XPost: alt.wildland.firefighting, ca.water, alt.los-angeles
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-08/lack-of-water-from- hydrants-in-palisades-fire-is-hampering-firefighters-caruso-says

As wildfires raged across Los Angeles on Tuesday, crews battling the
Palisades blaze faced an additional burden: Scores of fire hydrants in
Pacific Palisades had little to no water flowing out.

“The hydrants are down,” said one firefighter in internal radio
communications.

“Water supply just dropped,” said another.

By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all water storage tanks in the Palisades area “went
dry,” diminishing the flow of water from hydrants in higher elevations,
said Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city’s utility.

“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said Wednesday morning. “Four times the
normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”

The DWP and city leaders faced significant criticism on social media from residents as well as from developer Rick Caruso, who owns Palisades
Village mall in the heart of the Westside neighborhood. Caruso, a former
DWP commissioner, blasted the city for infrastructure that struggled to
meet firefighting demands.

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said with exasperation.
Through Tuesday night, he expressed similar criticism in a series of live interviews with local TV stations. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never
happen.”

L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades and participated with Quiñones in Wednesday’s news conference, also expressed
fury over the DWP’s water supply issues.

“The chronic under-investment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners was evident and on full
display over the last 24 hours,” Park said. “I am extremely concerned
about this. I’m already working with my team to take a closer look at
this, and I think we’ve got more questions than answers at this point.”

Quiñones and other DWP officials said that the city was fighting a
wildfire in hilly terrain with an urban water system, and that at lower elevations in Pacific Palisades, water pressure remained strong.

Before the fire, all 114 tanks that supply the city water infrastructure
were completely filled.

Quiñones said that the hydrants in the Palisades rely on three large water tanks with about 1 million gallons each. The first ran dry at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday; the second at 8:30 p.m.; and the third was dry at 3 a.m.
Wednesday.

“Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants in the hills in
the Palisades, and because we were pushing so much water in our trunk
line, and so much water was being used. ... we were not able to fill the
tanks fast enough,” she said. “So the consumption of water was faster than
we can provide water in a trunk line.”

In other words, the demand for water at lower elevations was hampering the ability to refill the tanks located at higher elevations. Because of the ongoing fire, DWP crews also faced difficulty accessing its pump stations, which are used to move water up to the tanks.

The utility on Wednesday was sending 20 tankers with water to support firefighters in the Palisades, and the tankers were having to reload at
other distant locations.

“We are constantly moving that water to the fire department to get them as
much water as we can,” Quiñones said.

It’s unclear how widespread the hydrant issues were. In November, the lack
of water from hydrants hurt the effort to combat the Mountain fire in
Ventura County, when two water pumps became inactive, slowing the process
to deliver hillside water.

Caruso, who also ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2022, contended that the challenges were avoidable.

“This is a window into a systemic problem of the city — not only of mismanagement, but our infrastructure is old,” Caruso said.

Caruso, who evacuated Tuesday from his home in Brentwood, said his
daughter’s home was destroyed in the blaze, and his family was waiting to
hear if one of his sons had also lost his home.

Caruso said in an interview that several homes around his Palisades
Village shopping center were “fully engulfed” in flames, and his shopping center, which opened in 2018, suffered damage. On Wednesday morning,
scores of buildings and homes in the Palisades were reduced to ash and
rubble.

“We are feeling the very personal effects of this,” he said.

Times staff writers Terry Castleman and Ian James contributed to this
report.


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