When the Hydrants Ran Dry in Los Angeles - WhoWhatWhy When the Hydrants Ran Dry in Los Angeles - WhoWhatWhy

Pacific Palisades, Fire Hydrant
A damaged fire hydrant is seen in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, California, the United States, Jan. 13, 2025. Photo credit: © Qiu Chen/Xinhua via ZUMA Press

When LA’s hydrants failed during massive fires, misinformation spread. What really happened – and the hard truths about our urban water systems.

When wildfires ravaged Los Angeles last week, destroying over 9,000 homes across Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Pasadena, a disturbing reality emerged: Firefighters couldn’t get enough water pressure from their hydrants to direct soaking streams at the rapidly spreading flames. 

The story that emerged about what led to this deadly failure was animated by finger-pointing, misinformation, and political opportunism. Now, in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, one of California’s leading water experts cuts through the noise to explain what really happened.

Gregory Pierce — director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, and the Human Rights to Water Solutions Lab — delivers a masterclass in understanding this infrastructure crisis. 

No, the hydrants didn’t fail due to mismanagement. No, southern California wasn’t suffering from a water shortage. And no, as some Washington politicians claimed, this wasn’t about needing to bring more water from Northern California.

The truth, Pierce explains, is both simpler and more damning: Our urban water systems were never built to fight wildfires of this scale. 

Like a scene from the movie Chinatown reimagined for the climate-change era, the podcast unravels the tangled web of LA’s water infrastructure — a system built to put out everyday blazes is now being overwhelmed by unprecedented infernos.

Pierce breaks down the three critical factors at play: (1) water availability, (2) infrastructure capacity, and (3) power for pressure. The region’s reservoirs were, contrary to widespread rumors, actually well-stocked. But getting this precious resource to the right places at the right times proved beyond the system’s capability. 

Creating truly wildfire-resistant systems would likely require massive, prohibitively expensive investments. As California grapples with this new reality, Pierce suggests that while changes are coming, the transformative reforms needed may remain out of reach.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. When thousands of homes burned in Los Angeles last week, firefighters faced an enemy beyond the flames themselves. They couldn’t get enough water pressure from fire hydrants to fight the fires effectively. It’s a problem that goes far beyond maintenance or mismanagement, striking at the very heart of how we design and build our urban water systems. The devastation has been unprecedented. Over 5,000 homes destroyed in Pacific Palisades alone, another 4,000 in Altadena and Pasadena.

As crews battled these fast-spreading fires, they encountered dry hydrants and failing water pressure across multiple neighborhoods. The problem became so severe that Governor Newsom has ordered an investigation, calling the reports deeply troubling. It exposed a fundamental weakness in our urban infrastructure. Systems designed for everyday use in typical emergencies are being pushed beyond their limits by fires of increasing intensity and scale. To help us understand this critical infrastructure challenge, I’m joined by Dr. Gregory Pierce.

As research and co-executive director of UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation and Director of the Human Rights to Water Solutions Lab, he has spent his career examining how our essential systems either help or hinder our ability to survive and thrive. His work regularly appears in leading journals and major media outlets, from the BBC to the LA Times. And his research has been examining everything from water insecurity to climate resilience. At a moment when Los Angeles faces unprecedented fires, when climate change is reshaping our understanding of normal, and when our infrastructure is being tested like never before, Dr. Gregory Pierce brings us a unique perspective on not just what went wrong, but what it tells us about the challenges ahead. Gregory Pierce, welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

Gregory Pierce: Thanks for having me.

Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is great to have you here. Thank you. When we hear these reports about fire hydrants that had no pressure, lack of water pressure in so many places when there was the early attempts to fight the fire, how much of this was simply the reality of the infrastructure versus a lot of reports that something went terribly wrong?

Gregory Pierce: Yes, great question and a big question, that there seems to be quite a confusion, frankly, disinformation regarding, I think I first want to say, there are multiple fires, as you alluded to, and multiple water systems. There are 200 drinking water systems in the county, and at least 8, probably more, were affected by these fires. That being said, I think most folks, and certainly the controversy and investigations are over the Palisades Fire, which the Palisades is served by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which serves the whole city and is by far the largest water utility actually in the state, but certainly in the county.

And to answer your question, I think it’s definitely true that the biggest factor regarding the insufficiency of the water systems to fight the fire was that urban water systems are not built to fight wildfires. We never historically have expected them to. They’re really built to, of course, provide water for drinking, cooking, washing businesses. And fundamentally, some people, in the past, would say they’re overbuilt to fight everyday fires, urban fires, structure fires, et cetera. That’s not to say that the systems involved providing water to firefighters in these fires couldn’t have done anything better, or certainly in looking out into the future that we won’t need to do better. And there’s lots of ways we could do better. Probably all of them are quite expensive, so we have to keep that in mind.

Some of them may even reach the limits of our technical capabilities at this moment. But yes, I think it’s unquestionable, talking to people who know water systems and who are actual firefighters, that also that water is only one part of the equation in firefighting and this type of terrain. And that the nature of the fire and the winds was unusual. And most people were saying that no amount of water and water infrastructure would’ve “stopped” the Palisades Fire. Certainly more water and associated infrastructure would’ve helped slow it, slow the damage. But again, it wasn’t, as far as we can tell right now, there are investigations ongoing and lots of finger pointing, really a structural or an unusual failure of these systems to fight the fires.

Jeff Schechtman: This problem wasn’t a brand new problem. There had been issues in previous fires, particularly even in Malibu, of lack of water pressure in systems fighting fires.

Gregory Pierce: Yes, that’s correct. Even I believe in December there was a fire in Malibu, and that whole region, the northwestern mountainous, hilly region of Los Angeles, all that area, is at high wildfire risk. Certainly, for broader LA County, it’s up there. But people weren’t particularly looking to Palisades, of course, until the last 10 days. And yes, other recent fires in Malibu and other parts of especially the Woolsey Fire. There are plenty of accounts of water systems losing pressure and firefighters needing to rely on pool water, needing to go to ocean water.

And again, there’s the other fires in Los Angeles also had issues with pressurization of the fire hydrants but have not been nearly so called out for that. But it’s a typical thing that happens in wildfires encroaching on urban systems. It’s not just that those systems aren’t built to fight the fires, but also they get impaired that they don’t work as well because their infrastructure gets damaged, and probably most critically, although it’s also a matter of controversy in some of these fires, their power is less reliable. And power or pressure is really what moves water, and especially moves the water through the fire hydrants and other infrastructure that firefighters need. But yes, the power gets affected, and so the water pressure gets affected. I don’t want to say it’s inevitable, but it’s really hard to fight.

Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about it from a design issue perspective. Certainly, there’s huge costs involved to try and mitigate some of these issues, but what are the limitations in terms of design that you referenced before?

Gregory Pierce: Yes, I’d say there’s really three aspects just to the water system’s role, and really, fighting any fire. That’s the raw water availability, which has been a point of controversy, as well as the infrastructure, of course, to hold it and to move it, the fire hydrants, the tanks, the reservoirs and the pipes. And then the third element is the power, so that the water can move as quickly through the system as is possible and also be high pressure. So those are the three elements, I think, that are subject to scrutiny right now, subject to improvement, and will be improved in the future.

But again, to really scale them up so that we have 5, 10, 15 times the firefighter capability just through the water system, which again, may in of itself not be enough. I think that’s what most people are saying. But to really scale up the resilience of that system is, again, incredibly expensive. It’s honestly going to be incredibly expensive just to build back the infrastructure to the way it was. But I think we know we need to build it back better because the decision has already pretty much seemingly been made that we’re going to build back the housing. But again, the question of how much better and who’s going to pay for that and how we’re going to pay for that is more than limiting.

Jeff Schechtman: Is there a willingness to think about this with respect to cost-benefit analysis, that it will be to create the kind of more modern, more technologically advanced system you’re talking about, so expensive that it simply isn’t worth it relative to what this kind of a system could have even done to stop something like the Palisades Fire?

Gregory Pierce: Yes. I think and hope we need to look closely at the alternatives and, again, the different pieces of the equation of firefighting that are most cost-effective, which include not just the water, but of course, home hardening, landscape, or the vegetation management. Other aspects of firefighting, including labor, including the other infrastructure and other wildfire retardants that are used. As well as the potential, and it gets really complicated here, but the potential privatization of at least the liability of some of these things.

There are potentially ways to support, or require, or allow private property to have more water on hand.

But that’s then not the responsibility of water systems. So yes, all of that needs to be judged against each other. It remains to be seen. I think there are certainly some avenues through which that will be done, but others that are more political and fast-moving. And I understand the need for fast moving are not taking into account critical cost-benefit analysis. And there are some previous studies and spaces that can give us hints around what’s more cost-effective, certainly, but we do need to do full studies that are vetted to say definitively, especially when we get to specific areas.

Jeff Schechtman: Is there a problem with the number of jurisdictions that are involved in Los Angeles? You were talking about all the water systems earlier, does that make trying to address this problem even more complex?

Gregory Pierce: I think so. To be clear, even though I think it’ll surprise most folks, LA County having 200 water systems isn’t unusual. It doesn’t stand out. The state has 3,000. Basically, water systems are fragmented across the entire United States. So that part of it isn’t so complicated. I think the fact there are so many different, although I know there’s two big ones, but there’s several other smaller ones, so many different fires or at least two big fires that, yes, are completely different jurisdictions except LA County, certainly complicates it.

But I don’t know that it would be any different than any other big urban region that has a dominant city like LA City within the county. Of course, there are all the complications that there always are that seemingly are going to be harder with the new federal administration, around who has jurisdiction over different parts of response and recovery, from the local to the county to the state to the federal. I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but I don’t think LA is actually that unique in that respect.

Jeff Schechtman: Have we seen anything in terms of an ongoing evolution of urban water systems in fire-prone areas? Has this been a subject that has been changing and evolving over time as we’ve become more concerned about these fires in urban areas and as global warming and climate change have had greater impact?

Gregory Pierce: That’s a great question, and I think we’re scrambling right now to find examples of cities in the world. There aren’t too many cities that look like Los Angeles in having these very forested, hilly areas right in the mix with more flat, very typically urban areas. There are other places. So, just the comparability, there’s not too many cities that look like that, that mix the wildland urban fire risk. And I think people are pointing now to San Francisco as the city obviously that had a huge fire a long time ago and then built a separate system, but it doesn’t have any of the wildland fire risk at this point.

And that was done a long time ago, when infrastructure costs a lot less. But yes, I think certainly, water systems, to your question, have been getting more equipped just for a variety of climate disasters, climate-induced or accelerated disasters. There aren’t really strong state standards around water systems needing to be, again, more prepared, certainly, than these systems in LA were for wildfire. And I’d say systems haven’t typically gone to investments that make them hyper-resilient to wildfire because that’s a whole nother level of cost, and people don’t want to pay for it.

They didn’t want to pay for it, at least before last week. Maybe that’s changing now. That being said, I’m open to being wrong and hearing examples of places in the world that have really done this, that look like Los Angeles, but have yet to hear examples. Again, I think the debate about what needs to be done, what the standards are going to be, where the funding is going to come from, are all to come, and it’s going to look different now in the future, given how this played out. But right now, yes, we weren’t really thinking or investing in the type of preparedness that people seem to expect.

Jeff Schechtman: There’s been, as we talked at the outset, a lot of misinformation about all of this. And one of the criticisms has been this idea that somehow there was mismanagement of the water infrastructure. Talk about that.

Gregory Pierce: Yes. I think that’s really specific to the Palisades case, in particular, where people were especially talking about the fire hydrants running dry or getting really low pressure after several hours of use. There are debates around how many hours and how many hydrants, but again, typically, hydrants will run dry after several hours fighting a wildfire because they’re not really designed– In that region, I think they were designed a little bit for some level of wildfire, but not for anywhere close to this level of wildfire. But there’s debates that have yet to be proven around, the hydrants actually didn’t function the way that they’re supposed, to or they weren’t inspected.

I don’t yet see any evidence that’s true, but again, there’s going to be all these investigations. I’m sure they’re going to find some things that could have been done better. Then otherwise, I think there is a certainly debate around a reservoir that was empty and has proven to be empty. And again, so far, as far as I can see, it was extraordinarily bad luck that that reservoir was empty at that time. It was empty because it had to be drained to comply with regulations around water quality and it was about to be refilled. It was empty for quite some time, but that’s typical of how long it takes urban water systems, especially ones that are big bureaucracies like DWP, to do things, but I’m not sure other water systems fill their reservoirs again more quickly.

So there’s maybe still some information out there on that, but largely again, that was really bad luck, and we won’t be doing that, I’m sure, in the future, or we’ll have to think about how we separate drinkable from non-drinkable. But again, that’s costly and there’s reasons why we didn’t do that in the past. But then I guess the broadest critique is, includes coming from our president-elect, around how there just wasn’t enough water in Southern California to fight these fires and promoting what’s been a debate now for 40 years, moving more water from Northern California to Southern California through the Delta.

That wasn’t an issue at all for two reasons. First, that Southern California, relative to how it usually is, actually has a lot of water in its reservoirs right now because we’re following two really rainy years, the last two years with one that’s really dry right now, but the second is that, even though we have all the water in these reservoirs, they’re spread across Southern California, and you can’t just move water quickly from a reservoir 100 miles away or 50 miles away up the train in the Palisades when you don’t have great power all the way through.

Water is heavy, it’s subject to the laws of physics. We’ve done a lot to move water more quickly, but it’s, again, stubbornly hard to move quickly, especially uphill. And we couldn’t just move it from these other reservoirs that are close by. That’s why you saw tanker trucks and helicopters trying to drop water. That’s a quicker way to get water from point A to point B. And it is difficult generally, I’ll also say, in the Palisades, most of these areas that are hilly but don’t actually have their own water supply to get water up there for anything. They don’t have their own water. You’re pumping the water uphill. It’s, in some ways, yes, already a subsidized area in that respect. So I think that those are the main pieces of disinformation I’ve seen that need to be combated.

Jeff Schechtman: You and your colleagues hope to learn from all of this. What do you think is going to be the state of the research and the experience? And what will you come away with from all of this, do you think?

Gregory Pierce: I think there’s two big things. One is this will give, obviously, the mandate and the ability to look really hard at all of the low-hanging or medium-hanging fruit that water systems have to be more resilient to fight wildfires. I don’t think there’s, again, a lot of low-hanging fruit, but looking at all of the best practices and making sure we have the standards, and we fund the infrastructure and maybe the water supply so that water systems are best equipped that they can be at a reasonable cost, which frankly, there’s big fires in California.

Well, the ones that people really remember, at this rate, every few years, and then the momentum dies. But I think with this, we expect the state and local systems, really, to do all that they can and be vigilant going forward. So a lot of research there on what is possible and what can be implemented. The bigger questions and the billion-dollar questions are around can we, and should we design hyper resilient, hyper redundant, in a positive sense, water supply systems for wildfire capability? Again, is that cost-effective versus the other ways to fight wildfires or the consideration around whether we should rebuild in some areas at all? And those are more, I’d say, political economy questions, the latter.

And there are going to have to be some big decisions made and societal willingness to pay for that type of infrastructure, for this type of systems if we really want those, but those are very much competing with other pressing demands, especially from climate change. And as we’ve all heard, inflation and cost of living has been rising as it is. So the question of who’s going to pay and also how we structure those, the funding, is an incredibly important question, not just for the city of LA, for which it is very complicated, but also, I think more broadly, across the US West and other regions, frankly, across the world that have these issues with dry climate and wildfire risk in urban areas.

Jeff Schechtman: Talk about other water needs in Los Angeles, in other communities that, by addressing these issues with respect to wildfires in the infrastructure that’s needed for that, that it takes away resources for other water needs that the communities may have.

Gregory Pierce: Yes, absolutely. At this point, of course, and I know some people will think it’s a paradox with what I said, what everyone said about Southern California having enough water right now in its reservoirs, but long term, we’re always needing to look for new sources of water and conserve our use of water. And especially a lot of areas of the region are trying to move toward more local water, recycled water, and move away from dependency on imported water sources, which have a lot of issues and are subject to cuts that we can’t control.

So, yes, unless we “generate” produce new water, there’s going to be direct trade-offs with water use for basic drinking, cooking purposes, outdoor watering for sure, businesses. And those were already tough questions for us. So then the question becomes, I think, really, do we try to produce more water? There’s reasons why we’re not pursuing more in that respect than we already are, because again, it’s incredibly costly and often environmentally damaging to try to pursue “new water supplies.” But I think all that’s taken back on the table, and I do think proponents of increasing or doubling down on the paradigm of importing water from different places are opportunistically trying to use this moment to push forward those ideas, but those ideas are no less controversial than they were a few weeks ago. So I think we have to be really careful, but also make some bold decisions on whether we want to, again, have this amount of water that we may need to be more resilient to wildfire.

Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about what those controversial ideas are. Moving water from where to where?

Gregory Pierce: Yes. Well, it’s a little different depending on where you are in the region. The city of LA relies on three different imported water sources or water sources that come from hundreds of miles away. The broader region only relies on two. So there’s the Owens Valley Aqueduct, which is only city of LA. There’s the Colorado River, which goes to seven states and Mexico, but Southern California gets a good amount of it. And there’s a state water project, which is the one that was referenced, and I think is being referenced because, the Colorado River, there’s already going to be cuts to Southern California.

That’s been quite in the news for the last few years, and that’s the reality of it. And the Owens Valley, the LA Aqueduct, there’s not really chance, at least in the long term, of increasing that supply. So it comes down to the state water project and an idea that’s literally been debated in different forms for 40 years, around additional conveyance or basically tunnels, pipelines, to bring more water to Southern California beyond what already is brought to Southern California down the spine, basically right next to the five freeway. Again, the governor, I think ironically, considering the president-elect’s criticism of him, was pushing before all this happened, the fires, for that revision or expansion of the Delta conveyance to bring more water from Northern California to Southern California.

But it’s been fought successfully for all those decades, both for environmental reasons, including impacts to the ecosystem and including the Delta smell that is referenced by many people, but other species and other environmental concerns, for sure, as well as the cost of the infrastructure, which is considerable, and you have to, again, weigh it against the alternatives of relying on more local water and conserving water, as well as I think the earthquake risk to that infrastructure, speaking of disasters. As well as concern around, like has happened on the Colorado River, that we may build more infrastructure, and then the water itself won’t be there that we counted on.

So we’ll have overbuilt our infrastructure and not really get a net yield in terms of water, which we can’t do anything about. So those are some of the controversies around the state water project, but that’s really the one I think that the debate gets changed or amplified given the fires and the narrative around the Northern California, Southern California transfers.

Jeff Schechtman: And finally, Greg, how much do you think this will change water policy in the state? We’ll have these debates. These debates, as you say, many of them have been going on for years and years and years, but will anything really change with respect to water policy as a result of this, do you think?

Gregory Pierce: It’s a great question. Of course, the real answer is, it’s too soon to tell. I’m very close to the situation, so to me, I can’t see how things wouldn’t change. And that’s how people are feeling right now, certainly in the sector, that they could change radically. And certainly, there’s going to be a lot of change in the next few years in regulation, in policy, in investment. But whether that persists and whether there’s the long-term vigilance and investment to keep up the systems to again, be more resilient, but not 5, 10, 15 times more resilient, or we’re going to go to that next level of investment that would radically change water policy or at least a water system policy in California, transform it, that is just, the jury is completely out. But I think yes, pretty sizable changes coming in the next few years, that will have some impact, for sure. But whether we see transformation remains to be seen.

Jeff Schechtman: Dr. Gregory Pierce, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

Gregory Pierce: Yes. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Schechtman: Thank you.


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  • Jeff Schechtman

    Jeff Schechtman's career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.

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