Why some fire hydrants in LA had no water to fight the fires, despite full reservoirs

• Some fire hydrants ran dry in LA due to enormous water demand and infrastructure issues.
• President-elect Trump wrongly blamed a separate debate over water from northern California.
• LA officials and California water policy experts said there was no water shortage in the area.

Some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles ran dry this week after the wildfires overwhelmed the local water system.

The problem unleashed a flurry of criticism, including from President-elect Donald Trump. He accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of refusing to sign a "water restoration declaration" that would have allowed water from northern California to flow into the areas burning in Los Angeles.

"He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn't work!), but didn't care about the people of California," Trump wrote on January 8 on his social media platform.

But the reasons the water ran out were about local infrastructure, California officials and water policy experts told Business Insider. They also refuted the existence of a "water restoration declaration" and said Trump used the delta smelt as a scapegoat for a separate — and much more complex — debate over water allocations from a watershed in northern California.

A spokesperson for Newsom called Trump's claims "pure fiction," and accused Trump of politicizing the disaster. A spokesperson for Trump's transition team pointed to a plan his administration developed in 2019 directing water to the Central Valley and Southern California. But a Newsom spokesperson and California water policy experts said that plan is unrelated to water in fire hydrants in LA.

Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said water demand was four times higher than usual for 15 hours straight as firefighters rushed to put out the flames. That depleted three 1 million gallon water tanks in Pacific Palisades between the afternoon of January 7 and early morning of January 8.

"Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants and the hills of Palisades," Quiñones said Wednesday during a press conference. She explained that without enough pressure in the system, more water couldn't be pumped uphill into the tanks from a network of underground pipes and aqueducts, leaving hydrants dry. Officials couldn't refill the tanks fast enough as flames engulfed entire neighborhoods.

Fire hydrants ran dry because of infrastructure

The problem stemmed from depleted water tanks in the hills of Pacific Palisades on January 7 and 8.

Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks water use and storage data in California, characterized it as an "infrastructure bottleneck."

"Water flows from the reservoirs into this very complicated network of pipes, pumps, and tanks that stretch all over LA. It's really like an electrical grid," Mount said. "Before the fire, the system was full, but then was drained."

Mount echoed LA officials, who said there wasn't enough pressure in the system to pump water into tanks in the hills of Pacific Palisades. Firefighters were stretched thin trying to put out the flames, unable to refill the tanks from which water flows down to homes and fire hydrants.

"We had crews trying to mitigate this, and they had to evacuate," Quiñones said during the press conference. "We're fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging."

Newsom on January 8 said up to 140 additional water tender truckers were deployed to assist in fighting the Eaton and Palisades fires.

At a January 9 briefing, LA Mayor Karen Bass said fire hydrants aren't constructed to handle such massive devastation. The water shortage was compounded by the fact that planes couldn't perform water drops from the air because of the high-speed Santa Ana winds.

"That was the reason that the devastation was so bad," Bass said. "The unprecedented wind, the strength of the wind, and the fact that the air support could not go."

There is no water shortage in southern California

Trump accused Newsom of causing a water shortage around LA. But southern California has plenty of water, despite the issues with fire hydrants, sources told BI.

The reservoirs in southern California are full, Mount said. And as of January 10 the Castaic Lake reservoir — the largest State Water Project reservoir in Southern California — was at 77% of its total capacity, per the California Department of Water Resources.

Mount said this was due to two years of record rainfall and snowpack in the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range, which feeds many reservoirs that serve southern Californians.

Mike McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District that serves 75,000 people in northwest LA — including in Palisades — told CalMatters on January 8 that the water supply was "looking pretty solid."

What does the delta smelt have to do with this?

A spokesperson for Newsom said Trump "conflated two entirely unrelated things: the conveyance of water to Southern California and supply from local storage." The spokesperson added that there was no "water restoration declaration."

Mount agreed, as did Mark Gold, the Natural Resources Defense Council's water scarcity director and a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

"There is no connection between the delta smelt and the water challenges of fighting a fire in Southern California," Mount said.

Mount said Trump may have been referring to a separate debate over how to allocate water exported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — where water in northern California flows into the San Francisco Bay — to both agriculture and urban areas in the southern half of the state, including Los Angeles.

In December, the Biden administration and California officials finalized a plan that aimed to strike a balance among farmers, urban residents, and depleted fish populations including the delta smelt, CalMatters reported. The new regulations replaced those finalized during Trump's first term, which were litigated by Newsom's administration over concerns that the delta smelt, salmon, and steelhead trout would be pushed to extinction.

While Los Angeles does import water from the Bay Delta through the State Water Project, Gold reiterated there are no shortages in southern California.

The region also gets water from the eastern Sierra Nevada through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River, and groundwater.

"The scapegoat for Trump has been the delta smelt because it's not exactly charismatic megafauna," Gold said, noting that endangered and threatened salmon, trout, and other fish are at risk.

Were you impacted by the Los Angeles fires and want to share your story? Email this reporter: Catherine Boudreau cboudreau@businessinsider.com