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Inside the DWP’s battle to keep water flowing as fire exploded – Jobsmaa.com

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As wildfires spread through the valleys of the Pacific Palisades, firefighters waged a desperate battle to save homes and lives.

Seventeen miles east of downtown LA, dozens of officials huddled around computers at a long conference room table in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's emergency operations center. The screens lit up on the system's water pressure from remote sensors stationed throughout the city.

Jan. As more firefighters rushed to put out the blaze at 7 p.m., Palisades needed more water, faster.

In the pressure control tanks at the top of the valleys, the water started to recede. DWP officials had to figure out how to increase the pressure in the western portions of the grid, where the 36-inch pipeline will run from Bel-Air Reservoir before it curves uphill to the Palisades Highlands on the west side.

Shut off water to nearby areas such as Brentwood or need to reduce water pressure on the front line.

Without water, dialysis centers and other medical facilities will suffer. How long does it take to shut off the valves safely? Can the pipes handle such a change, or will they break?

As the inferno grew, the flames encroached on some areas that had been considered for water shut-off.

Shutting off water to nearby areas, DWP officials ultimately decided, would endanger those neighborhoods and undermine efforts to fight the fire along its expanding edges, DWP's head of water operations, Anselmo Collins, said in his first interview. Race to fight devastating wildfires.

Firefighters battle a house fire on Bollinger Drive in Pacific Palisades

Firefighters battled a house engulfed in flames Jan. 7 off Bollinger Drive in Pacific Palisades.

(Wally Scalige/Los Angeles Times)

“We had a plan, but we didn't execute the plan,” Collins said, because those neighborhoods “needed water for fire protection.”

Decisions made by the DWP in the years leading up to the Palisades fire and in the hours after it broke out have drawn fierce criticism, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom. Order an inquiry. On Tuesday, the LA City Council Voted unanimously Requiring the DWP to present publicly an analysis of its actions during the Palisades fire.

Water officials and experts interviewed by The Times say municipal water systems in L.A. and elsewhere aren't designed to combat wildfires that typically rage through entire neighborhoods, even in areas with high wildfire risk. Collins' comments provide the first detailed account of the DWP's response to the most destructive fire in LA history.

Headquarters of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Headquarters of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

(Los Angeles Times)

Firefighters struggled as the fire spread rapidly amid extremely high winds, which caused pressure drops in high-altitude areas due to heavy water use. Hydrations that have dried up. Another problem: the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir in the upper palisades has limited water availability. was empty For repairs in February 2024.

Collins said water quality regulations require the reservoir to be emptied because of a tear in its lid. The repairs, which were bid out to a contractor for about $130,000, have not yet been completed, and Collins does not expect the reservoir to return to service until April or May. DWP is still trying to determine the impact of the reservoir being offline, Collins said.

“I think it would have helped, but I can't say right now how significant the help would have been,” Collins said.

Asked what he would have done differently, Collins indicated it was too soon to tell. He and colleagues will evaluate the overall response later, he said.

“I'm now focused on getting the computer back. That's the No. 1 priority,” he said.

LA residents draw water from a lattice of pipes that criss-cross the city.

In the palisades, houses with sloping valley topography draw water from cisterns on the hills above.

A 36-inch pipeline along Sunset Boulevard delivers water to Brentwood and Palisades Village before winding up Palisades Drive toward communities in the Highlands several hundred feet above sea level. There, the water is pumped upward into three tanks, each with a capacity of 1 million gallons of water.

Tanks located high in neighborhoods keep water pressure — and hydrants — down on homes. When someone takes a shower, or fills a pool, or turns on a hydrant, gravity pulls the water down from the tanks.

On a typical day, more water is pumped from the pipeline to refill the tanks, covering each shower or glass of water.

Inside the DWP's state-of-the-art headquarters on Tuesday, Collins and his colleagues noticed that water levels were getting lower and lower and lower — with pumps unable to fill tanks faster than the hydrants and homes below.

A DWP water tank above Via La Costa in Pacific Palisades.

A DWP water tank above Via La Costa in Pacific Palisades.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Just before 5 p.m., the first part of the system failed, a cul-de-sac just north of Marquess Knolls, Palisades Village.

“When that tank was empty, we realized the demands were too great,” Collins said.

The DWP sent a team to the neighborhood, hoping to install a device to control the pressure there and below. But as crews got to work, the house next door caught fire.

“The fire department immediately told the crew to evacuate for their own safety,” Collins said. “They were surrounded by fire.”

Collins defended the decision that the DWP did not pre-empt additional water crews ahead of deadly wind warnings. He said employees were on “high alert” and ready to report to yards across the city in the event of an emergency.

“You never know what the emergency is going to be, and you don't want to make an assumption and put your staff in the wrong place,” he said.

Around 2:30 p.m., Collins said, the water level began to recede in the trailer, the next-tallest tank set among Mediterranean mini-mansions in Palisades Highlands. By 8:30 pm, the tank was dry. As the night wore on, dozens of fire hydrants lost pressure.

The Palisades system soon became like a pipe that had been punctured a thousand times, its flow severely weakened. Scores of firefighters were pumping water from hydrants as several homes burned. As structures collapse and pipes melt or bend, water escapes, further reducing pressure.

“When there's a particularly large loss of housing, the system starts to go out of whack,” said Tom Kennedy, a water consultant and former general manager of the Rainbow Municipal Water District in San Diego County. “So it's very difficult to maintain system pressure and volume in your tanks.”

At one point, the DWP called in water tankers to fill fire trucks directly. Nine tankers arrived on Tuesday and another six the next day. The government sent additional tankers.

Around 6:30 pm on Tuesday, the water level in the tallest tank in the area – a squat steel cylinder located in Temescal Canyon – began to recede. By 3 am on Wednesday, the tank was empty.

“The fire department uses dozens of fire hydrants,” Collins said. “Even though we were pumping the tank, the tank was still going down.”

Meanwhile, Collins and his crew turned on as much water as they could, quadrupling the normal flow to 45,000 gallons per minute, enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every 15 minutes.

Kennedy, a former San Diego County water official, agreed with the DWP's decision not to shut off water to nearby neighborhoods.

“If they had shut off the water to other areas, there could have been a fire in some of those other areas and it could have turned into flames,” Kennedy said. In a large fire, firefighters knock down flying lava in the surrounding neighborhood to control the spread.

By 9 p.m., helicopters were grounded because of 90 mph winds, unable to retrieve water from reservoirs in Bel-Air, Encino and Hollywood, pillars of the city's strategy to fight wildfires.

The DWP now estimates 20% of the nearly 1,100 hydrants in the Palisades have lost pressure, Collins said, based on counting the number of high-rise homes served by three water tanks. The rest, he said, is pressure from the water main.

There are other locations in Southern California Large volumes of water stored in reservoirs and underground can be drawn by LA when needed. But moving water from those locations requires coordination between the city and the region's water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

As the Palisades Fire intensified, DWP called in MWD for assistance, and water flowed through a backup line near the Sunset Boulevard crossing of the 405 Freeway, which has not been used since 2019.

“We wanted to try a lot of things,” said Devan Upadhyay, MWD's interim general manager. Over the next 48 hours, the agency fired a pumping plant next to the Hollywood-Burbank airport and asked state officials to halt repairs on a reservoir on Castaic Lake to increase water flow to the west side, Upadhyay said.

The fire has since spread to 23,713 acres, killing nine people. Aerial mapping shows about 5,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the Palisades fire, with officials confirming 2,869 destroyed and 508 damaged so far.

Collins and other DWP officials have stressed that restoring the Palisades water system is their current focus.

Over the weekend, hundreds of DWP workers visited destroyed homes and businesses across the burned area.

LADWP contractors cut down trees around power lines in Mandeville Canyon on Tuesday.

LADWP contractors cut down trees around power lines in Mandeville Canyon on Tuesday.

(Brian van der Broek/Los Angeles Times)

As of Tuesday morning, water was shut off at more than 4,700 sites, allowing DWP workers to refill water tanks and restore pressure. By Wednesday night, both Marquez Knolls and trailer tanks were completely full.

MWD official Upadhyay said an analysis of what led to the drop in water pressure and how to prevent its recurrence will take time. He echoed the views of other water managers, saying the design of the city's water system created “significant challenges” in a large firefighting mobilization.

Collins said he was open to overhauling the system to deal with “climate extremes,” but the DWP's customers — residents and businesses in LA — must be willing to pay for it.

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