Special Coverage – Los Angeles is Burning // With fingers being pointed, who or what is to blame?

Water

Trump and Gavin Newsom have long had a dispute over water management in California. During his first term, Trump put in place rules to bring more water from Northern California to the drier south of the state. Newsom opposed them for environmental reasons, including to preserve the habitat of a fish—which Trump has mocked him for. So it was unsurprising that Trump is now once again leveling accusations at Newsom about water.
The Biden administration has changed those rules, which may have added to Trump’s frustration. But his specific assertions about the water don’t seem to be accurate, because northern water is not Los Angeles’ main source of water, and local reservoirs have been at high levels, despite drought conditions in the area. Most of LA’s water comes from groundwater, an aqueduct from the east of the Sierra Nevadas, and the Colorado River.
Trump, however, was correct in saying that there was a problem with water during this fire. Some firefighters reported that hydrants ran dry as they attempted to fight the fires or that there was very low water pressure. According to city and county officials that was due to the fact that the hydrant system was engineered to fight individual house fires, not massive wildfires. The large tanks up in the hills that provide water pressure for the hydrants can only be filled slowly, as well.
Whether that is an acceptable answer is unclear. Newsom has said that he is launching an investigation into the reasons the hydrants ran dry—and he seems to be offloading the blame onto local officials.
One disturbing fact is that a major reservoir in the Palisades area, where the largest fire in the LA area continues to rage, was empty. The Santa Ynez reservoir was emptied because of a cracked cover, and that reduced the amount of water available for firefighters.
But that alone would not have been enough, according to a former general manager of Los Angeles Department Water and Power, Martin Adams, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times: “You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure. Would Santa Ynez [Reservoir] have helped? Yes, to some extent. Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”
A lack of water was a problem in a different sense. Dr. Tim Brown is the director of the Western Regional Climate Center and directs the Program for Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. He said that dryness is one of the factors that likely played a role in the fires.
“There has been a drought in Southern California for a number of months,” he told Ami. “Normally this time of year, there have been wetting rains or snows in the higher elevations. That just hasn’t happened this year. All of that precipitation is taking place further north. The vegetation is very dry.
“There are two kinds of vegetations for fire. There is what we call dead fuels, which are the trees, bushes and grasses that are already dead materials that can be combustible. Then there are the live fuels, the growing plants. If there is a deficit of precipitation for those plants, they can start to stress out, and they contain less moisture than usual, which increases their flammability.”

Wind

One of the biggest factors contributing to turning LA into a firestorm was the Santa Ana winds. This phenomenon has long been a fixture of the autumn and winter in Los Angeles, leading disparate authors like novelist Raymond Chandler and essayist Joan Didion to discuss the winds.
The Santa Anas arise as a high-pressure system of cool air over the Great Plains descends through the canyons and valleys of the Sierra Nevadas and other south California mountains, drying out and becoming hot in the process. The funneling and falling process creates fast-moving, dry, hot winds.
The Santa Anas have long been associated with fire in Southern California. They can further dry out already dry plant matter that has built up, and when a spark of any sort ignites that fuel, the speed of the winds can send the embers of that fire far and wide—which is what happened this past week.
The wind speeds in Los Angeles during this latest bout of Santa Anas reached as high as 100 miles per hour at the tops of hills and mountains, and gusts over 70 miles per hour occurred in the valleys. The rapid spread of the fire, according to those who experienced it, was something that no firefighter could get in front of. A 100 mile-per-hour wind simply moves the fire from tree to house to new neighborhood in a flash.
“These were the strongest winds that area has seen since 2011,” Dr. Brown noted.
The winds caused another major problem: They made it impossible for fire crews to drop water from the air for the first few days of the disaster, because the planes could not fly that low in those winds. Water drops are essential for fighting these kinds of wildfires, and without them, fire crews were forced to rely on using water on the ground—which was not always reliable and in any case cannot always prevent the movement of the fire.
In her essay on the Santa Anas, Didion says, “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” This fire may have given outsiders a better picture of that image.