Fire hydrants ran dry as Pacific Palisades burned. L.A. city officials blame ‘tremendous demand’
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.”
With Mayor Karen Bass far from L.A., Rick Caruso, her opponent in the 2022 election, swept in to fill the gap, blasting the city’s handling of the wildfires.
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.”
More than 1,100 buildings have burned and at least five people are dead in wildfires burning across L.A. County, making this one of the most destructive firestorms to hit the region in memory.
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.
Tanner Charles and Orly Israel tried to save Israel’s home from the Palisades fire on Tuesday morning, but gave up as the backyard fence caught on fire.
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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