The politics of fire
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What catastrophic events occurred during the Los Angeles wildfires?
It's kind of hard to wrap your head around the scale of the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles. They've burned 40,000 acres throughout the city. That's roughly the size of Washington, D.C. Some estimates are putting the damage upwards of $250 billion. That'll make these the most... economically devastating fires in the history of the United States. And then one thing people can't seem to get over is that in this wildfire-prone city, in a wildfire-prone state, firefighters battling these blazes somehow ran out of water.
We have no water on these streets, and we have multiple structures taken off.
Why was there no water in the hydrants, Governor? That's all literally... Is it going to be different next time?
They have no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants today in Los Angeles. It was a terrible thing. And we're gonna get that done.
Everyone gets that this is tragic. On Today Explained, we're gonna try to understand why this has to be political.
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This is Today Explained. Greg Pierce is the director of the UCLA Water Resources Group and a professor at UCLA, which means, of course, he lives in L.A. And like just about everyone else who lives in L.A., he knows people affected by these fires.
Yeah, I'm in Los Angeles. I'm OK. Everyone I know is safe. A close relative lost their home and plenty of people were evacuated. and facing much worse things than me. But yes, I am in Los Angeles.
How quickly, when these fires started, Greg, did you look at this and say, oh gosh, they're going to run out of water? Or did you have that thought at all?
I can't say that I had that thought independently. And I guess in some ways, I think, you know, it's a little bit of a boring story, but what the public officials have been saying, though, is true. by my judgment and everyone i've talked to who actually knows about the topic which is that urban water systems aren't equipped to fight wildfires of this nature but when i first heard or actually saw the smoke plume as i was coming to ucla that day i didn't know that it was going to be such an intense fire and that our you know ability to fight it would be so poor
Can you help people understand how exactly firefighters would run out of water while fighting these wildfires in the Pacific Palisades?
Yeah, it's pretty simple in a way, which is that the water system in the Pacific Palisades, which is the city of Los Angeles' water system, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest and certainly among the most technically powerful Competent water systems in the county, if not the state, is not set up to fight wildfires. The fire hydrants and the fire flow are really there for everyday fires, structure fires, whatnot. And that capacity to fight wildfires is not something that I'm aware of that any water system in the world has, especially when they grew this quickly, this fast.
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