‘There’s nothing they can do’: Fire hydrants across Pacific Palisades are coming up dry as blaze rages
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‘We pushed the system to the extreme,’ one official said. As Southern California battled multiple raging wildfires, they faced a critical issue: no water in some fire hydrants. Four major fires have devastated the region, growing to cover more than 15,000 acres since they began on Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, they had not been contained at all.
![[Firefighters fight the flames from the Palisades Fire burning a house during a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/08/16/SEI235337822.jpg)
More than 400 members of the Los Angeles Fire Department have been deployed to fight the Palisades Fire alone, Kristin Crowley, chief of the department, said at a Wednesday morning press conference, noting the blaze was “stretching the capacity of our emergency services to their maximum limits.”.
But they ran into another issue: a lack of water in hydrants. The Palisades area has three large tanks that provide water for the hydrants, each holding about a million gallons. The first tank ran out of water at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, the second tank ran out at 8:30 p.m. and the third ran out at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning. The water was being consumed at a rate faster than the tanks could be replenished, officials said.
“We pushed the system to the extreme,” Janisse Quiñones, the chief executive officer and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a press conference Wednesday, noting that the Pacific Palisades neighborhood saw four times the normal demand for 15 hours in a row.
