It comes as fire officials attempt to make progress on containing several fires around the city.
Amid concerns about water supply to put out wildfires that have burned thousands of buildings across Los Angeles, President Joe Biden said that intentional power outages caused shortages.
Biden said Thursday that he spoke with California Gov. Gavin Newsom about water shortages that were reported and that generators are being brought in to deal with the fires. Utilities were shut down out of concern about triggering more fires, the president said.
“What I know from talking to the governor, that there are concerns out there that there’s also been a water shortage. The fact is the utilities, understandably, shut off power because they are worried the lines that carried energy were going to be blown down and spark additional fires,” Biden said at a briefing with White House officials. “When it did that, it cut off the ability to generate pumping the water. That’s what caused the lack of water in these hydrants.”
Biden said that California’s Cal Fire and other state agencies are bringing in generators to deal with the shortage of water in hydrants, which sparked controversy and criticism of local state officials earlier this week.
Roughly 20 percent of hydrants across the city went dry as crews battled blazes, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said. Firefighters in Southern California are accustomed to dealing with the strong Santa Ana winds that blow in the fall and winter, but the gusts earlier in the week took them by surprise. The winds grounded firefighting aircraft that should have been making critical water drops, straining the hydrant system.
Officials told The Epoch Times that water tanks used to supply gravity-fed fire hydrants were drained to the point that there wasn’t enough pressure to fight wildfires in some areas in Los Angeles.
Sam Digiovanna, chief at the Verdugo Fire Academy in Glendale, told The Epoch Times that “due to the amount of fire trucks doing structure protection and tying into so many hydrants, we used that water up very quickly.”
