Los Angeles on Fire

States with a smaller population than Los Angeles County ! @GavinNewsom @fema @R5_Fire_News pic.twitter.com/Ebxv6KygpA

— Russel L. Honore' (@ltgrusselhonore) January 12, 2025

Maanvi Singh and Dani Anguiano at The Guardian:

The horrors that unfolded around US’s second largest city this week were shocking – but they were also, to some extent, expected. The blazes are part of the wildfire crisis that’s been unfolding in the American west for the last decade, from the 2017 fire siege in California’s Bay area to the 2018 blaze that destroyed Paradise and killed 85 people.

The fires that ravaged Los Angeles unfolded on a stunning landscape that is prone to burn, yet dotted with thousands of homes built over the years. Hurricane-force winds barreled through an area that hadn’t seen substantial rain in months, leading to massive conflagrations, fanned by hurricane-force gusts. It created a firestorm that spread at a rate that far exceeded firefighters’ ability to respond.

Firefighting forces across the state are deeply understaffed and have been struggling for years to battle the barrage of extreme wildfires. The 9,000 firefighters in Los Angeles county – including crews with the county’s fire department and 29 other fire agencies – were overwhelmed by the size and ferocity of the wildfires across the region, calling for aid from neighboring counties and states.

Infrastructure failed, too. “This is like a third world country,” said Rick Caruso, the billionaire real estate developer who lost the mayoral race to Bass, calling into a local radio station. Caruso was referring to reports that water hydrants in the Pacific Palisades, where his daughter lost her home, ran dry. A Los Angeles Times report that a massive reservoir in the Pacific Palisades was closed for repairs and empty at the time of the fire has raised further questions.

The city did, in fact, have enough water, but the system was not built for fighting multiple infernos. The LA department of water and power (LADWP) said that fire crews drew so much water, so fast in the initial hours of the fight, that the tanks that maintain water pressure to help supplies travel uphill to hydrants were strained.

“We pushed the system to the extreme,” the LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.” Crews instead had to rely on water trucks.