No 'water system in the world' could have handled the L.A. fires. How the region could have minimized the damage

Trail of destruction from the Palisades wildfire A news drone captured the widespread trail of destruction over the Pacific Palisades as active wildfires burn.

Even as flames in Southern California continued to carve a destructive path on Friday and fire officials sought to assess the damage and determine how the fires began, a larger question loomed: Could this level of devastation somehow have been minimized, or is this simply the new normal in an era of climate-related calamities?

A CNN review of government reports and interviews with more than a dozen experts suggests the ultimate answer is a mix of both.

Los Angeles city and county officials have characterized the fires as a “perfect storm” event in which hurricane-force gusts of up to 100 miles per hour prevented them from deploying crucial aircraft that could have dropped water and fire retardant on the drought-ravaged neighborhoods early on. The consensus of experts interviewed by CNN was that the combination of those winds, unseasonably dry conditions and multiple fires breaking out one after another in the same geographic region made widespread destruction inevitable.

Nonetheless, humans could have taken some steps to potentially lessen the impact of Mother Nature’s wrath. Inconsistent vegetation management, aging infrastructure and homes, and a lack of planning likely contributed to fires that have so far scorched more than 55 square miles, destroyed thousands of structures and left at least 10 people dead.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised a full investigation. “Rest assured…we will absolutely do an evaluation to look at what worked, and what didn’t work, and to correct – or to hold accountable – anybody, department, individual, etcetera,” she said.

‘Got dry hydrants’

Part of that investigation is certain to focus on a key ingredient in fighting fires: water.

As high winds stoked flames Wednesday morning, firefighters could be heard on radio broadcasts relaying an alarming development.

“We’ve lost most of the hydrant pressure,” one firefighter said around 2:45 a.m. as he requested help refilling fire engines, according to a county dispatch recording.

“Got dry hydrants,” said another.

Experts told CNN even fully functioning hydrants would not have been enough to battle fires of the magnitude of those that raged this week, particularly when air resources, such as helicopters and fixed-winged aircrafts were grounded due to the wind.

“I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” said Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA.

Still, fully operational hydrants could have helped minimize some of the damage, saving a house here, or snuffing out embers there.

In the Pacific Palisades – which is at the far end of the municipal water system and experiences reduced water flow due to decreasing pipe sizes extending from the main line – the dry hydrants were due to unprecedented demand placed on a system that was not designed for fighting wildfires, said Janisse Quiñones, chief executive officer and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Quiñones said firefighters battling the blaze in the Palisades created four times the normal demand in the area for 15 straight hours. Three separate storage tanks of roughly one million gallons of water each support fire hydrants in the area. These tanks sporadically ran dry Tuesday night and Wednesday morning leading the pressure in fire hydrants to drop. Quiñones said 20 per cent of hydrants used to fight the Palisades fire ran dry on Wednesday.

“We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems and that is really challenging,” she said. “This is an unprecedented event.”

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that a nearby reservoir was undergoing repairs and was empty at the time of the fires, further hampering firefighting efforts.

Hours later, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for an independent investigation into the problems with the water supply for firefighters battling the blazes.

“The ongoing reports of the loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community,” Newsom wrote in a letter, which he posted on X.

The letter was addressed to Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella and Quiñones.

“We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires,” the governor said.

Across town in Altadena where the Eaton Fire broke out Tuesday evening, problems with dry hydrants traced back to a lack of electricity, said Bob Gomperz, a board member at a Southern California water supplier which provides water to the western region of Altadena.

In an interview with CNN, Gomperz explained that in foothill communities like Altadena, the water system relies, in part, on gravity. That means water needs to be pumped into tanks at higher elevations so that it can flow downhill when needed.

Once those tanks were drained by firefighters and homeowners with garden hoses battling the recent blaze, officials were unable to pump water to refill them because Southern California Edison cut power in the area to protect firefighters from falling power lines.

Without power, Gomperz said, there was no way to pump water to where it was needed.

“It’s a Catch-22,” he said.

‘Screaming to be properly funded”

While the Los Angeles area is no stranger to large wildfires, fire officials have been sounding the alarm over their ability to meet a dramatically increasing risk of disaster fueled in large part by climate change.

But major improvements require political will and extensive financial resources — which Los Angeles City Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has repeatedly said she doesn’t have.

Just last month, Crowley wrote in a memo to Bass that the elimination of “critical” civilian support positions and US$7 million in cuts to overtime hours had “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies.”

Crowley said that the budget cuts had affected the department’s training and fire prevention efforts, specifically noting that current funding limited the department’s ability to complete required brush clearance inspections, which she described as “crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”

Last year, Bass approved over $17 million in cuts to the annual fire budget, a decision that has drawn much criticism as the calls for help amid the fires have far outnumbered the firefighters available to respond. Bass addressed the controversy surrounding these cuts in a press conference Thursday, arguing that the kinds of budget cuts made would not have had any impact on the current situation.

“It’s important to understand that we were in tough budgetary times,” she said Thursday. “Everybody knew that, but the impact of our budget really did not affect what we’ve been going through over the last few days.”

Bass also said additional funding had been allocated “to be distributed later on.” That additional funding amounted to a $53 million increase for the fire budget from the previous year, a spokesperson for City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield told CNN.

Still, in an interview with local news station Fox11 on Friday, Crowley said the city had failed her department and that she believes they would have been in a “better position” to prevent some of the widespread damage had her requests for additional resources been granted.

“We are screaming to be properly funded,” she told the reporter.

Crowley had also expressed concern in a January 2023 memo. “From the effects of climate change, seasonal Santa Ana wind conditions, to the impact of increased construction in the high severity fire areas, the Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing a year round fire season,” she wrote, noting that expanded staffing would be needed to meet this “new normal,” which has been further worsened as the number of prison inmates who have traditionally worked alongside firefighters as part of the state’s conservation camp program have dwindled due to state prison reforms.

Officials in Los Angeles County had also pointed last year to a “critical shortage” of these additional inmate boots on the ground, saying the problem had been “exacerbated by the increasing frequency and severity of wildland fires due to climate change.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency rated Los Angeles County as “the most susceptible county in the United States to natural disasters,” according to a recent county progress report on an initiative launched in 2023 to create “climate ready communities and infrastructure” given these increased risks.

Yet as fires continued to rage this week, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone acknowledged at a press conference that there were not enough firefighters to take on the multiple enormous and quickly spreading blazes located across wide swaths of the city and county.

“We don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County, between all of the departments, to handle this,” Marrone said.

‘All bets are off’

Residents should also play a role in mitigating fire damage, experts say.

Coincidentally, the Pacific Palisades community council had just entered into a roughly six-month process that qualifies homeowner associations for grants that enable them to, among other things, enhance warning systems, improve evacuation route signage and help homeowners clear brush around their houses.

“The fire came too soon,” said David Barrett, who heads up MySafe:LA, the grant-supported public safety nonprofit that runs the program.

Barrett’s organization tries to get communities to take the steps necessary for becoming “fire safe councils,” a designation which, in addition to enabling neighborhoods to obtain grants, also makes homeowners eligible for possible discounts on home insurance, he said.

“Although the fire has destroyed the community, that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a great time to become a fire safe council to aid them in securing additional financing to be able to rebuild the Palisades,” Barrett said. “If you look at the aerial infrared photography of the Palisades, there’s a lot of vegetation that did not burn.”

But while Barrett swears by the efficacy of his program, he acknowledges that none of the standard precautions would have been enough to thwart the main culprit that destroyed the Palisades in this week’s historic inferno: wind.

“It wasn’t because there wasn’t enough water,” he said. “It wasn’t because of political things that you might have read about. It wasn’t because of anything else but the wind.”

Jon Keeley, a senior research scientist for the US Geological Survey, echoed this sentiment, saying the rare combination of circumstances behind the Los Angeles wildfires made the widespread destruction unpreventable.

“When you have winds, the velocity of these winds, all bets are off in terms of what you can do to save homes,” he said.

Even so, Sue Kohl, president of the Pacific Palisades Community Council, said more could have been done to prepare.

“I think people in general just need to be more organized, more prepared in advance than we all have been,” she said. “And I think that’s going to be, going forward, something we’re going to emphasize."

Kohl said the council – under Barrett’s direction – was gearing up to put on a fire safety fair next month.

“But now there’s probably no place to have it,” she said.

From the comfort of a friend’s home, she is struggling to grasp the enormity of the loss, which included her home.

“Our schools, our church, restaurants, stores, everything – the supermarkets, everything’s gone,” Kohl said.

A national model, but only for newer homes

When it comes to protecting homes against wildfire threats, California’s building codes are a national model. But only a tiny fraction of homes in the areas threatened by this week’s fires were built after those standards were enacted, according to a CNN analysis of state data.

The state first mandated fire-related building requirements in the wake of a devastating 1991 fire in Oakland, which killed 25 people. Those mandates were significantly beefed up in 2008, when the state approved a new building code that applies in designated fire-prone areas, which include most of Pacific Palisades and some but not all of Altadena.

The codes require ignition-resistant roofs, fire-resistant siding, and exterior windows and doors that can resist fire for at least 20 minutes, among other features.

California has “some of the strongest wildfire building codes in North America,” said Judson Boomhower, a University of California San Diego professor who’s studied the requirements. “It’s quite clear when you look at the post-incident data that those codes really have had quite an effect.”

In parts of California subject to the fire-related building codes, a home built in 2008 or later was about 40 per cent less likely to be destroyed than a home built in 1990 that had identical exposure to wildfire, according to a 2021 study Boomhower co-authored.

But the rules only apply to new structures built after the updated code was approved, and don’t require property owners to retrofit older buildings unless they’re in the midst of a major renovation of their home.

The vast majority of the homes threatened by the L.A.-area fires this week were built before the codes went into effect. According to Cal Fire incident reports, only about five per cent of the structures in the area surrounding the Palisades Fire were built in 2010 or later and 16 per cent were built in 1990 or later. Less than three per cent of the structures in the area around the Eaton Fire were built in 2010 or later and about 9 per cent were built in 1990 or later.

“One of the big challenges about wildfire resilience and vulnerability is we have this enormous stock of really old houses,” Boomhower said. “That means we have this legacy of decisions made decades ago about where to build and how safely to build, and that has a big effect on our experience of wildfires today.”

Fire-related building standards are especially important because, unlike a flood or hurricane, how quickly a wildfire reaches a home depends on whether it first consumes neighboring houses. That means that even older homes built before the modern building codes were passed are better protected if they’re in a neighborhood with more newer homes.

Local authorities have previously acknowledged the risk of fire to aging homes. A Los Angeles County report issued in 2021 noted how a high percentage of homes in areas vulnerable to wildfire damage were built before the adoption of building codes with higher safety standards.

Is rebuilding worth the risk?

Even as the flames are still burning across the Los Angeles area, residents and local leaders in the region are starting to think about how to rebuild their devastated neighborhoods. While damage wrought by the inferno may have been unavoidable, the reconstruction process should be shaped by efforts to minimize the risk of future fires, experts say.

Regions vulnerable to wildfires can take steps to better prepare, such as changing neighborhood designs and enacting policies that require residents to clear brush and debris, said Daniel Aldrich, a Northeastern University professor who focuses on disaster resiliency and recovery.

“Those are things we can control right now,” Aldrich said.

Some of the most effective interventions, however, would be costly or disruptive.

The state or local governments could do more to incentivize property owners to retrofit older buildings. California started a pilot program to do that a few years ago. Still, it would be highly expensive to retrofit all older buildings in fire-prone areas, even though that would make them significantly safer, Boomhower said.

It’s not yet known what sparked this week’s blazes, but several of California’s previous biggest fires have been started by falling power lines that ignite surrounding trees or brush. Some utility companies in the state are already moving to bury power lines in fire-prone areas, although the process can cost millions of dollars per mile.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” said Gomperz, the water board member. “The one thing they could have done 100 years ago is bury the power lines under the street. They can still do that, but it is very expensive and would disrupt a lot of communities.”

Water lines could also be upgraded to handle increased demand in the event of a drastic fire and better guarantee pressure to fire hydrants. “There are absolutely actions we can take,” said Erik Porse, director of the California Institute for Water Resources at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “We can make investments in larger distribution lines to maintain pressure or help to refill those [storage] tanks faster.”

Still, some experts question whether the most fire-risky neighborhoods – those on the border between cities and wildland – should be rebuilt at all. Researchers have suggested policies to incentivize some survivors of fires to move to less dangerous areas, in a strategy known as “managed retreat.”

“We have to think about more and more places not rebuilding,” said UCLA’s Pierce, who acknowledged the difficulty of suggesting some people should move on from their longstanding homes. But given the risks, he said, “that’s, I think, where things are headed.”

The-CNN-Wire

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