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I predicted this would happen and here we are. Today we’re getting more information about why fire hydrants in LA County ran dry and it turns out there was a human error factor here because the reservoir that holds millions of gallons of water in Pacific Palisades was recently closed for repairs and was empty when fire broke out this week.

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An important reservoir that helps supply water in Pacific Palisades was offline at the time the fires began, officials said Friday, and that shutdown may have contributed to firefighters losing water so early in their fight against the blaze.

The Santa Ynez Reservoir sits within the Palisades and can hold millions of gallons of water. Records show it was recently set to undergo maintenance to the reservoir’s cover.

Ellen Cheng, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said in a statement on Friday that the reservoir had been offline when the fires began.

We’ll come back to the Santa Ynez Reservoir in a moment but first let’s recall what LA officials were saying prior to today. Wednesday afternoon they confirmed that fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades had lost pressure and eventually run completely dry. They said this was because the water system is fed by three one-million gallon tanks into which water is pumped so that gravity can feed the system. And just as quickly as they claimed this, the media leaped forward to announce there was no negligence or poor planning at fault here. In short, Democratic officials were in the clear.

“We pumped over 3 million gallons of water on that fire, so it does strain that system, and they’re doing everything they can to fill it back up,” Los Angeles Fire Capt. Sheila Kelliher told MSNBC…

Experts in urban water management said it’s unlikely that poor planning or negligence were to blame for the water tanks’ drying up.

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The NY Times published another story yesterday titled “‘Completely Dry’: How Los Angeles Firefighters Ran Out of Water” which made the same argument. There was nothing anyone could have done.

“Completely dry — couldn’t get any water out of it,” said Captain Easton, who was part of a small, roaming patrol of firefighters who were trying to protect the community’s Palisades Highlands neighborhood. Even on Wednesday afternoon — hours after the hydrants had gone dry — there was still no water. Houses in the Highlands burned, becoming part of the more than 5,000 structures destroyed by the Palisades fire so far.

Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like the Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.

“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly four million residents of Los Angeles.

But it turns out that’s not entirely true. The Santa Ynez Reservoir holds 117 million gallons of water when full. It sits high in the hills above the Pacific Palisades. 

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That’s an image of it but I encourage you to open this link to LA DWP’s website in a new tab so you can see a picture of how this reservoir sits high above Pacific Palisades. So as of today, we’re getting a slightly different story. The same guy, Marty Adams, quoted in that NY Times story above now says having water in that reservoir would have helped, though he still thinks it wouldn’t have saved the day.

 “You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure,” Adams said in an interview Thursday. “Would Santa Ynez [Reservoir] have helped? Yes, to some extent. Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”…

Adams said it had been out of service “for a while” due to a tear in the cover and that DWP’s vast storage and supply infrastructure still provided water to residents without disruptions, until this week…

Had the Santa Ynez Reservoir been in use in that period, Adams estimated, that demand might have been three times as high. Water in the reservoir would have fed the firefighting equipment and helped the pump stations push water to the storage tanks. But the reservoir “wouldn’t have lasted forever and would not have been a fix-all,” Adams said…

…had the utility opted to start filling the reservoir over the weekend, in advance of the extreme winds, Adams said it was unclear whether the water could have been added fast enough to be useful.

“They would have been betting that there would be a fire that wipes out the whole neighborhood, which of course, no one has ever seen before,” he said. “It would have been a strange bet.”

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So the reservoir has a cover that prevents chemicals in the water from evaporating and keeps it suitable for drinking. Because of the tear in the cover, the water wasn’t suitable for drinking so it was shut down sometime in the past few months for repair and was scheduled to reopen in February.

However, it was still functional and could have be refilled in advance of the wildfires for the purposes of firefighting. Officials knew this wind storm was coming days in advance. They also knew Pacific Palisades was at high risk for damage because it backs up into the hills. The question is why no one put two and two together in this case and filled the reservoir.

As for Adams’ claim that doing so would not have prevented hydrants from running out of water, it’s unclear to me why he’s saying that. If the reservoir was only one quarter full that would have been nearly 30 million gallons of water. That’s 10 times the amount that was held in the three 1 million gallon tanks feeding the hydrants. It seems like that amount of water would have lasted for a really long time. Maybe there are reasons he’s saying it would have run out having to do with getting water from the reservoir into the main system. I don’t know but at a minimum, there are more questions that need to be asked and answered about this decision. Even a marginal improvement of the kind he’s describing could have saved more homes.

LAFD chief Kristin Crowley was just asked about all of this and she was clearly upset, to the point of agreeing to the reporter’s suggestion that the city failed her department. “My stance on this is when a firefighter comes up to a hydrant we expect there’s going to be water,” she said.

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This is simply not how things usually go in California. Normally, because nearly everyone is in the same party, no one wants to come out and call for accountability like this. Normally, the news reporters are also halfway in the tank for the Democrats. But at this moment people are angry. You can see the reporter here is upset at having had to watch a home burn while firefighters ran out of water. 

Nevertheless, I’m guessing Chief Crowley is going to get a lot of angry phone calls this evening asking her to revise and extend her remarks so no one comes away with the idea that any part of this ongoing disaster could have been handled better than it was. The plan was to blame climate change and leave it at that.

On the other hand, I’d bet there were a lot of firefighters who were pumping their fists in the air after hearing this. Crowley is defending her people to the hilt, possibly at the risk of her own job, and they are going to recognize that.

Finally, here’s a sign that maybe there’s more to this. Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling for an investigation. Sounds like he’s eager to get on the right side of this one. 

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Personally, I find it hard to believe that Gov. Newsom, Mayor Bass and the rest didn’t know about this until the LA Times reported it. Time to gather up some emails and texts to see what officials have been saying about this over the past few days.