As wildfires raged across Los Angeles on Tuesday, crews battling the Palisades Fire faced an additional burden: Little or no water was flowing from numerous fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades.

“The hydrants are down,” a firefighter said in internal radio communications.

“The water supply just went down,” said another.

As of 3 a.m. Wednesday, all water storage tanks in the Palisades area were “dry,” reducing water flow from fire hydrants at higher elevations, said Janisse Quiñones, executive director and chief engineer of the city’s Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Utility.

“We had tremendous demand for our system in the Palisades. We have taken the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said Wednesday morning. “For 15 hours there was four times the demand, which lowered our water pressure.”

But the DWP and city leaders faced significant criticism on social media from residents as well as developer Rick Caruso, who owns the Palisades Village shopping center in the heart of the Westside neighborhood. Caruso, a former DWP commissioner, criticized the city for its infrastructure, which has difficulty fighting fires.

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said angrily. He expressed similar criticism in a series of live interviews with local television stations until Tuesday evening. “The firefighters are there (in the neighborhood) and there’s nothing they can do – we have neighborhoods on fire, houses on fire and businesses on fire. … It should never happen.”

L.A. City Councilwoman Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades and attended Wednesday’s press conference with Quiñones, also expressed anger over the DWP’s water supply problems.

“The City of Los Angeles’ chronic underinvestment in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners has been evident and starkly visible over the last 24 hours,” Park said. “I’m very worried about it. I am already working with my team to take a closer look at this and I think we have more questions than answers at this point.”

Quiñones and other DWP officials said the city was battling a wildfire in hilly terrain using a municipal water system and that water pressure remained strong at lower elevations in the Palisades.

Before the fire, all 114 tanks that supply the city’s water infrastructure were completely filled.

Quiñones said the fire hydrants in the Palisades rely on three large water tanks, each holding about 1 million gallons. The first ran dry on Tuesday at 4:45 p.m.; the second at 8:30 p.m.; and the third was dry at 3 a.m. on Wednesday.

“These tanks help relieve the pressure on the fire hydrants in the hills of the Palisades and because we were pumping so much water into our trunk lines and using so much water. … We couldn’t fill the tanks fast enough,” she said. “So the water consumption was faster than we can provide water in a long-distance pipeline.”

In other words, the demand for water at lower elevations hindered the ability to refill tanks at higher elevations. Due to the ongoing fire, DWP crews also had difficulty reaching the pumping stations used to move water to the tanks.

The utility sent 20 tanks of water to support firefighters in the Palisades on Wednesday, and the tankers had to reload at other remote locations.

“We are constantly transporting water to the fire department to get as much water as possible,” Quiñones said.

It’s unclear how widespread the fire hydrant problems were. In November, a lack of water from fire hydrants affected efforts to fight the mountain fire in Ventura County when two water pumps were out of service, slowing the mountain water supply process.

Caruso, who also unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2022, claimed the challenges were avoidable.

“This is a glimpse into a systemic problem in the city — not just the mismanagement, but also our city’s aging infrastructure,” Caruso said.

Caruso, who evacuated his Brentwood home on Tuesday, said his daughter’s home was destroyed in the fire and his family is waiting to learn whether any of his sons also lost their home.

Caruso said in an interview that several homes around his Palisades Village shopping center were “completely” engulfed in flames and his mall, which opened in 2018, was damaged. On Wednesday morning, numerous buildings and homes in the Palisades were reduced to rubble.

“We feel the very personal impact of this,” he said.

Times staff writers Terry Castleman and Ian James contributed to this report.