- Some fire hydrants ran dry in LA due to enormous water demand and infrastructure problems.
- President-elect Trump wrongly blamed a separate debate over water from northern California.
- Here’s what you need to know about the water supply problems in Los Angeles.
Some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles ran dry this week after the wildfires overwhelmed the local water system.
The problem unleashed a flurry of criticism, including from President-elect Donald Trump. He accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of refusing to sign a “water restoration declaration” that would have allowed water from northern California to flow into the areas burning in Los Angeles.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump wrote on January 8 on his social media platform.
But the reasons the water ran out were about local infrastructure, California officials and water policy experts told Business Insider. They also refuted the existence of a “water restoration declaration” and said Trump used the delta smelt as a scapegoat for a separate — and much more complex — debate over water allocations from a watershed in northern California.
A spokesperson for Newsom called Trump’s claims “pure fiction,” and accused Trump of politicizing the disaster. A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team pointed to a plan his administration developed in 2019 directing water to the Central Valley and Southern California. But a Newsom spokesperson and California water policy experts said that plan is unrelated to water in fire hydrants in Los Angeles.
Newsom on Friday ordered an investigation into the cause of lost water supply and pressure in municipal systems. The order followed a report by the Los Angeles Times that a large reservoir in Pacific Palisades was empty and out of service as flames engulfed entire neighborhoods. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said it took the Santa Ynez Reservoir offline in February for repairs to meet safe drinking water regulations.
How water from the reservoir might have helped firefighters tame the blazes remains unclear.
Fire hydrants ran dry because of infrastructure
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said urban water systems aren’t designed to supply enough water to fight wildfires.
“We had crews trying to mitigate this, and they had to evacuate,” Quiñones said during a January 8 press conference. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”
Quiñones said water demand was four times higher than usual for 15 hours straight as firefighters rushed to put out the flames. That depleted three 1 million gallon water tanks in Pacific Palisades between the afternoon of January 7 and early morning of January 8.
“Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants and the hills of Palisades,” Quiñones said during a press conference. She explained that without enough pressure in the system, more water couldn’t be pumped uphill into the tanks from a network of underground pipes and aqueducts, leaving hydrants dry. Officials couldn’t refill the tanks fast enough as flames engulfed entire neighborhoods.
Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks water use and storage data in California, characterized the water supply problems as an “infrastructure bottleneck.”
“Water flows from the reservoirs into this very complicated network of pipes, pumps, and tanks that stretch all over LA. It’s really like an electrical grid,” Mount said. “Before the fire, the system was full, but then was drained.”
However, the Santa Ynez Reservoir — which holds 117 million gallons of water — was empty. Had the reservoir been operable, water pressure in the Palisades would have lasted longer, Martin Adams, the former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told the Los Angeles Times. He added that while it would have helped, it wouldn’t have saved the day.
Newsom on January 8 said up to 140 additional water tender truckers were deployed to assist in fighting the Eaton and Palisades fires.
At a January 9 briefing, LA Mayor Karen Bass said fire hydrants aren’t constructed to handle such massive devastation. The water shortage was compounded by the fact that planes couldn’t perform water drops from the air because of the high-speed Santa Ana winds.
“That was the reason that the devastation was so bad,” Bass said. “The unprecedented wind, the strength of the wind, and the fact that the air support could not go.”
There isn’t a water shortage in southern California
Trump accused Newsom of causing a water shortage around LA. But southern California has plenty of water, despite the issues with fire hydrants, sources told BI.
Most reservoirs in southern California are full, Mount said. As of January 10 the Castaic Lake reservoir — the largest State Water Project reservoir in Southern California — was at 77% of its total capacity, per the California Department of Water Resources.
Mount said this was due to two years of record rainfall and snowpack in the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range, which feeds many reservoirs that serve southern Californians.
Mike McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District that serves 75,000 people in northwest LA — including in Palisades — told CalMatters on January 8 that the water supply was “looking pretty solid.”
What does the delta smelt have to do with this?
A spokesperson for Newsom said Trump “conflated two entirely unrelated things: the conveyance of water to Southern California and supply from local storage.” The spokesperson added that there was no “water restoration declaration.”
Mount agreed, as did Mark Gold, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water scarcity director and a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
“There is no connection between the delta smelt and the water challenges of fighting a fire in Southern California,” Mount said.
Mount said Trump may have been referring to a separate debate over how to allocate water exported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — where water in northern California flows into the San Francisco Bay — to both agriculture and urban areas in the southern half of the state, including Los Angeles.
In December, the Biden administration and California officials finalized a plan that aimed to strike a balance among farmers, urban residents, and depleted fish populations including the delta smelt, CalMatters reported. The new regulations replaced those finalized during Trump’s first term, which were litigated by Newsom’s administration over concerns that the delta smelt, salmon, and steelhead trout would be pushed to extinction.
While Los Angeles does import water from the Bay Delta through the State Water Project, Gold reiterated there are no shortages in southern California.
The region also gets water from the eastern Sierra Nevada through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River, and groundwater.
“The scapegoat for Trump has been the delta smelt because it’s not exactly charismatic megafauna,” Gold said, noting that endangered and threatened salmon, trout, and other fish are at risk.
January 12, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect the news that the Santa Ynez Reservoir has been offline since February last year, though it’s unclear what effect that had on firefighting efforts.
Were you impacted by the Los Angeles fires and want to share your story? Email this reporter: Catherine Boudreau cboudreau@businessinsider.com
