Palisades Has 3 1-Million Gallon Water Towers; After 15 Hours At 4X Demand, They Ran Dry [View all]

[hatrack]

Ed. - Not a conspiracy, not incompetence, not an evil plot. Water demand at unprecedented levels because of a fire beyond anything the city of Los Angeles has seen before, plus the physics and time of pumping water uphill to fill the water system.

As firefighters battled three wildfires raging across Los Angeles in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the water tanks supplying Pacific Palisades – where the largest of the fires broke out – ran dry. Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer and CEO of the Los Angeles department of water and power, told reporters that by 3am Wednesday, the three 1m-gallon tanks serving the Palisades had been depleted.

“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said during an early Wednesday morning press conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”

Although all 114 water tanks serving the city of Los Angeles were completely filled before the fire, water use in the Palisades caused the first of three tanks to run dry at 4.45pm on Tuesday, followed by the second at 8.30pm and the third at 3am Wednesday. As those tanks – located in the high-elevation Palisades – emptied, it became more difficult to refill them from lower-elevation reserves.

Emphasis added.

“Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants in the hills of Palisades,” Quiñones said. “Because we were pushing so much water in our trunk line, and so much water was being used before it [went] to the tanks, we were not able to fill the tanks fast enough. So the consumption of water was faster than we can provide water in our trunk line.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/08/los-angeles-palisade-fire-water-tanks-empty