As Los Angeles firefighters battle the most destructive fire in the city's history, water is running out.
“The hydrant is down,” a firefighter said over the radio. According to the Los Angeles Times.
Another said, “The water supply has just decreased.''
Firefighters were forced to watch as Pacific Palisades, one of Los Angeles' most scenic and celebrity-filled neighborhoods, was gutted in a matter of hours late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
“There's no water in the fire hydrants,” Rick Caruso, owner of the Palisades Village shopping mall in the heart of the disaster area, told local media furiously. “The firefighters are there, but there's nothing they can do. Neighborhoods are burning, houses are burning, businesses are burning. … That should never happen.”
The water shortage was the result of years of mismanagement of Los Angeles' water system, including federal indictments and high-profile resignations of its leaders, and serious operational problems that rapidly depleted reservoirs.
The Pacific Palisades Fire, whipped by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses. By Wednesday night, it had spread to 16,000 acres, larger than New York's Manhattan Island, and crews were unable to contain it in the slightest.
LA residents voiced outrage over how the fire and two other fires in Los Angeles County were raging out of control. As of Wednesday night, five people were dead, several others were injured, and at least 70,000 people across Los Angeles were told to evacuate their homes.
To add insult to injury, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass is 11,400 miles away in Africa, where she had approved $18 million in cuts to the fire department months earlier.
“I'm resigning! Why are you in Ghana?!,” one person commented on an X post from Bass's office providing updates on the bushfires.
One angry Angelino told Fox News: “I was born and raised in Los Angeles, so I spend my life worrying about when an earthquake is going to hit or when the Santa Ana winds are going to blow. I have a plan. Someone was in charge of my town. Where were you?”
Los Angeles' smoky skies also bear the legacy of poor fire management by the state of California and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Los Angeles' water system simply could not keep up with the demands of multiple fires that lasted 15 hours at four times the normal rate, Janice Quiñones, director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told the LA Times.
The city has 114 huge water tanks to store water and ensure a steady flow of water. All were full on Tuesday when the fire started. Three million-gallon tanks feed Pacific Palisades' fire hydrants.
Quiñones said the first car was empty before 5 p.m., but the last one was trained by 3 a.m. Wednesday.
Without water tanks, the city's system could not maintain pressure on the fire hydrants.
This problem was not unique to the city of Los Angeles.
Malcolm Stewart, who lives near Pasadena, watched as the massive Eaton Fire in East Los Angeles engulfed homes in his neighborhood and crept toward his childhood home. There was not a single fire engine in sight.
With water cut off to their home, he and his brother had little access to a garden hose to put out the blaze and prevent it from spreading to the property.
“The county did nothing. He's literally out there with dirt, a shovel and hope,” his wife, Charlene Stewart, told the Post hours after she couldn't reach him. Ta.
When the same thing happened in neighboring Ventura County in November, disgraced officials blamed pump damage and overall They blamed it on the lack of water. The LA Times reported.
Caruso, a former public works commission chairman and Los Angeles mayoral candidate, said such safeguards should have worked in Los Angeles, fire hydrants should have remained full, and that a water shortage of this magnitude “never should have happened.” he told the paper.
The collapse of Los Angeles' water system comes after years of criticism from President-elect Donald Trump and others that California's leaders are not properly managing water and fire hazards.
President Trump has placed the blame for the water shortage on Democratic Gov. Newsom, who in 2020 derailed the Trump administration's order to shift water from the state's leafy north to arid Southern California.
Newsom's excuse is an endangered small fish that has already been declared functionally extinct.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called smelt…but he didn't care about Californians,” the president-elect said. His truth ranted on social platforms..
Trump also accused Newsom of failing to clean up underbrush and dead trees that can cause wildfires, but it's not yet clear whether that was a factor in the fires.
“From the first day we met, I said that no matter what my bosses or environmentalists wanted me to do, I had to 'clean up' the forest floor. I had to get burned, I had to turn off the fire hydrants.” President Trump posted on X in 2019.
Trump was referring to measures such as burns, refueling breaks or firebreaks that have been established to prevent the spread of wildfires.
Newsom has touted his accomplishments in forestry, but 2021 investigation It turns out he overstated the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by a whopping 690%, according to CapRadio and NPR's California Newsroom.
But Los Angeles' public utility system has its own major systemic problems.
Bass, who had been touting his DEI appointment, fired the department's first Indigenous chief, Cynthia Lewis, after less than a year in office.
Two of the utility's last three general managers resigned in disgrace, with one allegedly mismanaging $40 million in funds. Another man, David Wright, was sentenced to six years in prison for: accepting bribes;
But most of the public outcry has focused on Basu, who was rushing home from attending the inauguration of Ghana's new president when the fire broke out on Tuesday night. She was overseas even though there had been warnings about strong Santa Ana winds a few days earlier.
Stay up to date with NYP's coverage of horrific fires in the Los Angeles area
In addition to Bass, the city's fire chief, Christine Crowley, the first woman to hold the position, is also a former Fox News official who came under fire for Crowley for prioritizing virtue signaling and woke branding over doing her job. It has also received criticism from news host Megyn Kelly and others.
“In recent years, the Los Angeles fire chief has made diversity a priority, not filling hydrants,” Kelly said on his eponymous show, adding that he has encouraged more women and LGBTQ+ people to join the fire department. Mr. Crowley's stated goal was to attract people to the United States.
