Los Angeles officials are speaking out in response to fire hydrants running out of water in the Pacific Palisades following public outcry amid the area’s raging wildfires.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said during a press conference Wednesday, Jan. 8.
As firefighters battled the deadly blaze, which has already claimed at least two lives and ripped through more than 11,000 acres of the Pacific Palisades, water stopped flowing through multiple fire hydrants — leaving crews unable to put out fires.
“Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure,” Quiñones continued.
“If there’s a message you take away from me today, is, I need our customers to really conserve water — not just in the Palisades area, but the whole system because the fire department needs the water to fight the fires,” Quiñones added.
Per the Los Angeles Times, firefighters could be heard discussing the water outage on their internal radio channels.
“The hydrants are down,” one firefighter reportedly said.
Another replied, “Water supply just dropped,” before all hydrants “went dry” around 3 a.m.
Palisades Village mall owner Rick Caruso slammed the lack of water for the fatal fires.
“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” the businessman, a former commissioner for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said, per the Times.
“The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning,” Caruso continued, adding, “It should never happen.”
According to the Associated Press, the Palisades Fire has now been classified as the most destructive in the history of Los Angeles County. It remains at 0% containment.
One factor causing the flames to spread at extremely high rates has been wind.
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The National Weather Service (NWS) Los Angeles advised early Wednesday morning that a high wind warning was in effect until 6 p.m. for Catalina and Santa Barbara islands, as well as Los Angeles County beaches, Los Angeles County Inland Coast including downtown Los Angeles and Palos Verdes Hills. Winds were expected to reach 30 to 40 mph with gusts up to 60 mph.
“This event is not only not over, but it is just getting started and will get significantly worse before it gets better,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said Tuesday, Jan. 7, per the Los Angeles Times.
Click here to learn more about how to help the victims of the L.A. fires.
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