LA Fire Hydrants Running Dry Poses New Danger in Combating Blazes

(Bloomberg) -- Firefighters have had to contend with hurricane-force gusts, grounded aircraft and rushed evacuations in their quest to control devastating blazes across Los Angeles. But one surprising factor worsened their plight: Hydrants ran dry.

As the Palisades and Eaton fires spread on Tuesday night, multiple crews reported losing that crucial firefighting tool. The issue wasn’t California’s water management, as some including President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have suggested, but rather systems that simply aren’t designed to handle fires of such ferocity burning in or near urban areas.

“Learning how to fight those fires is a big learning process,” said Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University. 

Hydrants are part of municipal water systems and many of those in California are gravity-fed, according to John Fisher, a retired battalion chief of San Diego Fire-Rescue who spent 34 years battling blazes. That means water is pumped uphill to a tank or reservoir, then fed down to homes and hydrants. The setup provides enough water pressure to meet daily needs like showers and watering gardens or fighting individual structure fires. 

But the fires that have scorched Southern California are different, burning through open space and urban areas. At least 2,000 structures have been destroyed or damaged, and the toll will likely rise as new blazes ignite. Based on AccuWeather’s estimates and statistics compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, these are the costliest fires to strike California in the last 45 years.

Firefighters are used to working within the constraints of a water system, Fisher said, “but the magnitude of fires like these makes it so that there’s just more fire than there are firefighters.”

Or perhaps more aptly, more fire than water. “Each one of those fire engines can pump 1,500 gallons a minute,” Fisher said. “They’re not all pumping that much, but think: a million-gallon tank and 100 fire engines. You’re going to run out of that tank pretty quickly.”

Imagine holding a bag overhead and poking a hole in it. At first, the water pressure is strong enough to keep a consistent flow but as the supply dwindles, so does the stream. 

Refilling tanks using pumps is both energy-intensive and time-consuming given water’s weight. (Assuming there’s even electricity available to operate pumps amidst power outages.) 

These conditions drove the hydrant issue across the Los Angeles region. The strain was particularly acute in Altadena and the surrounding area where the Eaton Fire is burning. Systems there have “much less sophistication and capacity” compared with neighboring Pasadena and even-bigger Los Angeles, said Greg Pierce, the co-director of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Luskin Center for Innovation. 

Even the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADPW), which Kearns said is “very well resourced,” was still unable to meet demand at times. This was despite the department pre-filling three tanks near the blazes, each with a capacity of a million gallons. The fire response used four times the normal demand for 15 hours and LAPDW was unable to refill the tanks because there wasn’t enough pressure to move water uphill, Chief Executive Officer Janisse Quiñones said at a press conference.

Republicans have used the issue with fire hydrants to push for transferring water from the north of the state, arguing that it's being wasted to protect the Delta smelt, a small endangered fish. But that argument is a red herring. 

“Blaming protections of the Delta smelt has become a go-to response to environmental problems in California for numerous right-wing politicians, particularly President Trump,” said Caleb Scoville, a sociologist at Tufts who has studied the response. “The truth is, driving native species to extinction would not have prevented this and would do nothing to help the people of Los Angeles. It’s pure fantasy, but a politically convenient one.”

But solutions will be needed to deal with the era of urban wildfires. Of the 10 most destructive wildfires in California history, seven have occurred over the past decade. That doesn’t include the Palisades and Eaton Fires, which could very well reshape the list. The trend is being driven in part by 25 million moving into areas more prone to wildfires, even as climate change ups the odds of more large blazes. Fires are also spreading faster now than they were in 2001, including a staggering 398% increase in California since 2001, according to a recent study.

Taking steps such as building more defensible space around homes will help, but the state’s 2,800 water systems will also need upgrades. Because they “have vastly different planning and operational capacities,” there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, according to a 2021 report co-authored by Kearns and Pierce.

Keeping the power on is one way to ensure a steady supply of water, which requires a huge amount of energy. To keep pumps moving, it “takes an awful big generator,” said Fisher, “which takes an awful lot of diesel, which means someone has to drive up through the fire to refuel it.”

An alternative is battery storage linked to solar panels, though lithium-ion batteries are prone to fire themselves. Other options include clearing debris and silt from reservoirs, which can increase their capacity, and adding redundancies to ensure if one tank goes down, another is available. 

Those can be costly upgrades for aging water systems. “People haven’t wanted to pay for that,” said Pierce. With so many wealthy households affected and the shocking images coming out of normally idyllic locations, though, “this may be a tipping point.” 

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