As Los Angeles battles multiple fast-moving wildfires, emergency officials have faced a nightmare sitaution: fire hydrants that have run out of water.
“How do you fight a fire with no water?” Ryan Babroff, a volunteer firefighter battling the Eaton Fire, toldThe Washington Post.
At some point this week, up to 20 percent of the city’s hydrants went dry, according to L.A. mayor Karen Bass. And as of Thursday night, firefighters had stopped tapping into hydrants at all.
“Right now, we’re not utilizing the hydrants,” Kristin M. Crowley, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said Thursday.
By Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for an independent investigation into the hydrant issue.
“We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires,” he wrote in a statement on X.
Critics have sounded off on the situation from near and far.
Rachel Darvish, a resident of the scorched Pacific Palisades neighborhood, went viral after she confronted Governor Newsom over the tapped-out hydrants, insisting she would “fill up the hydrants myself.”
Meanwhile, real estate developer and former L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso alleged “absolute mismanagement by the city.”
Some on the right, meanwhile, have used the shocking water shortage to attack California’s Democratic leadership and policies. Donald Trump claimed the governor’s “gross incompetence” and decision not to open up “the water main” in Northern California was to blame, while Elon Musk has argued everything from environmental protections for endangered fish to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s diversity initiatives were behind the issues with the fire response.
According to experts and government officials, the water shortage issue is much more complex.
A patchwork of municipal waters systems feed L.A., drawing water from 200 different utilities, supporting a system designed to handle lower-level, urban fires, not multiple large-scale wild fires descending from the hills.
“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, toldThe New York Times. “If this is going to be a norm, there is going to have to be some new thinking about how systems are designed.”
“It was like a worst-case scenario, but I think we should be planning for those worst case scenarios,” Faith Kearns, a wildfire and water expert at Arizona State University, added in an interview with National Geographic. “You can’t predict everything, but also, I do think this is where we’re headed.”
