CALIFORNIA, USA — A lack of water made the firefight even more difficult from the start. Within hours of the Palisades Fire igniting in Los Angeles, firefighters were faced with empty fire hydrants, which only added fuel to the flames and people’s emotions.
Governor Gavin Newsom announced Friday he’s demanding an investigation into the water supply issues.
It was only about 16 hours after the Palisades fire started when hydrants in that area ran dry. Newsom said losing that supply, likely impaired firefighters’ efforts to save homes.
“We all know this has been an unprecedented event,” LA Mayor Karen Bass said. There were several large wildfires burning, all at once – swallowing up homes and consuming resources at an alarming rate.
“A firefight with multiple fires drawing water from municipal water systems for several hours is just not sustainable,” Mark Pestrella, the Director of Public Works for LA County, said.
Hydrants in the Palisades can hold 3 million gallons of water, but the fire that started at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday had used it all by 3 a.m. Wednesday. Five thousand homes were destroyed in that area alone.
“When you have 100 water tanks and we’re tapped into the fire hydrants, we lose water pressure very quickly,” former LA Fire Chief Sam DiGiovanna said.
Local officials say hydrants are meant for maybe a single house fire. The Palisades fire spanned the entire community. Water supply systems are simply not built for this scale. There were ten times as many fire units, using up four times the usual water demand, all within those first few hours.
“I’ll be honest with you, we get outgunned in fires like this,” DiGiovanna added.
There were also countless people pulling from that same source, at the same time using gardening hoses and sprinklers as a last-ditch effort to save their homes.
“We have the ability to pull from swimming pools, ponds and lakes and tenders can bring water to fire trucks, but that’s a little more time-consuming,” DiGiovanna explained.
Another factor is that important air support that pulls water from reservoirs wasn’t possible on day one or day two because the ferocious Santa Ana winds made it too dangerous to fly – leaving crews to rely on those limited resources on the ground.
“When lives are saved, and homes are saved, we will absolutely do an evaluation to look at what worked, what didn’t work,” Mayor Bass said.
Newsom says he hopes this investigation will allow us to learn from this tragedy and help prevent future catastrophic events.