The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is grappling with unprecedented demands on its water system and widespread power outages as wildfires continue to threaten the region.
As firefighters battled the Palisades Fire over the past day, concerns emerged about a lack of water pressure from municipal fire hydrants and an overall lack of supply to fight the fire. Officials said that hydrants did go dry in some areas at about 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
Water consumption in the Pacific Palisades reached four times normal levels for 15 straight hours, depleting three million-gallon storage tanks and compromising water pressure needed for firefighting efforts, DWP CEO Janisse Quinones reported Friday.
"We're fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging," Quinones said. The utility has deployed 20 water tanks from construction crews to support firefighting operations, with tankers making 30-minute round trips to refill.
She said her department is pushing to keep water flowing into the area and that has caused a decrease in water quality that could make tap water unsafe to drink in the 90272 zip code.
“Because we're pushing the water system so hard, our water quality is decreasing,” she said. “So we're going to be issuing a boil water notice this morning, and I will extend for about 48 hours. The water quality is low. We have a lot of ash in the system, and so please, if you're going to be drinking water, you need to boil the water.”
The crisis extends beyond water services, with 135,000 DWP customers currently without power. While crews have restored service to 78,000 customers since the outages began, some residents have been without electricity for more than 18 hours.
Forty percent of the outages were caused by intentional de-energization for public safety, while 20% resulted from downed power lines. The utility cannot restore power until crews physically inspect the lines, a process that could take 24 to 48 hours.
Quinones said the department is seeking mutual aid from other California utilities to accelerate restoration efforts, but crew safety remains paramount. "We cannot do that until it's safe for our crews," she said.
The DWP has activated its Emergency Operations Center for both water and power operations and urges residents experiencing outages to report them via 911.
She said the system is going to have to adapt as climate change makes this kind of fires more frequent. “How are we going to change the way we operate our water systems for events like this? This is an unprecedented event,” she said. “I think the 2011 winds was significant from a power perspective, but the fires have really increased the response complexity of this. We had crews trying to mitigate this, and we had to evacuate. We worked with the fire department to try to get back in and try to fill the tanks again. It wasn't safe to do so. So you're managing the fires, you're managing the power outage, and you're managing the water needs …. So yes, we have to look at our system from a climate resiliency as a region, and it's going to be more than just DWP, it's all the water agencies here, including the county.”
