.
Two out of the last three general managers of the utility have resigned in disgrace: One allegedly mismanaged $40 million in funding. Another, David Wright, was sentenced to six years in prison for taking bribes.
Most of the public backlash, however, has centered on Bass, who rushed
home from attending the inauguration of Ghana’s new president when the
blaze broke out Tuesday night. She was overseas despite warnings about the Santa Ana winds days earlier.
In addition to Bass, the city’s fire chief Kristin Crowley — the first
woman in that role — is also taking heat, including from ex Fox News host
Megyn Kelly, who flamed Crowley for putting virtue signaling and woke
branding above doing her job.
“In recent years LA’s fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants
top priority, but diversity,” Kelly said on her eponymous show,
referencing Crowley’s stated goal to bring more women and LGBTQ+ people
into the fire department.
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November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.
The disease known as Kamala Harris has been effectively treated and
eradicated.
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.
Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
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