What Happened With California’s Water Supply During the Wildfires?
As vast swaths of Los Angeles County burned this week, with uncontrolled wildfires killing at least 10 people and destroying upward of 9,000 structures, residents and politicians understandably looked to assign blame. And in a drought-afflicted state where access to water is a particularly contentious issue, many argued that mismanagement of this crucial resource had led to wider destruction.
The hard truth, however, is that some of the most convenient scapegoats had little or nothing to do with the firestorm that raged through the city, and it’s not altogether clear what authorities might have done differently in the immediate crisis to prevent the extensive losses.
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Reservoirs
Billionaire real estate mogul Rick Caruso, who lost a 2022 election to current L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, was among the first to allege — in a series of interviews with local TV stations on Tuesday night — that the city’s irresponsibility with water had doomed the affluent westside Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where he owns a mall. (It sustained burn damage but is still standing.) Taking shots at his political rival, the former Department of Water and Power commissioner claimed that unreplenished reservoirs had caused fire hydrants in the area to run dry.
Some hydrants did lose water pressure throughout Tuesday night, as firefighters acknowledged, though it was not for a lack of preparation. The DWP had filled all its water storage tanks ahead of the Santa Ana windstorm that triggered the blazes, including three tanks in the Palisades area that hold 1 million gallons each. Yet the tremendous demand from firefighting crews as the flames spread had depleted them all by 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
Caruso was closer to the truth when he called this infrastructure old and inadequate. As a former general manager of DWP told the Los Angeles Times, these local supply systems were designed to provide enough water flow to battle a house fire or douse an apartment complex or commercial building. They are no match for massive infernos that erupt at an origin of “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI, where human development has penetrated into an ecosystem where fires are a natural occurrence — and where such a conflagration can quickly rip through an entire community.
The geography of the Pacific Palisades caused another difficulty in efforts to combat the flames: Its hilly landscape covers elevations from sea level up to 1,500 feet, and water pressure in those higher places fell as the tanks were used up. DWP officials said that pressure remained strong at lower elevations. In a briefing on today, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator Deanne Criswell reiterated that an “overload of the system” affected firefighters’ ability to pump water. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for an investigation into whether the nearby Santa Ynez Reservoir being offline when the fires began may have contributed to the situation, though Marty Adams, a 40-year-veteran of the DWP, told The New York Times that this reservoir likely would have been drained as well — though it certainly could have been helpful in the short term.
Gov. Newsom’s Policies
President-elect Donald Trump, always reliable for an inaccurate take that suits his political grievances, blasted Democrats including Newsom over the disaster response, targeting a state environmental policy of using substantial waterflow to preserve rivers and wetlands. Trump has long oversimplified the dizzyingly complex realities of water distribution in California, and once again this week appeared to suggest that the Southland’s troubles would be solved by an infusion of water from other 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 in a virtually apocalyptic way,” he posted on Truth Social on Wednesday.
There is, of course, no such thing as the “water restoration declaration,” nor did L.A. burn for lack of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides water for agricultural industry and drinking water to tens of millions of residents. The city instead gets most of its water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which draws water from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the Metropolitan Water District, which receives a large allotment from the Colorado River and Delta. Mark Gold, water scarcity director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the MWD, told CalMatters this week that Trump was wrong to suggest the scale of the fires was down to available water as opposed to climate change “at a time when the Metropolitan Water District has the most water stored in its system in the history of the agency.”
Indeed, while Southern California has received almost no rainfall in the past eight months, creating the perilously dry conditions that all but assured wildfires during multiple days of hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, the previous two winters have been notably wet. Though this contributed to the growth of additional vegetation now fueling the blazes, it also means — contrary to various claims on social media — that almost every major reservoir in California is holding an amount of water at or above its historical average.
Ocean Water
More uninformed complaints came in the form of the observation that L.A. is situated next to the Pacific Ocean, a seemingly inexhaustible abundance of water with which to put out fires. One naive user on X, formerly Twitter, even made the outlandish suggestion of implementing “a statewide sprinkler system feed from the Pacific.” While CL-415 aircraft known as “Super Scoopers” can pick up payloads of more than 1,500 gallons of ocean water at a time to dump on fires, seawater is only used selectively because its salt content corrodes metal pumps and hydrants, lessens the cooling effects of the water, and wreaks havoc with the environment by increasing soil salinity, which can prevent plants and seeds from absorbing water. (Meanwhile, one of two CL-415 planes being used in L.A. this week was grounded after colliding with a civilian drone illegally flying in restricted airspace over the Palisades Fire.)
Billionaires
Others focused their outrage at California billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, whose Wonderful Company holds a controlling stake in the Kern Water Bank in the southern stretch of the state’s Central Valley. Initially created as a public asset, the reservoir has an underground capacity of 488 billion gallons of water in an arid region that also serves as California’s breadbasket, and it serves as a crucial asset for Wonderful, the largest agricultural company in the world, which grows oranges, pomegranates, and water-intensive crops including pistachios and almonds. Their controversial public-private Kern deal, struck in 1994 during what critics have described as backroom meetings, allows the Resnicks to reserve enough water for their farm empire and sell water back to the state in times of drought; Mother Jones described them in a 2016 headline as “the California Couple Who Uses More Water Than Every Home in Los Angeles Combined.”
The results of this arrangement are dire where it comes to equitable access to water, especially in the Central Valley, where the Resnicks can easily afford to outspend smaller farmers when purchasing roughly nine percent of its total water on the open market. But, again, L.A. did not run out of water during the wildfires — it was a problem of directing it to places where demand was at its most extreme, combined with ecological factors, an understaffed fire department, and the fact that municipal hydrant systems simply aren’t suitable for containing fires on this unprecedented scale. The Resnicks may be convenient villains, but they don’t explain this catastrophe.
Artificial Intelligence
Finally, observers took aim at AI technology, which is known to consume large quantities of water, used to cool servers, and contributes to carbon emissions that warm the planet. (By one recent estimate from Cornell University researchers, the airborne pollution from data centers could rival that of all of the cars on California roads by 2030.) Concerns that companies building generative AI might accelerate water shortages as they build giant data centers across the country are certainly justified: The IT service management company CalEthos, for example, has plans to construct one of these centers on the lithium-rich shore of California’s Salton Sea, promising to drive the economic development of one of the state’s poorest counties. Water for the ambitious project would come from California’s precious share of the Colorado River flow.
Such usage, if it significantly increases, could someday limit the water available for putting out the kind of deadly, sprawling fires that ravaged L.A. this week. At the same time, as with so many of the supposed culprits being held accountable for homes not saved, AI can’t be forced to answer for this disaster, because tech companies did not siphon off the water that firefighters have relied upon. Theories about reasons for insufficient water supply have served as comforting fictions in recent days, obscuring the far scarier reality: California is facing a level of wildfire threat beyond any in its history, the kind that overwhelms our usual definitions of preparedness.
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