As massive fires continue to sweep through Los Angeles, firefighters are relying on local water infrastructure not designed for fires of this size, researchers say. Fires in California have grown more explosive because of climate change, which is largely driven by humans burning oil, gas and coal.
And yet prominent right wing influencers and political figures, including President-elect Donald Trump, are falsely blaming the fires' destructiveness on the city not having enough water to fight the blazes. Some online commentators are falsely saying water needed to fight the fires is instead going to pistachio moguls. Others are claiming, inaccurately, that there were "bans on pumping water" and that it's part of a plan by a "globalist elite" to turn burned land into open-air prisons. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has made a webpage to fact-check false wildfire narratives, much of them about water.
"We're finger pointing away from the problem," says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. " We have really no lack of water. What we have is an infrastructure that is not made to fight cataclysmic fires, biblical-size fires."
A reservoir in the Palisades was empty while its cover was getting repaired. And the water systems used to fight the Palisades and Eaton fires couldn't maintain the continuous high water pressures needed, meaning water stopped flowing in some hydrants. Newsom has called for an investigation.
But water and climate experts say that even if the Palisades reservoir had been full and hydrants working perfectly, they wouldn't have allowed firefighters to change the course of large wildfires. Hurricane-force winds fueled the fires, and meant that in the first days planes and helicopters couldn't fly and drop water, experts say.
These municipal water systems were structured for residential and commercial needs and everyday fires – not firefighting on many fronts without aerial support, says Josh Lappen, a climate researcher at University of Notre Dame who studies Los Angeles' infrastructure systems. " Trying to pretend that this system was built for this disaster is dishonest," he says.
Here's what you should know about the water situation and the fires.
Does Los Angeles have enough water to fight fires?
Los Angeles has access to more than enough water to fight the fires, says Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of L.A.'s Metropolitan Water District Board, founded in 1928. "I can say with great authority, we have as much water stored as any time in the history of our agency," he says.
Most local L.A. reservoirs have ample water in them. While Los Angeles has seen negligible rain in the last eight months, the previous two years saw extreme rainfall.
" There's way more water in local storage than you could ever fight a fire with," says Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or DWP.
Some of the false narratives about a lack of water for firefighting comes from Trump, who blamed Newsom for not directing water to Southern California from Northern California. That is inaccurate and "irrelevant to the situation" of the Los Angeles fires, Gold says.
And some conspiracy theories about a lack of water for firefighting center around the billionaire owners of The Wonderful Company, Stewart and Lynda Resnick. The Resnicks' companies include Fiji Water and Pom Wonderful Pomegranate Juice, and they are America's largest pistachio growers, mostly growing them in California's Central Valley. Posts online, which use anti-semitic tropes and language, inaccurately claim that the Resnicks "secretly seized control of all the water" in California.
Pincetl says while the Resnicks have used a lot of California's water, she says their water usage is "distinct and not germane to the problem" of fighting wildfires.
"We have nothing to do with how the city of L.A. or any other municipality secures water to fight fires," says Seth Oster, chief corporate affairs officer for The Wonderful Company.
What happened with a reservoir near the Palisades?
One reservoir near the Palisades, called the Santa Ynez reservoir, is currently empty during the firefight because the reservoir's cover is being repaired.
An operational reservoir may have meant firefighters could have saved more structures, says Michael Wara, who directs a climate and energy program at Stanford University and studies wildfire. "But were you going to save the neighborhood? Probably not."
Still, some people have speculated that the reservoir was empty for nefarious reasons.
On Fox News, actor and director Mel Gibson said, "I know they were messing with the water. Letting [water] reserves go for one reason or another… in the events like this, you sort of look, is it on purpose? Which it's an insane thing to think. But one begins to ponder. Whether or not there is a purpose in mind."
While such views are inaccurate, there is a growing narrative that water was deliberately withheld from Los Angeles communities to increase the burn area. The false narrative claims that would then make way for 15-minute cities, an urban planning concept where your main daily needs are a close walk, bike or transit ride from home. There is a popular conspiracy theory, that also came up in the Maui fires, that a cabal of global elites want to clear land and use 15-minute cities as open-air prisons where they can control people.
"This is misinformation," Joseph Ramallo, DWP's chief customer officer, said in an email.
What happened to fire hydrants during the fire?
Some fire hydrants in both the Palisades and Eaton fires stopped working within the first 24-hours of the fires breaking out.
"We pushed the system to the extreme," Janisse Quiñones, DWP's chief executive and chief engineer, said at a briefing last Wednesday. "Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight which lowered our water pressure."
Adams notes that most hydrants and water systems are designed for structure fires at individual homes, apartment buildings or commercial buildings, and not large wildfires. " No one's engineered for a fire like this," he says.
Gold says a main hurdle was the high winds in the early days of the fire that grounded aircraft that could have dropped a lot more water.
" You can't fight a wildfire of this scope and scale without any aerial support," Gold says. "We had two communities that were basically sitting ducks."
Why wasn't the Los Angeles water infrastructure prepared for the fires?
No city in the U.S. or the world would have been equipped with on-the-ground water infrastructure to completely snuff out huge wildfires like these, says Greg Pierce, director of UCLA's Water Resources Group.
"Firefighting, especially in environments like this, it's not just about water. It's about, especially, aerial attacks," Pierce says. "Vegetation management, hardening [homes for wildfires] and firefighting capacity.
"That's going to be a huge debate about how to rebuild systems, about who's going to pay for it," Pierce says.
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