Everything can be prevented if there had been foresight and enough of a political environment to allow for prevention. It's an old and outdated infrastructure issue, something that, unfortunately, will become more common going forward. Here's what really caused L.A. fire hydrants to run out of water A challenge of access, not supply Over the past decade, California has experienced historic drought conditions, which have resulted in water-restricting policies. And while the past two rainy winters have offered some reprieve in Southern California, 2025 has been off to a record-dry start. Climate scientist Daniel Swain referred to this swing between extreme rain and drought as “hydroclimate whiplash,” which his research found is exacerbated by global warming. While this boom-bust precipitation cycle creates particularly dangerous conditions for fires, it has allowed for California to see its previously shrinking water reserves fill in recent months. So while drought has been a persistent problem in Southern California, it wasn't behind the cause of the city's water shortages. It also can’t be chalked up to restrictions protecting the endangered Delta smelt, a tiny fish that has proved to be a perennially politically popular scapegoat for water issues. The fish’s protected status limits water usage in its Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta habitat, which some have argued should be freed up for human consumption. Quiñones instead explained it as an issue of access. During that roughly 15-hour window from the Palisades Fire sparking and the available water tanks running dry, Quiñones said the demand for water was four times the norm, causing water pressure to lower. This made it difficult to achieve the force needed to get water into the higher-elevation tanks, particularly at the rate necessary to address a fire moving five football fields a minute, boosted by the gusty Santa Ana winds. "We pushed the system to the extreme," Quiñones said during a Wednesday news conference. “We're fighting a wildfire with an urban water system. And that is really challenging.” .... “Everybody has known that there was the potential for something like this to happen because we've seen it on a smaller scale,” Kearns said. While the demand issues Quiñones cited is one aspect of the failure, Kearns believes a number of issues contributed to the overall lack of water where and when it was needed. The lack of fire hydrants would not have been quite as dire if the wind was not strong enough to prohibit helicopters from flying overhead and dropping waters—a challenge that also plagued firefighters responding to the Lahaina, Maui wildfire in 2023. Fires can also cause power cuts or damage water pipes and other infrastructure, creating additional issues all their own. “It was like a worst-case scenario, but I think we should be planning for those worst case scenarios,” she said. “You can't predict everything, but also, I do think this is where we're headed.”
“It was like a worst-case scenario, but I think we should be planning for those worst case scenarios,” she said. Well - yes.
One thing, chimneys will most definitely survive an earth apocalypse. But also, when you pan out worldwide, fires are consuming a lot of the world right now. Not at the Level of LA, but there are huge red spots all over the world.
The cool thing about having a house on an island is that when it’s a house in the water there won’t be fires everywhere
Again, it's a city/county water system designed to provide drinking water and enough pressure to handle a few hydrants being tapped at any one time. The topography is such that the system depends on water tanks above the community so that gravity sustains the flow. That means water has to be pumped up to the tanks so water can flow down to houses and hydrants, yet the amount of water you can pump in to fill the tanks is not as fast as the drawdown during this kind of fire. So, no. It's a basic infrastructure problem and we are almost certainly unwilling to pay the taxes needed to improve our infrastructure to the standards we'll need in 2050 or 2100, both of which are getting here faster by the day.
If you want to fix the issues in California, you have to ditch the excessive environmental red tape preventing the state from investing in sufficient energy production required to then invest in desalinization plants....but even those things are not as important as allowing routine controlled burns to clear out underbrush near populated areas AND building in sufficient fire breaks to stop the spread of wildfires. Given how much California rips off their citizens with taxation, those basic steps are the least they can do to at least keep them safe and if they were done. Now that won't stop eco-terrorists or homeless people from starting arson fires, but they would mitigate the damage done by them.
We got on a path to end fossil fuels 40 years ago? We changed how we thought about the relationship between hazards and the built environment 50 years ago? Doing both now is still a good thing. For instance, none of these homes along Malibu Beach should be allowed to be rebuilt. Between fires and sea level rise, it's utter folly to allow it. How we buy out property owners in vulnerable areas will be one of the more hotly contested political issues in the coming years, as it won't just be limited to a stretch of homes, but whole communities.
From fire under those conditions? Highly unlikely. Look, sometimes fire wins. We do what we can, but there are days where all you can do is try to protect lives while the fire moves.
My uninformed curiosity as a tech entrepreneur is mostly about some sort of hypothetical rapid surveillance and response system - if you could catch it early enough, almost like if you catch cancer earlier rather than later, shouldn't you be have a much better chance to contain and stop it? I'm just wondering why something like that doesn't seem to exist. If somelne could invent something like it, shouldn't that be a big business opportunity?
Something like that exists. We no longer have human fire lookouts in towers, but cameras with all kinds of capabilities to detect heat, identify smoke, and triangulate location. It works pretty well in places that are more remote than the middle of LA. We also have satellites looking at heat signatures and lightning trackers. For these LA fires and others that immediately move quickly, including the Camp Fire, it doesn't really matter how fast you detect. 60-mph+ wind-driven fire can go from a spark to 100 acres in a few minutes. Even if you could detect it as soon as it started and pinpoint the location, it still takes time for firefighters to reach the scene. To stop the LA fires, you would literally need to be on the start within the first two minutes and even then you're probably going to fail if the winds are high enough and aligned with slope and fuels. And before you ask, we don't fly helicopters and tankers if the winds get above 35 mph. The risk to pilots is too great and even if you had unmanned aircraft, in those kinds of winds the drops get too dispersed (falling water also evaporates in warm, dry winds) to do much good. There's an optimum height above the fuels for drops of water and r****dant and high winds make drops problematic at best.
I guess that's the big challenge here. I thought these fires originally started away from the houses? Still trying to think how one could come up with a better system.
That's great, but it's yesterday's problem and kind of feels like Dresden mandating smoke detectors after the bombings. There are larger issues here. I don't think there is a tech fix to putting a world designed for the mid-20th century into a radically different and quickly changing 21st century. We have a lot of hard work to do and band-aids that encourage us to keep existing systems will be more harmful than good. Try to imagine what we'll be experiencing in 25 years and use your tech brain to start working on those problems.
I don't know what you and your tech boys could have done about this. ...about the same as everyone else? 2+ years of abnormal wet weather made things grow out there...then a massive drought dried it all out. Crazy low humidity + high winds is a very bad combo. It just takes one spark. There's literally nothing that could be done to prevent this other than not putting buildings there in the first place and just letting it burn down every few years.
The biggest issue with the hydrants in the palisades fire, as I understand it, was that the sustained water usage for 15 hours was 4x the maximum, and the stored water supply just ran out. So to go back to what @rimrocker has been saying, these systems were designed for a world that needed lower fire extinguishing capacity. The ‘easy’ fix is to add more water capacity to storage and the storage infrastructure associated with it. Of course that leads to the need for more water traffic and if the pipes are being used more, they will require more maintenance and other items. Juxtapose that to how the American infrastructure is slowly crumbling due to lack of overall upkeep due to funding and it all comes back around to money/taxes. This is not a political take, it’s reality. Tangentially, and I posted this in the D&d thread, I’m very interested to see how these fires affect building codes in the future. FEMA is a strong factor, as we see with their building requirements post hurricane. Going back to @rimrocker’s mention of Dresden and also looking at Japan post-WWII, buildings were constructed very differently after their cities were firebombed into oblivion.
Great posts @rimrocker and thank you for sharing your knowledge. This gets again to that the has an ongoing infrastructure problem. We are building new infrastructure but a lot more is needed just to upgrade existing infrastructure. Also this isn’t just a CA problem. We see it with flooding and damage from other disasters around the country.
