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As Los Angeles firefighters faced down the most destructive blaze in the city’s history, they ran out of water.
“The hydrants are down,” a firefighter said over the radio, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Another chipped in: “Water supply just dropped.”
Fire crews were forced to watch as entire blocks of the Pacific Palisades — one of the most scenic and celeb-packed neighborhoods in LA — were incinerated in a matter of hours late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Rick Caruso, who owns the Palisades Village mall in the heart of the devastated area, fumed to local media. “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.”
The water shortage was the result of years of mismanagement of LA’s water system — including a federal indictment of a leader and high profile resignations — as well as major operational problems that drained reserves too quickly.
The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses. By Wednesday night, it had spread to 16,000 acres, bigger than the island of Manhattan in New York — and crews had not managed to contain any of it.
LA residents voiced their outrage over the conditions that allowed the fire — and two other blazes in Los Angeles County — to rage out of control. Five people died as of Wednesday night, several others were injured and at least 70,000 were told to evacuate their homes across the LA area.
Adding insult, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass was 7,400 miles away in Africa, and months earlier she had approved an $18 million cut to the fire department.
“RESIGN! WHY ARE YOU IN GHANA?!,” one person commented on an X post by Bass’ office giving an update on the wildfires.
One angry Angelino told Fox News: “I’m born and raised in Los Angeles, I spend my life worrying about when the earthquakes come, when the Santa Ana Winds come. I plan my trips around this. For someone to be in charge of my town… where were you?”
A legacy of terrible fire management by the state of California and Gov. Gavin Newsom also hangs over the smoky skies of LA.
LA’s water system simply could not handle the demand of the multiple blazes — which was four times normal and last for 15 hours, Janisse Quiñones, the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told the LA Times.
The city has 114 massive water tanks that store water for and help ensure consistent flow. All were full when the fire started Tuesday. Three 1 million-gallon tanks supply the hydrants in the Pacific Palisades.
The first was empty before 5 p.m. The last was trained by 3 a.m. Wednesday, Quiñones said.
Without the water tanks, the city’s system was simply not able to maintain pressure to the hydrants.
The problem was not isolated to the city of LA.
Malcom Stewart, who lives near Pasadena, had not seen a single fire truck on his street as he watched the Eaton fire — a huge blaze east of Los Angeles — swallow his neighbors’ houses one by one, creeping closer to his childhood home.The water supply to his house had been cut, leaving him and his brother without so much as a garden hose to douse spot fires and keep the flames from spreading to their property.“The county did nothing. He’s literally out there with dirt and a shovel and hope,” his wife Charlene Stewart told The Post, hours after she had lost contact with him.
When the same thing happened in neighboring Ventura County in November, humiliated officials blamed damaged pumps and overall lack of water — despite backup systems and protocols that allow firefighters to draw water from other sources, the LA Times reported.
In LA, those fail-safes should have been working, the hydrants should have stayed full, and a water shortage on this scale “should never happen,” Caruso, a former utility commission head and candidate for LA mayor, told the newspaper.
The failure of LA’s water system comes after years of criticism from President-Elect Donald Trump and others that California’s leaders are not managing their water — or their fire risk properly.
Trump pinned blame for the water shortage on Democratic Gov. Newsom — who derailed a 2020 Trump admin order redirecting water from the verdant north of the state to parched SoCal.
Newsom’s excuse, a tiny endangered fish that has already been declared functionally extinct.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt… but didn’t care about the people of California,” the incoming president ranted on his Truth Social Platform.
Trump has also slammed Newsom for failure to clean up underbrush and dead trees that can fuel forest fires — though it’s not yet clear whether that is a factor in these latest blazes.
“I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,” Trump posted to X in 2019.
Trump was referring to measures such as prescribed burns and fuel breaks, or firebreaks, which help keep wildfires from spreading.
Newsom has bragged about his forestry accomplishments, but a 2021 investigation by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found that he overstated the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by a whopping 690%.
But LA’s utility system has its own massive institutional problems.
Bass, who has touted her DEI appointments, ousted Cynthia Ruiz, the department’s first-ever Native American commissioner, after less than a year of service.Two out of the last three general managers of the utility have resigned in disgrace: One allegedly mismanaged $40 million in funding. Another, David Wright, was sentenced to six years in prison for taking bribes.
Most of the public backlash, however, has centered on Bass, who rushed home from attending the inauguration of Ghana’s new president when the blaze broke out Tuesday night. She was overseas despite warnings about the Santa Ana winds days earlier.
Stay up to date with the NYP’s coverage of the terrifying LA-area fires
In addition to Bass, the city’s fire chief Kristin Crowley — the first woman in that role — is also taking heat, including from ex Fox News host Meghan Kelly, who flamed her for putting virtue signaling and woke branding above doing her job.
“In recent years LA’s fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity,” Kelly said on her eponymous show, referencing Crowley’s stated goal to bring more women and LGBTQ+ people into the fire department.
