By Rachel Becker, CalMatters
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As firefighters battled catastrophic fires in Los Angeles last January, one question reverberated across the country: Where was the water?
The question came from wealthy developer Rick Caruso and then-President-elect Donald Trump, from reporters and residents. It prompted executive orders and state and federal investigations. Once the fires were more ash than flame, the Trump administration used a water shortage to justify its baffling move to release vital summer irrigation supplies from two reservoirs that do not supply Los Angeles.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Trump posted on social media, referencing Gov. Gavin Newsom, as the fires raged across L.A. “On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not (sic) firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
A team of researchers, led by Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, set out to uncover whether the intense focus on water supply meant that dry hydrants had uniquely hampered the Palisades firefight, or whether this was a common occurrence.
In a policy brief published Monday, the researchers used media reports to confirm that when fires burn urban areas, hydrant flows often sputter out — the result of lost pressure as burnt homes hemorrhage water and too many hoses simultaneously draw on a limited supply.
“Fire hydrant performance in the Palisades seems to represent the rule rather than the exception,” the report says. “The only apparent, factual difference between the Palisades Fire and its comparators is that hydrant performance did not make the headlines of news stories covering the other fires.”
‘The rule rather than the exception’
The policy brief echoes the findings of a recent state investigation into water supply during the Palisades Fire.
“Even though there was plenty of water available in the system,” state investigators wrote, “it was not possible to pump enough water to the fire area all at once to meet the flow rate demand created by the leaking water from already destroyed structures and high water use from hydrants.”
Even if the much-implicated empty Santa Ynez reservoir had been full, “the hydrants could not have maintained pressure,” the state report said.
Firefighters work to put out a fire in the rubble of a home that burned down on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, as a result of the Palisades Fire. Jan. 9, 2025. Photo by Ted Soqui for CalMatters
Together, the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed thousands of structures, caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, killed at least 31 people and likely contributed to hundreds more deaths.
With smoke still in the air, experts, state officials, reporters and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power raced to fact-check claims that water management resulting in dry hydrants was uniquely responsible for the devastation. The repeated refrain: urban water systems aren’t built to put out wildfires.
But the spark had caught. And as residents reeled from the devastating losses of entire communities and grasped for explanations, a sense of betrayal — that water and their hydrants had failed to save Los Angeles from the flames — set in.
By the end of March, nearly a third of 2,000 Los Angeles County residents surveyed by the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research blamed poor water management as the biggest contributor to the wildfires. Only slightly more — 36% — said arson.
Another survey by Probolsky Research reported that more than a quarter of 1,000 likely primary election voters in California were surprised to hear — or flat out didn’t believe — that fire hydrants are not designed to fight major wildfires.
“Sometimes all you need is one idea to catch on a little bit and start spreading. And then once it starts to go viral, it gets accepted by lots of people,” said Lisa Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University who studies how people learn information.
During disasters, she said, “people are hunting for that understanding and sense of control.”
It’s happened before — many times.
In fire after fire, the researchers found reports of lost water pressure.
Paul Lowenthal, division chief fire marshal with the Santa Rosa Fire Department, remembers when the Tubbs Fire roared through Santa Rosa in 2017, destroying thousands of homes and killing 22 people.
“When we had the loss of pressure in Fountaingrove, there was this immediate sense of, ‘The firefighters didn’t have the water that they needed to fight the fire,’” he said. “And I think we saw some of the same concerns bubble up out of Los Angeles.”
But Lowenthal said the true picture was much more complicated: In the hills, as the fire was pushing into the city, firefighters were too busy getting people out to even use the hydrants.
“It was all just purely saving lives,” he said. By the time the winds had died down on the valley floor enough to fight back the flames, he said, the city’s water system had restored enough pressure to hydrants.
Kevin Phillips, district manager of Paradise Irrigation District, said that some hydrants in the town of Paradise lost pressure during the 2018 Camp Fire, which remains the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.
When a wildfire destroys a town, like the fires in Paradise or the Palisades, Phillips said, each burned home bleeds water out of the system — sapping its pressure.
“Every one of those homes that gets burned is an open sore to the outside,” Phillips said. “Your system basically is dying as every one of those homes are being destroyed.”
William Sapeta, fire chief of the Lake County Fire Protection District, agreed. “The Eaton and the Palisades fires really drew a lot of attention to the capabilities of water for fire suppression,” he said. “Yet we experienced in the Camp Fire, the Valley Fire, the Carr Fire — all of these fires have exceeded municipalities’ ability to provide water for fire suppression.”
New requirements
Hydrants and water supply have drawn public scrutiny in Ventura County, where two major wildfires in less than a decade spurred reports of hydrant outages and lost water pressure.
The fires in Assemblymember Steve Bennett’s home county, one of which burned homes on his own street, prompted new legislation. Signed into law this year, Bennett’s bill sets new requirements for certain water suppliers in fire-prone parts of Ventura County to harden their systems and obtain enough backup power or alternate water supplies to keep water pumps running for 24 hours.
“You ought to be able to have a system that can at least help you put out the small little ember, the bush that catches on fire — so that you can get it before the house catches on fire,” the Democrat from Oxnard said. Having enough to do that, he added, should be the minimum requirement.
But some water suppliers fear they won’t be able to withstand the financial costs of meeting the law’s requirements, and worry about the potential liability if they can’t.
“You have smaller water systems that don’t even have the capacity or funding to deal with all those things,” said Daryl Osby, former Los Angeles County Fire Department chief and now vice president of emergency preparedness, safety & security for California Water Service, an investor-owned water utility.
A new frontier
ASU’s Faith Kearns, a co-author of the policy brief, has chronicled the convergence of fire and water supplies before, and said the growing scale and devastation of these fires are resetting public expectations for urban water systems.
“This feels like the new frontier we’re discussing around wildfire, but (it’s) just part and parcel of California’s really complex, ongoing wildfire issues,” Kearns said.
Climate change-fueled, extreme conditions further limit what water and water systems are capable of in response to fire — like in Santa Rosa, where Lowenthal said firefighters were too focused on saving lives to tap the hydrants in the hills.
“You might have the best water system in the world, and you still might not have conditions that are safe for fire personnel to go into,” Kearns said.
The new UCLA policy brief doesn’t interrogate why the hydrants became such a flashpoint in the Palisades Fire, but Pierce has some hypotheses. Preliminary data for a forthcoming study suggests it’s political — that support for Trump drives the belief that water management was to blame for the fires.
“Local influencers, political voices — all the way up to the president and a lot of people in between — quickly seized on the fact that some of the fire hydrants in the Palisades Fire didn’t have water,” Pierce said.
That gained a snowball effect. “The same thing kept getting repeated, and then people just thought it was true.”
Fazio, the psychology professor at Vanderbilt not involved in the policy brief, said the urge to cling to a culprit may even go deeper: people often seek out simple answers in moments of crisis.
“You could think of all of this as being a part of a causal story — like, ‘What caused my house to burn down? Why was it not safe?’” Fazio said. “The really simple model is, ‘The firefighters and the hydrants are supposed to prevent it, and they didn’t, therefore they’re at fault.’ Whereas I’m sure the actual causal story is much more complicated.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
