Inside L.A.’s desperate battle for water as the Palisades fire exploded
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As wildfire tore through the canyons of Pacific Palisades, firefighters waged a desperate battle to save homes and lives.
Seventeen miles east in downtown L.A., dozens of officials huddled around computers over a long conference room table in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s emergency operations center. Screens beamed in the system’s water pressure from remote sensors stationed across the city.
With more firefighters rushing to tame the flames the afternoon of Jan. 7, it became increasingly apparent that Palisades needed more water, fast.
In the tanks that regulate pressure in the upper reaches of the canyons, water was beginning to dwindle. DWP officials had to figure out how to boost pressure into the western reaches of the grid, where a 36-inch pipeline ferries water from a Bel-Air reservoir to the Westside before curving uphill into the Palisades Highlands.
They wrestled with a high-stakes choice: shut off water to nearby neighborhoods such as Brentwood, or face diminishing water pressure on the front lines.
Without water, dialysis centers and other medical facilities would be impaired. How long would it take to turn off valves safely? Could the pipes handle such a shift, or might they rupture?
As the inferno swelled, flames encroached on some areas that were being considered for water shutoffs.
Shutting off water in adjacent areas, the DWP officials ultimately decided, would endanger those neighborhoods and undermine efforts to stanch the fire on its expanding edges, said Anselmo Collins, the DWP’s chief of water operations, in his first interview on the utility’s handling of water flow to fight the devastating wildfire.
“We had a plan, but we did not execute on the plan,” Collins said, because those neighboring enclaves “needed water for fire protection.”
Decisions by the DWP, both in the years before the Palisades fire and in the hours after it exploded, have generated stinging criticism, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to order an inquiry. On Tuesday, the L.A. City Council voted unanimously to demand that the DWP publicly present an analysis of its actions during the Palisades fire.
Water officials and experts interviewed by The Times said that municipal water systems in L.A. and elsewhere, even in areas with greater wildfire risk, generally are not designed to fight firestorms that rage through entire neighborhoods. Collins’ remarks offer the first detailed account of the DWP’s response to the most destructive fire in L.A. history.
As the fire rapidly spread amid extremely high winds, the pressure plummeted in high-elevation areas because of heavy water usage, leaving firefighters to contend with hydrants that had gone dry. Another complication: There was less water available because the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir in the upper Palisades had been emptied in February 2024 for repairs.
Water quality regulations required the reservoir to be emptied because of a tear to its cover, Collins said. The repairs, which were bid out to a contractor at about $130,000, still have not been completed, and Collins does not expect the reservoir to return to service until April or May. The DWP is still trying to determine the impact of the reservoir being offline, Collins said.
A reservoir in the Palisades that holds 117 million gallons of water was offline this month for previously scheduled maintenance.
“I think it would have helped, but I couldn’t tell you at this point how significant the help would have been,” Collins said.
Asked what he would have done differently, Collins indicated it was too soon to say. He and colleagues will evaluate the overall response later, he said.
“I am focusing right now on getting the system back. That’s the No. 1 priority,” he said.
L.A. residents draw water from a lattice of pipelines crisscrossing the city.
In the Palisades, homes dotting the sloping canyon landscape take their water from tanks on the hillsides above.
The 36-inch pipeline along Sunset Boulevard feeds water into Brentwood and Palisades Village before winding along Palisades Drive toward communities in the Highlands several hundred feet above sea level. There, water is pumped uphill into three tanks, each with a capacity of 1 million gallons of water.
The tanks, perched high among the neighborhoods, keep up the water pressure in homes — and hydrants — below. As someone takes a bath, or fills a pool, or opens a hydrant, gravity draws the water down from the tanks.
On a typical day, more water is pumped up from the pipeline to refill the tanks, offsetting each shower or glass of water.
Inside the DWP’s modernist headquarters Tuesday, Collins and his colleagues watched as the water levels dipped lower, and lower, and lower — with pumps unable to refill the tanks faster than water was being siphoned to fire hydrants and homes below.
The first piece of the system to fail, just before 5 p.m, was Marquez Knolls, a tank tucked into a cul-de-sac north of Palisades Village.
“When that tank emptied, we realized that the demands were that great,” Collins said.
The DWP dispatched a team to the neighborhood, hoping to install a device that would regulate pressure there and below. But as the crew began to work, flames overtook the home next door.
“The fire department immediately told the crews that they had to leave for their own safety,” Collins said. “They were surrounded by fire.”
The DWP had not preemptively deployed additional water crews in advance of the dire wind warnings, a decision that Collins defended. Employees were on “high alert” and ready to report to yards across the city in an emergency, he said.
“You don’t know what the emergency is going to be and you don’t want to make an assumption and put your staff in wrong location,” he said.
By 2:30 p.m., Collins said, the water level in the next highest tank, Trailer, set among Mediterranean mini-mansions in the Palisades Highlands, was starting to plummet. By 8:30 p.m., the tank was dry. As the night went on, pressure dropped in dozens of fire hydrants.
The Palisades system soon became like a hose pricked a thousand times, its flow severely weakened. Scores of firefighters were pulling water from hydrants as more homes burned. As structures collapsed and pipes melted or bent, water likely gushed out, further reducing pressure.
“Especially when there’s large-scale loss of homes, the system just starts draining out,” said Tom Kennedy, a water consultant and former general manager of Rainbow Municipal Water District in San Diego County. “And so it’s very difficult to maintain system pressure and volumes in your tanks.”
At one point, the DWP summoned water tankers to directly refill fire trucks. Nine tankers arrived on Tuesday and six more the next day. The state dispatched additional tankers.
Around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, the water level in the highest-elevation tank in the area — a squat steel cylinder nestled in Temescal Canyon — began to drop. By 3 a.m. Wednesday, the tank was empty.
“The fire department was using dozens and dozens of fire hydrants,” Collins said. “Even though we were pumping into the tank, the tank level was still dropping.”
Meanwhile, Collins and his team directed as much water as they could, quadrupling the normal flow to nearly 45,000 gallons per minute, enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every 15 minutes.
Kennedy, the former San Diego County water official, agreed with the DWP’s decision not to turn off the water in nearby neighborhoods.
Firefighters in Pacific Palisades and Altadena have repeatedly been hampered by low water pressure and dry hydrants, revealing limitations in local water systems designed to supply neighborhoods.
“If they had shut down water to other areas, I think it’s more likely than not that some of those other areas could have gotten spot fires that turned into conflagrations themselves,” Kennedy said. In a big fire, he said, firefighters knock out flying embers in surrounding neighborhoods to limit the spread.
By 9 p.m., helicopters were grounded due to winds gusting up to 90 mph, unable to scoop up water from reservoirs in Bel-Air, Encino and Hollywood that are pillars of the city’s strategy to fight wildfires.
The DWP now estimates that 20% of the nearly 1,100 hydrants in the Palisades lost pressure, a figure that Collins said is based on calculating the number of higher-elevation homes served by the three water tanks. The rest, he claimed, had pressure from the water main.
Elsewhere in Southern California, there are vast amounts of water stored in reservoirs and underground that L.A. can draw upon when needed. But moving water from those places requires coordination between the city and the region’s water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
As the Palisades fire intensified, the DWP called on the MWD to help, and water was soon flowing through a backup connection near where Sunset Boulevard crosses the 405 Freeway that had not been used since 2019.
“We wanted to try out a number of things,” said Deven Upadhyay, interim general manager of the MWD. Over the next 48 hours, the agency fired up a pumping plant next to Hollywood Burbank Airport and asked state officials to halt repairs on a reservoir at Castaic Lake to increase water flowing to the Westside, Upadhyay said.
The fire has since spread to 23,713 acres, with nine people confirmed dead. Aerial mapping shows that about 5,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the Palisades fire, with officials so far confirming 2,869 destroyed and 508 damaged.
Collins and other DWP officials emphasized that their current focus is restoring the Palisades water system.
Over the weekend, hundreds of DWP workers fanned out across the burn area, visiting destroyed homes and businesses.
By Tuesday morning, the water at more than 4,700 sites had been shut off, allowing DWP workers to refill water tanks and restore pressure. By Wednesday night, the Marquez Knolls and Trailer tanks were both fully refilled.
An analysis of what led to the drop in water pressure and how to prevent it from happening again will take time, said Uphadyay, the MWD official. He echoed comments by other water managers that the design of the city water system created “significant challenges” in a massive firefighting mobilization.
Collins said he is open to an overhaul of the system to deal with “climate extremes,” but that the DWP’s customers — residents and businesses in L.A. — have to be willing to pay for it.
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