Sadly, the red flag warnings are still going and it’s supposed to continue next week.
I finally got a text from my friend we stay with and she sent this photo from her house looking at Runyon:
She was fortunate it went the other away (She’s going towards the 101). They did a great job with the Sunset fire. I do worry about misinformation and have been hesitant to mention arson but there are def going to be some psychos setting some like John Leonard Orr did back when I was growing up.
Right, that’s how it was reported here. Whatever the cause, it was heartbreaking to some friends of mine to be trying to save their homes with their garden hose until the fire department ordered them to leave immediately. Many left on foot.
Can any city be prepared for a fire like this one? I am sure there will be investigations and lawsuits for some time now. Until we know more I think taking many of the explanations–including those from the Department of Water and Power–with a couple of grains of salt.
Clarification: Isn’t overwhelming demand the cause of a lack of pressure? I understand Pacific Palisades had large reserve water tanks for firefighting purposes but that ran dry.
A large reservoir in Pacific Palisades that is part of the Los Angeles water supply system was out of use when a ferocious wildfire destroyed thousands of homes and other structures nearby.
Officials told The Times that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117 million gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades.
The revelation comes among growing questions about why firefighters ran out of water while battling the blaze. Numerous fire hydrants in higher-elevation streets of the Palisades went dry, leaving firefighters struggling with low water pressure as they combated the flames.
Department of Water and Power officials have said that demand for water during an unprecedented fire made it impossible to maintain any pressure to hydrants at high elevations.
Had the reservoir been operable, it would have extended water pressure in the Palisades on Tuesday night, said former DWP general manager Martin Adams, an expert on the city’s water system. But only for a time.
“You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure,” Adams said in an interview Thursday. “Would Santa Ynez [Reservoir] have helped? Yes, to some extent. Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”
A DWP official acknowledged that the reservoir’s absence likely contributed to some diminished pressure and dry hydrants in upper regions of the Palisades.
However, a spokesperson for the utility said in a statement that DWP was still evaluating the effect of the reservoir being placed offline, and that staffers were conducting a root-cause analysis.
“Our primary focus is to provide water supply throughout the city,” the DWP spokesperson said, adding, “The system was never designed for a wildfire scenario that we are experiencing.”
It’s unclear when the reservoir first went offline. Adams said it had been out of service “for a while” due to a tear in the cover and that DWP’s vast storage and supply infrastructure still provided water to residents without disruptions, until this week.
Water pressure in the upper Palisades is sustained with three storage tanks, which hold 1 million gallons each. The tanks, part of a network of more than 100 across the city, are located at successively higher elevations in the coastal, hilly neighborhood, with water pumped up to the tanks, then flowing down by gravity to maintain pressure.
By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all three tanks had gone dry.
DWP Chief Executive Officer Janisse Quiñones said the tanks could not be refilled fast enough and that demand at lower elevations hampered the ability to pump water to tanks at higher elevations. In one case, DWP crews attempting to reroute water to refill a tank had to be evacuated, officials said.
Quiñones said four times the usual demand for water on the trunk line over a 15-hour period led to drops in water pressure.
Had the Santa Ynez Reservoir been in use in that period, Adams estimated, that demand might have been three times as high. Water in the reservoir would have fed the firefighting equipment and helped the pump stations push water to the storage tanks. But the reservoir “wouldn’t have lasted forever and would not have been a fix-all,” Adams said.
“Eventually, you would have gotten to the same place,” he added. Adams cautioned that he was basing his assertion on a rough estimate, and that he had not calculated the specific impact.
Whether the reservoir would have had a meaningful impact on fighting a blaze of such intensity remains unclear. Researchers said urban water systems like DWP’s were not designed to fight wildfires that overtake whole neighborhoods.
The National Weather Service had warned of “life threatening” winds before the fire broke out. By then, Adams said, the DWP’s options were limited. He noted that fire risk is not exclusive to the Palisades but is present across L.A. County.
Had DWP held water in the reservoir with a ripped cover, the water would have been legally undrinkable except in emergencies.
And had the utility opted to start filling the reservoir over the weekend, in advance of the extreme winds, Adams said it was unclear whether the water could have been added fast enough to be useful.
“They would have been betting that there would be a fire that wipes out the whole neighborhood, which of course, no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It would have been a strange bet.”
The reservoir is one of several operated by DWP across the city, which have a combined capacity of more than 4.1 billion gallons of water. Including aqueduct reservoirs, the city can store more than 91 billion gallons across its vast infrastructure. The Santa Ynez complex, at 117 million gallons, is among several sources of water in the area, including a large pipeline from Stone Canyon and a smaller site, the nearby Palisades Reservoir.
The utility designs the system with redundancies and multiple sources of water. In a statement, the agency said that none of its infrastructural assets failed Tuesday and early Wednesday but that the “intensity” of the fire disrupted the contingencies in place.
Joseph Ramallo, a chief communications officer for DWP, said the reservoir was scheduled to reopen in February. The maintenance, he said, was needed to comply with water quality regulations.
Adams said that if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been in normal use with a fully repaired cover, the water level would likely have been well below maximum capacity.
Yes to overwhelming demand.
I’m just saying a standard wharehouse, large fire can drop pressure in a busy city system.
That is some serious flying. Sure that is pretty low risk in a Super Cub- but that size of jet delivering a load under harsh conditions… Wow.
Hard to know what to do with the idiots flying recreational drones for fun and putting the pilots, material, and the entire firefighting effort at risk- public beatings?
Many of you will remember the fire in Sugarhouse about 4 years that destroyed one of the apartment buildings under construction. Speaking to someone who would know said that the fire department used 7 fire hydrants to fight the blaze and that doing so pretty much eliminated the ability to fight any other fires that might have started on the east bench of SLC while that blaze was being fought. The infrastructure we have in place to fight fires is not designed to have enough capacity to fight the type of wind-driven fires they are experiencing in LA.
This whole thing - and the political blaming and finger pointing going along with it - has been absolutely horrible to watch. While no one in my immediate family was affected, I’ve got several friends and friends-of-friends that have lost everything. I can’t even begin to imagine.
Used to be that unthinkable devastation like this brought us together as Americans. Not so much anymore, I guess. Seems like asking people to just not be giant dicks to each other for a few days while victims try to recover is a bridge too far these days.
Seeing Steve Guttenberg helping to move cars out of the way so the firefighters could get to the blaze was something unexpected.
This is a major reality for consideration. If everyone is a cynic, where do ideas come from? If everyone is corrupt, where is my slice? If everyone doesn’t think like me, well then, they can go to hell and one feels good about it: because they don’t feel good about anything else either…
Like the wind fed the flames, there are very cynical elements contributing to this cynical and all too typical response to almost any modern event. It’s not only annoying, it is destructive to our collective well being.
I started this thread for my concern and awareness of the real potential for disaster. This was an informed opinion from years of training and experience in fire science. Now the conversation is dominated by false narratives and blame games. This fire was out of control within minutes and a perfect storm of contributory factors, previously described which exponentially accelerated a “Bomb” sequence of events.
The wisest amongst us will contribute anyway we can to provide care, education, resources and compassion for each other and the planet.
“It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.”
― Eric Hoffer
The president elect used the wildfires to revisit a water policy disagreement with Gov. Gavin Newsom. Experts say that the disagreement had nothing to do with the current disaster.
Outpouring of help for animals caught in California wildfires
President-elect Donald Trump has used the devastating Los Angeles wildfires to revisit a policy disagreement with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, pushing a series of complaints that experts say are false or misleading.
Trump this week blamed Newsom for the fires, which have killed at least 10 people, forced 180,000 to evacuate and burned more than 10,000 structures.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this,” Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The availability of water has been a particular concern over the past few days after some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades temporarily dried up as firefighters attempted to contain a massive blaze there.
But three water policy experts said the problem wasn’t the water supply — the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power filled all available water facility storage tanks ahead of the fires.
Rather, the city’s water infrastructure wasn’t equipped to fight major wildfires, they said.
After the hydrants dried up, the water department attributed the issue to excessive demand on the system. The department couldn’t refill tanks quickly enough, it said, so the pressure dropped and water struggled to reach hydrants in the hills. A reservoir in the Palisades that could have helped with water pressure was also out of commission when the fire started.
Electrical outages further disrupted the flow of water to hydrants. President Joe Biden said in a public address on Thursday that utilities shut off power due to concerns about sparking additional fires, which in turn disrupted water pumps. “Cal Fire is bringing in generators to get these pumps up and working again,” he said.
Newsha Ajami, chief development officer for research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said it can be easy to misattribute these issues to water scarcity.
“I can understand, if you are not a water person per se, you might not know all the details that go into this system,” she said.
Part of Trump’s criticism seemingly refers to a plan put forth during his first administration to redirect more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in Northern California to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities. Newsom’s administration opposed it, saying it would endanger fish species in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.
According to experts, the debate has nothing to do with the current fires, which were the product of heavy winds and a long period without rainfall in California.
“To basically tie those two together is nothing short of irresponsible … It’s just throwing gasoline on the fire, and the fire is bad enough,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gold worked in Newsom’s administration in 2020, when the governor clashed with Trump over the Delta plan. Other experts have also said the wildfires are a product of extreme climate conditions and infrastructure not meant to handle wildfires.
Gold now serves on the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and noted that the region has plenty of accessible water in reservoirs: “I am not exaggerating when I say we have record storage as we speak.”
“The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.”
― Eric Hoffer
I hope that everyone learns something from this experience, maybe after a non-partisan investigation (if there can be such a thing). I don’t like the idea that we should say. “Well, these things are going to happen sometimes, and we can’t do anything about that.”) No one here is saying that, but I’ve seen some commentators elsewhere come pretty close to saying it.
I fully agree.
However, I also think that mitigating this sort of catastrophe moving forward will require public infrastructure and support investments that we have proven we are collectively unwilling to make
Yep.
LA Times wrote a few years back a good critique on building on what has been historically fire areas, building without more fire “proof” buildings and relaxing codes against more multi family complexes etc. there does need to be a big discussion of big ideas how to move forward with a bunch of growth in LA.
Shortly after my wife and I bought our all-wood Victorian home in Malibu in 2000, our next-door neighbor had a garage sale, and I watched as a truck pulled up in front of my house with a surfboard on top. I’d recently learned to surf since moving from New York and went to ask the owner about conditions. Soon, Tim was offering to show me all of the town’s secret surf spots.
Before he drove off, he said something I’ve never forgotten. “You know you’re going to have to fight a wildfire one day to save this house.”
I’d only lived around big cities. Didn’t you just dial 911 when a wildfire came? He explained that firefighters would likely be overwhelmed by the size and ferocity of these fast-moving, wind-driven wildfire events. He and his father had saved their nearby family home themselves in a previous fire.
True to his word, Tim took me surfing to spots where you needed a key just to get in. Between rides on uncrowded waves, he listed the items I’d need to save my home, including a fire retardant just like what the fire departments drop from planes and helicopters. Apparently, we were to spray our own house in advance of the fire. I never imagined I’d use any of it.
Then in 2018, the Woolsey Fire burst alive in the mountains above my home. The blaze turned out to be one of the most destructive in California history, burning 100,000 acres, forcing 250,000 people to evacuate and destroying nearly 2,000 homes and structures. On my street, 17 of 19 homes burned to the ground. Because of Tim and our spraying, our Victorian was one of the few homes to survive.
Last week, Tim’s childhood home burned to the ground in the Palisades Fire. His parents had both died in the last few years, and the house was unoccupied while the children decided what to do with it. No one was close enough to get there and spray it when the flames started coming. It still held the family’s pictures, heirlooms and mementos of more than 50 years.
I know what’s next for the families who have lost their homes around Los Angeles in the last week; I’ve seen it up close. The Red Cross often leaves sifters at burned-out homes. Made of wood with a mesh screen, residents use them like old-fashioned gold diggers to sort through the rubble. The fires burn so hot that it’s rare for anything to make it through. Most people sift for a few hours and give up. It is exhausting work, going through the charred remains of your home hoping to find that one thing that hasn’t been destroyed.
Most people are unable to fathom losing everything they’ve owned. A teenage girl who’d lost the only bedroom she’d ever had in the Woolsey Fire told me the trauma made her never want to have children. Six years later, neighbors on my street still have not rebuilt.
There’s never a shortage of people who need help during a wildfire. On Thursday I received a text from my doctor, who had been ordered to evacuate the Palisades days earlier; he was desperate to know whether his home had survived. He and his wife, like most people, had evacuated with just the shirts on their backs.
I drove toward the fire zones, thinking I was prepared for what I would see: homes burned down to the chimney, a scorched moonscape that Malibuites are all too familiar with.
But the decimation I saw was beyond description. At various points as I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway, I became disoriented. I’ve driven up and down that highway nearly every day for 25 five years; now, landmarks and buildings of all kinds were gone on both sides of the road. Sections of the ocean that have always been obscured were now visible. At one point, I had to pull over to figure out where I was.
I picked up my doctor, who told me that 45 of his patients had lost their homes. “They’ve been calling me all day, stunned, just to talk.” I wondered what I would say if we found that his home was gone.
As we entered his neighborhood, the homes seemed untouched. “You’re looking good,” I said, and immediately regretted it. As I continued driving higher into the neighborhood, burned homes started to appear—at first just one here or there, but as we rose, more and more. At a certain point, every home we could see—behind us, in front, to both sides—was destroyed.
Then we reached his home. It was one of only a few on his block that had survived. It was good news, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d be living in a hazardous waste area for months and a construction zone for years. The local energy company, Southern California Edison, is preparing residents for a long wait to see their power restored. On the way out of the neighborhood, we ran into a fleet of LAPD officers making an arrest for looting, another problem he can expect in the aftermath.
Back on the Pacific Coast Highway heading home just after sunset, the road was dark and empty. Occasionally, I came upon a hotspot along the highway where crews were still battling flames and attempting to save homes.
People often ask me what homeowners can do to avoid the sorrow of losing their home from a wildfire without putting themselves in danger or relying only on luck.
The answer is quite a lot, actually. Spraying, or gelling, in advance of a fire is just one way to give your home a fighting chance to survive. (If no fire comes, the product can be power-washed off.) Removing dry brush and dead leaves and the most flammable vegetation is another critically important step. Experts I’ve interviewed say the most significant thing homeowners can do to mitigate fire risk is to reduce the amount of available fuel.
Before the Woolsey Fire, a nearby neighbor couple had a grove of highly flammable eucalyptus and pine trees on their property, some more than a hundred feet high. California had been in drought conditions regularly since 2012, and everything on their property looked like kindling. Concerned neighbors attempted to get them to trim the trees or clear their brush, but they refused. It was no surprise when their house was incinerated during the fire.
The surprise came after the fire, when the wife sent me a letter apologizing for their inaction and promising to do things differently in the future. Today, they have a new fire-hardened home.
But the risk isn’t just of losing your home. Someone in L.A.’s Glendale area told me this week that the firestorms hadn’t affected them. “Did you smell smoke?” I asked. When they said yes, I explained that when homes burn, we are inhaling the remains of refrigerators, washers, dryers, stereo systems, insulation materials, chemicals, tools and anything else that couldn’t withstand the 2,000-degree heat.
With climate change, it seems likely that California and other western states will have more fires, which means that every agency, every elected official and every homeowner needs to do better in the future. We need more water to fight fires, more reservoirs to store the water and more firefighters with the right kind of equipment to battle these massive wind-driven blazes. We need to consider expensive but critical proactive solutions like putting more power lines underground.
Communities like mine have even started a fire brigade where Malibu locals work in conjunction with L.A. County officials to assist with evacuations in order to free up firefighters. Friends of mine spent their weekends at a fire academy crawling into burning buildings and putting out cars on fire, and they have been putting their training to use in recent days.
I haven’t found the moxie to sign up yet, but they did give me an honorary T-shirt. For now, I’m going to stick to spraying and doing what I can to stay out of harm’s way.
Robert Kerbeck is the author of “Malibu Burning: The Real Story Behind L.A.’s Most Devastating Wildfire” and “Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street,” a memoir of his career in corporate espionage.
Robert Kerbeck has seen the devastation of California’s wildfires up close for years and has ideas for how homes can be saved from a fiery future.
I agree, however, voting for people who believe in maintaining and developing infrastructures (Hello Jobs!) doesn’t seem to be the tend in climate predictions for the next 4 years. Drill Baby Drill!!!
This is an eloquent and heartfelt piece that brings home the sadness of loss but also the practical application of proactive planning.
Thanks so much for posting.
So many of our forum have homes, family, pets, friends, associates, colleagues and fellow human beings in this fire.
Maybe we can start a UfN Go Fund Me Site?
L.A. is America!
Sing IT!
Yes and no.
I work closely with SLC Fire, obviously, and have been in the command post for fires.
They have the ability with public utilities to divert water and change pressure. It’s pretty cool.
The LA Fire has nothing to do with water, there’s no amount of water you can use to stop that.
This is an interesting map with the Eaton LA fires. I’m surprised by the number of unaffected homes in the burn area. The legend is buried on the right side.
There were a number of lessons learned from wildfires in Alberta over the past number of years about how to make your home resistant to wildfire. Things like using fire resistant roofing materials especially. One of the main ways that fire spreads in these situations is embers landing on roofs and igniting. In places like Jasper, Slave Lake, and Fort McMurray the homes that survived when others around burned had brick or stucco exteriors and metal or composite roofs. Here’s a website that has a lot of great information about making your home fire smart.
The fire chief they interviewed on 60 Minutes last night said they typically deploy three engines to a single house fire. Using this number they would have needed 26,000 trucks for just Pacific Palisades. It’s also not realistic to have the water capacity, ie pipe sizes and pressures - not just storage capacity in reservoirs, available for this kind of event. So, yes we simply cannot expect to be adequately prepared to respond to an event like this nor can we control the weather that exacerbated the danger.
They don’t call them complex emergency events because the infrastructure to rein them in exists in abundance.
This is, and always will be, a case of a perfect alignment emergency - an emergency that has a tsunami-like effect on resources that feels like one is just spitting in the ocean.
