As wildfires raged across Los Angeles on Tuesday, crews battling the Palisades blaze faced an additional burden: Scores of fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had little to no water flowing out.
“The hydrants are down,” said one firefighter in internal radio communications.
“Water supply just dropped,” said another.
By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all fire hydrants in the Palisades area “went dry,” said Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city’s utility.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said Wednesday morning. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
But the DWP and city leaders faced significant criticism on social media from residents as well as from developer Rick Caruso, who owns Palisades Village mall in the heart of the Westside neighborhood. Caruso, a former commissioner for the DWP, blasted the city for infrastructure that struggled to meet firefighting demands.
“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said with exasperation. Through Tuesday night, he expressed similar criticism in a series of live interviews with local TV stations. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. … It should never happen.”
L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades and participated with Quiñones in Wednesday’s news conference, also asserted her fury over the DWP’s water supply issues.
“The chronic under-investment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners was evident and on full display over the last 24 hours,” Park said. “I am extremely concerned about this. I’m already working with my team to take a closer look at this, and I think we’ve got more questions than answers at this point.”
By Matt Hamilton and David Zahniser
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