It’s a headline no one wants to see: Fire hydrants used to fight the Palisades Fire were empty.

The rapidly spreading fire tested the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s municipal system: The last tank used to maintain water pressure in the area was empty at 3 a.m. Wednesday, according to officials.

The news sparked anger both on social media and among prominent figures like Rick Caruso. The former mayoral candidate and Pacific Palisades landowner reached out to local television news stations to complain about the situation. tells Fox 11 it is a case of “absolute mismanagement of the city”.

Officials say they were and are operating in extreme conditions. We examined exactly how the shortage occurred and what, if anything, could have been done to prevent it.

The water supply was too slow, not too low

LADWP explains the shortage by citing three nearby water tanks, each with a storage capacity of about a million gallons. These tanks help maintain enough pressure to allow water to flow through pipes to homes and uphill to fire hydrants – but the pressure had dropped due to heavy water use, and officials knew the tanks couldn’t keep the flow going forever .

“We have taken the system to the extreme,” LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a press conference. “For 15 hours straight we were seeing four times the demand, which lowered our water pressure.”

According to LADWP, the water supply to the tanks needed to be replenished to provide enough pressure for the water to flow uphill to the fire hydrants. But officials said that as firefighters drew more and more water from the trunk line or main supply, they used water that would have refilled the tanks and eventually exhausted them.

This reduced the water pressure needed for the water to flow uphill.

“I want to make sure you understand that there is water on the main. It just can’t get up the hill because we can’t fill the tanks fast enough,” Quiñones said.

A drain on LADWP’s resources

The first LADWP water tank was empty around 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, the second was empty around 8:30 p.m. that day, and the third and final tank was empty around 3 a.m. on Wednesday. Officials said this was expected due to the limitations of the municipal water system, which LA County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said was “not designed to fight wildfires.”

“A firefight with multiple fire hydrants pulling water from the system for several hours is not sustainable,” Pestrella said in a news conference Wednesday. “That is a known fact.”

In fact, fire hydrants have dried up in other wildfires that spread to urban areas the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the 2024 Mountain Fire, and the 2023 Maui wildfires.

In these cases, firefighters rely on other water sources. For the Palisades Fire, LADWP brought 19 water trucks, each with a capacity of 4,000 gallons.

“There is no shortage of water flowing through our pipes and flowing into the Palisades area,” LADWP spokesperson Mia Rose Wong said in a statement to LAist. “Water remains available in Palisades, but is limited at elevations, impacting fire hydrants.”

Tanks are commonly used throughout the LADWP system for both everyday use and emergencies. To illustrate, the million-gallon tanks are much smaller than the LADWP reservoirs, which can hold hundreds of millions or even billions of gallons of water (and are miles from the Pacific Palisades).

Officials said emergency teams would typically rely more on air support such as firefighting helicopters, which would ease the strain on water tanks as more water would be used from other sources such as above-ground reservoirs. However, strong winds and a lack of visibility in the air led to the firefighting work being stopped, said Pestrella.

“County and city water reservoirs – open reservoirs – are available and on standby as soon as aerial firefighting support is available,” he said.

Fire hydrants: a known problem

While the news of dry hydrants came as a shock to many residents, it’s a familiar concern firefighters have faced in the past: When homes burn and water pipes leak, overall water pressure drops, meaning fire hydrants may run dry soon.

In general, wildfires quickly put a strain on local water supplies.

“In most cases, this happens pretty quickly with almost any wildfire, but especially one like this,” said Greg Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group.

To have a system that could have handled the demands of continuous hydrant fire suppression, Pierce said LADWP would have had to physically maintain much larger reserves of water near the locations of potential wildfires.

“There is a theoretical world, and perhaps a world that we are entering, where we could pay much, much more to have redundant water and power supplies – because you need both (for firefighting), particularly in areas like “This one,” Pierce said. “I’m not even sure that would have made a difference in these types of wildfires, but it’s possible.”

Pierce said the level of financial commitment would be “incredibly expensive,” but that’s exactly what’s needed to keep the hydrants running – especially in mountainous or hilly regions where local authorities also struggle to get water uphill pump.

“There is no reason to believe that the DWP was particularly ill-prepared. Nobody talked about being ill-prepared for wildfires,” he said. “From what I understand, this surprised everyone.”

Saving water helps

As in the case of the Mountain Fire, authorities are urging LADWP users to limit their water use.

“I want our customers to really save water, not just in the Palisade area but throughout the system,” Quiñones said. “The fire department needs water to fight the fires, and we’re fighting a wildfire with city water systems, and that’s a real challenge.”

Because the added stress has caused water quality near the Pacific Palisades to deteriorate, authorities have issued an ordinance 48-hour boil water notification to residents of the 90272 zip code and surrounding communities north of San Vicente Boulevard.

“Because we are putting so much strain on the water system, our water quality is declining,” Quiñones said. “We have a lot of ash in our system.”

And one of the biggest ways to reduce the strain on municipal systems is for residents to have their own water supplies — like tanks or even pools — that emergency personnel can use. For more information about these tanks, see Here.

Fire resources and tips

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Things to consider

Managing fire conditions

How you can help yourself and others

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