ALTADENA, Calif. – Firefighter Ryan Babroff hurried to a nearby hydrant, hoping to connect his hose and douse the massive flames consuming homes in this mountain community northeast of Los Angeles.
But when he pried it open, no water came out. The hydrant was empty.
The longtime Cal Fire volunteer said he encountered at least four dry hydrants as he tried to battle the Eaton Fire in Altadena on Wednesday. Fellow firefighters had to drive to neighboring Pasadena to fill their trucks.
“How do you squabble a fire with no water?” Babroff said.
As wildfires tore through greater Los Angeles this week, one of the most exasperating obstacles firefighters have come up against are hydrants with no water. In Pacific Palisades, hydrants failed after three tanks each holding a million gallons of water went dry within a span of 12 hours, officials said. Across the city in Altadena, residents said they futilely tried to extinguish flames with water from pools and garden hoses.
The reports of dry hydrants sparked outrage and finger-pointing. President-elect Donald Trump accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of depriving the region of much-needed water and demanded he “immediately go to Northern California and open up the water main, and let the water flow into his dry, starving, burning State.”
Even celebrities chimed in, with former “Dancing With the Stars” performer Valentin Chmerkovskiy writing on social media: “5th largest economy on the planet. Firefighters didn’t have enough water pressure to do their jobs?! Are you joking me?!”
Experts in urban water supply said the hydrants ran dry because of a host of factors, including spiking demand that made it difficult to quickly refill them. Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas of Los Angeles County rely on a patchwork of municipal systems that are designed to battle house fires, not massive wildfires consuming blocks at a time.
“The way fire departments are set up is to fight a fire at a house or maybe two houses or a block,” said Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire expert at Arizona State University. “They’re not set up to fight a fire that’s an entire neighborhood.”
Several experts dismissed Trump’s claim that Newsom could have averted the tragedy by transferring water from Northern California. Southern California’s reservoirs are actually above historical levels, “a best-case scenario for emergency response,” according to Ashley Overhouse, water policy adviser at Defenders of Wildlife.
“There is no connection whatsoever between California’s water policies and the water available for firefighters in Southern California,” Peter Gleick, senior fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, said of Trump’s claims. “They’re unrelated issues.”
Nonetheless, Los Angeles-area city leaders, veteran firefighters and water system experts said that the metropolis is not equipped to fight the urban wildfires that have become increasingly routine.
“Tanker trucks on hand, more backup power in places they need it, probably more water sitting in reservoirs, having more of these tanks and spot checks on these hydrants – all of these things could make a difference,” said Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group. “How much of a difference, I don’t know.”
Pushed to ‘the extreme’
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), the county’s largest local utility, serves Pacific Palisades, an affluent community that is home to celebrities and longtime residents on the city’s west side. Residents there had long felt shielded from the calamities that seemed to always strike elsewhere.
Janet Davis, 75, said she and her late first husband specifically bought their two-bedroom Mediterranean home 41 years ago in the Palisades because they thought it would be safer from winds and mudslides up in the hills.
“We never thought that stuff would come down here to our little stucco home,” she said.
But on Tuesday morning as she was out running errands in Santa Monica, a brush fire broke out and 50 mph gusts quickly helped fuel its reach. Within hours, the blaze had torn through the elementary school that her children had attended, her favorite coffee shop and her home, which she had no chance of defending.
In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.
DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.
By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m. Wednesday.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” she said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”
High demand and lower water pressure were also plaguing firefighters in Altadena, an unincorporated community north of Pasadena. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the area, said the number of blazes across a wide swath had made firefighting especially challenging. She visited firefighters on Wednesday and said that, while they didn’t seem to be running out of water, “there’s never enough.”
“What I saw, it was beyond water,” she said. “No sooner did they get to one place, they were being told there was fire eight blocks over.”
On the darkened streets of Altadena on Wednesday, there were not enough engines to extinguish embers drifting from one burning house to the next. Explosions echoed as houses ignited and the fire spread. Residents who had defied evacuation orders used whatever water they could find to douse their roofs.
Roberto Salazar helped relatives fight the fire at his grandmother’s house. When he arrived, the house next door had already been gutted. The family filled buckets from puddles and grabbed neighbors’ garden hoses.
Fire trucks kept passing as they fought the fire. They asked nearby firefighters for help, but they were occupied with a bigger blaze nearby.
Salazar, 16, said he understood.
“They can’t just help everybody,” he said.
New fires, new needs
For veteran fire captain Freddy Escobar, the problem boils down to an urban water system that is not equipped to handle brush fires that once were seasonal and now burn across much of the state year round.
“We need more resources, more firefighters, more engines,” said Escobar, who is also president of the Los Angeles firefighters union. “What we’re doing is not sustainable.”
Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, echoed those concerns. He said the agency’s water pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume whole neighbourhoods.
“None of that’s ever been based on the entire neighbourhood going up. If that’s the new norm, that’s something that’s got to be figured in,” he said. “Nobody designs a domestic water system for that. It would be so overbuilt and so expensive.”
Adams said the water system has done “what it was designed for pretty successfully, but it couldn’t do everything. The system probably delivered more water than it was designed to deliver, but it couldn’t deliver an infinite amount.”
He said water pressure issues could be addressed by adding more or larger pipes, or officials could add temporary water storage. “If we’re fighting a different kind of fire, we have to think about a different kind of system,” he said.
The county’s 200 water utilities rely on multiple power companies to run water pumps and other machinery that can be damaged by fires, so it’s difficult to immediately identify what went wrong, said Kearns, the Arizona State water expert.
“Finding out who’s responsible will be really complex,” she said.
But some were quick to cast blame.
Los Angeles billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso accused Mayor Karen Bass of failing to provide resources to fight the fire that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades, including his daughter’s home. (Caruso lost a home in Malibu to the fire, which also damaged his business, Palisades Village mall.)
“We’ve got more than enough water in my opinion,” said Caruso, who served on a city commission overseeing public works. “How the water was deployed was the issue.”
At a Thursday briefing, Bass faced questions about empty hydrants and why the city wasn’t better prepared. She called the fires “an unprecedented event” and said they were “not constructed to deal with this type of mass devastation.” She said the high winds also posed a challenge because firefighters couldn’t rely on water dropped by air.
“That was the reason that the devastation was so bad,” she said. “The unprecedented wind, the strength of the wind and the fact that the air support could not go.”
‘No hydrants to be found’
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said firefighters had tried to be resourceful.
“If we don’t have water, we find water. We use water tenders. We trapped water, the fire department, first responders,” she said. “We’re going to do everything in our absolute effort to do what we can do with what we’ve got.”
Pierce, the director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, said it was difficult to project exactly how much of a difference it would have made even if officials had done more to supply water to fight the fires.
“It happened so quickly and ferociously, I’m not sure having any level of water would have made a difference,” said Pierce, whose relative lost a home in the fires.
But Los Angeles City Council member Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades, said firefighters shouldn’t have to cope with such water shortages and faulted “chronic underinvestment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure.”
“I’m blaming all of us,” she said. “It’s on us to fix that.”
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has since sent seven 4,000-gallon water tender trucks to the Pacific Palisades area and a dozen smaller water trucks to assist firefighters, and directed them to refill at three hydrants with strong water pressure, said Xie, the agency spokesman.
Babroff, the Cal Fire volunteer, said Wednesday that he saw Altadena residents fighting the fire with water scooped from pools.
A man whose house was on fire ran into the street and yelled to Babroff, “Can you help me?” He was pulling water from a kiddie pool using a pressure washer attached to a generator to douse his home of 70 years.
Babroff found a shovel to throw dirt on the flames and flying embers, then a hose. But it only sprayed a “trickle of water.”
“It was all we had,” he said. “No engines, no resources, no nothing. No hydrants to be found.”