‘There’s nothing they can do’: Fire hydrants across Pacific Palisades are coming up dry as blaze rages
As Southern California battled multiple raging wildfires, they faced an immensely critical issue: no water in some fire hydrants.
Four major fires have devastated the region, growing to cover more than 23,000 acres since they began on Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, they had not been contained at all.
More than 400 members of the Los Angeles Fire Department have been deployed to fight the Palisades Fire alone, Kristin Crowley, chief of the department, said at a Wednesday morning press conference, noting the blaze was “stretching the capacity of our emergency services to their maximum limits.”
But they ran into another issue: a lack of water in hydrants.
The Palisades area has three large tanks that provide water for the hydrants, each holding about a million gallons. The first tank ran out of water at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, the second tank ran out at 8:30 p.m. and the third ran out at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning. The water was being consumed at a rate faster than the tanks could be replenished, officials said.
“We pushed the system to the extreme,” Janisse Quiñones, the chief executive officer and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a press conference Wednesday, noting that the Pacific Palisades neighborhood saw four times the normal demand for 15 hours in a row.
She pleaded with locals to conserve water so that fire crews could use as much as possible. Quiñones said: “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems — and that is really challenging.”
Fighting that much fire requires lots of water, but that effort has been stymied due to the windstorm — with gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour — that’s both fanning the flames and preventing crews from using air support to battle the blaze.
Mark Pestrella, director of Los Angeles County Public Works, said that fighting wildfires using fire hydrants for multiple hours on end is not sustainable. “That’s why air support is so critical to the firefight, and unfortunately, wind and air visibility have prevented that support,” he said.
One official called the wildfires “a historical natural disaster.”
At least five people have died and an unknown number have been injured as a result of the fires raging over 27,000 acres. More than 150,000 people have been forced to evacuate the city and surrounding area, which has now become unrecognizable.
“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Rick Caruso, a Los Angeles developer, told the Los Angeles Times. He owns the Palisades Village shopping center. “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,” he added.
