Water tanks went dry in Pacific Palisades, hampering efforts to fight fire

Immense demand for water to fight the fast-moving Palisades Fire led all three of the community’s water tanks — and some fire hydrants — to temporarily dry up in the last 24 hours or so.

That hampered efforts to fight the blaze, said the Los Angeles Fire Department said, which didn’t elaborate on the specific challenges or how it addressed them.

The Palisades Fire, which broke out Tuesday morning, is still 0% contained. More than 15,000 acres have burned, and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated. An estimated 1,000 structures have been destroyed, making the fire the most destructive in L.A. history.

Firefighters battling the Eaton Fire in the nearby Altadena area also reported that hydrants there were down or had low water pressure.

Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the Palisades water system sustained four times its usual demand for 15 hours straight. That made it difficult to refill water tanks quickly enough to maintain pressure, she said, which in turn disrupted the water supply to hydrants in the hills. According to the water department, crews trying to reroute water at one point had to evacuate because of the fire’s intensity.

“We have three large water tanks, about a million gallons each. We ran out of water in the first tank at about 4:45 p.m. yesterday. We ran out of water in the second tank about 8:30 p.m. and the third tank about 3 a.m. this morning,” Quiñones said at a news conference Wednesday.

She added that there is still water in the supply line — “it just cannot get up the hill because we cannot fill the tanks fast enough.”

Pacific Palisades, an affluent community of roughly 27,000 west of downtown Los Angeles, has hilly terrain and high elevation, making it harder to move water. Water tanks help by maintaining enough pressure to pump water uphill, but when demand on the system is heavy, it’s difficult to maintain that pressure.

“We did experience some challenges with water pressure while battling the Pacific Palisades Fire,” said Erik Scott, a public information officer for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The water department said it filled all available water storage tanks in Los Angeles ahead of the fire. Since Tuesday night, it has dispatched 18 trucks carrying thousands of gallons of water to support firefighting efforts.

“We pumped over 3 million gallons of water on that fire, so it does strain that system, and they’re doing everything they can to fill it back up,” Los Angeles Fire Capt. Sheila Kelliher told MSNBC.

For a brief time, strong winds and smoky skies prevented the fire department from using aircraft or helicopters to drop water over the fires. However, Scott said, that issue has been resolved.

Experts in urban water management said it’s unlikely that poor planning or negligence were to blame for the water tanks’ drying up. Rather, “these systems are not designed to deal with these disasters at the magnitude and scale and the frequency that’s happening,” said Newsha Ajami, chief development officer for research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Erik Porse, director of the California Institute for Water Resources, said that it might have helped had there been more water tanks in the Palisades area — but that ultimately, urban water systems like the ones there are designed for putting out house fires, not widespread blazes.

“We’re looking at a large burned area that’s not just the buildings, but it’s also the entire surrounding landscape. There’s just not enough water that you could store up in tanks to be able to deal with that,” he said.

Los Angeles officials urged residents to cut back on water use.

“I need our customers to really conserve water, not just in the Palisade area, but the whole system, because the fire department needs the water to fight the fires,” Quiñones said.

Her department also issued a 48-hour boil water notice for one ZIP code, which includes Palisades and adjacent communities, on Wednesday.

“Because we’re pushing the water system so hard, our water quality is decreasing,” Quiñones said. “We have a lot of ash in the system, and so please, if you’re going to be drinking water, you need to boil the water.”

Ajami said a drop in water pressure can allow contaminants to enter the system.

“Because pipelines might have cracks here and there, when the pressure goes down, some of those cracks can actually work in reverse — instead of leaking water, they start bringing things from outside into the water,” she said.

Heavy winds and a long dry period in Southern California created ideal fire conditions.

“It does show that in a world where climate change is making these fires more frequent and more devastating, we need to re-evaluate our infrastructure,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

On Truth Social, President-elect Donald Trump blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the Los Angeles fires. His post appeared to refer to a policy debate over diverting water from Northern California to farms in the central and southern parts of the state.

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning,” Trump wrote.

“On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” Trump added.

Newsom’s communications director, Izzy Gardon, said in a statement that “there is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction.”

“The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Gardon said.

Gold, who worked in Newsom’s administration from 2019 to 2022, said the problem wasn’t the quantity of water in Southern California’s reserves. Instead, the issue was the infrastructure in that particular area, he said, paired with dried-out vegetation and the lack of rain.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com