The Brief

As firefighters battled catastrophic fires in Los Angeles last January, one question reverberated across the country: Where was the water?

The question came from wealthy developer Rick Caruso and then-President-elect Donald Trump, from reporters and residents. It prompted executive orders and state and federal investigations. Once the fires were more ash than flame, the Trump administration used a water shortage to justify its baffling move to release vital summer irrigation supplies from two reservoirs that do not supply Los Angeles.

“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Trump posted on social media, referencing Gov. Gavin Newsom, as the fires raged across L.A. “On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not (sic) firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

A team of researchers, led by Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, set out to uncover whether the intense focus on water supply meant that dry hydrants had uniquely hampered the Palisades firefight, or whether this was a common occurrence.

In a policy brief published Monday, the researchers used media reports to confirm that when fires burn urban areas, hydrant flows often sputter out — the result of lost pressure as burnt homes hemorrhage water and too many hoses simultaneously draw on a limited supply.

“Fire hydrant performance in the Palisades seems to represent the rule rather than the exception,” the report says. “The only apparent, factual difference between the Palisades Fire and its comparators is that hydrant performance did not make the headlines of news stories covering the other fires.”

‘The rule rather than the exception’

The policy brief echoes the findings of a recent state investigation into water supply during the Palisades Fire.

“Even though there was plenty of water available in the system,” state investigators wrote, “it was not possible to pump enough water to the fire area all at once to meet the flow rate demand created by the leaking water from already destroyed structures and high water use from hydrants.”

Even if the much-implicated empty Santa Ynez reservoir had been full, “the hydrants could not have maintained pressure,” the state report said.

Firefighters work to put out a fire in the rubble of a home that burned down on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, as a result of the Palisades Fire. Jan. 9, 2025.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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Together, the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed thousands of structures, caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, killed at least 31 people and likely contributed to hundreds more deaths. 

With smoke still in the air, experts, state officials, reporters and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power raced to fact-check claims that water management resulting in dry hydrants was uniquely responsible for the devastation. The repeated refrain: urban water systems aren’t built to put out wildfires.

But the spark had caught. And as residents reeled from the devastating losses of entire communities and grasped for explanations, a sense of betrayal — that water and their hydrants had failed to save Los Angeles from the flames — set in.

By the end of March, nearly a third of 2,000 Los Angeles County residents surveyed by the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research blamed poor water management as the biggest contributor to the wildfires. Only slightly more — 36% — said arson.

Another survey by Probolsky Research reported that more than a quarter of 1,000 likely primary election voters in California were surprised to hear — or flat out didn’t believe — that fire hydrants are not designed to fight major wildfires.

“Sometimes all you need is one idea to catch on a little bit and start spreading. And then once it starts to go viral, it gets accepted by lots of people,” said Lisa Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University who studies how people learn information.

During disasters, she said, “people are hunting for that understanding and sense of control.”

It’s happened before — many times. 

In fire after fire, the researchers found reports of lost water pressure.

Paul Lowenthal, division chief fire marshal with the Santa Rosa Fire Department, remembers when the Tubbs Fire roared through Santa Rosa in 2017, destroying thousands of homes and killing 22 people.

“When we had the loss of pressure in Fountaingrove, there was this immediate sense of, ‘The firefighters didn't have the water that they needed to fight the fire,’” he said. “And I think we saw some of the same concerns bubble up out of Los Angeles.”

But Lowenthal said the true picture was much more complicated: In the hills, as the fire was pushing into the city, firefighters were too busy getting people out to even use the hydrants.

“It was all just purely saving lives,” he said. By the time the winds had died down on the valley floor enough to fight back the flames, he said, the city’s water system had restored enough pressure to hydrants.

Kevin Phillips, district manager of Paradise Irrigation District, said that some hydrants in the town of Paradise lost pressure during the 2018 Camp Fire, which remains the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.

When a wildfire destroys a town, like the fires in Paradise or the Palisades, Phillips said, each burned home bleeds water out of the system — sapping its pressure.

“Every one of those homes that gets burned is an open sore to the outside,” Phillips said. “Your system basically is dying as every one of those homes are being destroyed.”

William Sapeta, fire chief of the Lake County Fire Protection District, agreed. “The Eaton and the Palisades fires really drew a lot of attention to the capabilities of water for fire suppression,” he said. “Yet we experienced in the Camp Fire, the Valley Fire, the Carr Fire — all of these fires have exceeded municipalities’ ability to provide water for fire suppression.”

New requirements

Hydrants and water supply have drawn public scrutiny in Ventura County, where two major wildfires in less than a decade spurred reports of hydrant outages and lost water pressure.

The fires in Assemblymember Steve Bennett’s home county, one of which burned homes on his own street, prompted new legislation. Signed into law this year, Bennett’s bill sets new requirements for certain water suppliers in fire-prone parts of Ventura County to harden their systems and obtain enough backup power or alternate water supplies to keep water pumps running for 24 hours.

“You ought to be able to have a system that can at least help you put out the small little ember, the bush that catches on fire — so that you can get it before the house catches on fire,” the Democrat from Oxnard said. Having enough to do that, he added, should be the minimum requirement.

But some water suppliers fear they won’t be able to withstand the financial costs of meeting the law’s requirements, and worry about the potential liability if they can’t.

“You have smaller water systems that don't even have the capacity or funding to deal with all those things,” said Daryl Osby, former Los Angeles County Fire Department chief and now vice president of emergency preparedness, safety & security for California Water Service, an investor-owned water utility.

A new frontier

ASU’s Faith Kearns, a co-author of the policy brief, has chronicled the convergence of fire and water supplies before, and said the growing scale and devastation of these fires are resetting public expectations for urban water systems.

“This feels like the new frontier we're discussing around wildfire, but (it’s) just part and parcel of California’s really complex, ongoing wildfire issues,” Kearns said.

Climate change-fueled, extreme conditions further limit what water and water systems are capable of in response to fire — like in Santa Rosa, where Lowenthal said firefighters were too focused on saving lives to tap the hydrants in the hills.

“You might have the best water system in the world, and you still might not have conditions that are safe for fire personnel to go into,” Kearns said.

The new UCLA policy brief doesn’t interrogate why the hydrants became such a flashpoint in the Palisades Fire, but Pierce has some hypotheses. Preliminary data for a forthcoming study suggests it’s political — that support for Trump drives the belief that water management was to blame for the fires.

“Local influencers, political voices — all the way up to the president and a lot of people in between — quickly seized on the fact that some of the fire hydrants in the Palisades Fire didn’t have water,” Pierce said.

That gained a snowball effect. “The same thing kept getting repeated, and then people just thought it was true.” 

Fazio, the psychology professor at Vanderbilt not involved in the policy brief, said the urge to cling to a culprit may even go deeper: people often seek out simple answers in moments of crisis.

“You could think of all of this as being a part of a causal story — like, 'What caused my house to burn down? Why was it not safe?’” Fazio said. “The really simple model is, ‘The firefighters and the hydrants are supposed to prevent it, and they didn't, therefore they're at fault.’ Whereas I'm sure the actual causal story is much more complicated.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Los Angeles World Cup host committee has quietly posted its guidance on human rights after months of speculation over where the plan was and when it would be published.

Advocates had pushed the committee, an arm of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission, to produce its plan. But now that it's out, they're not satisfied with what they're seeing.

The human rights guidance is required by FIFA and outlined on the host committee's website. It includes a list of online resources including where to file complaints with various local and state level agencies and a summary of local, state and federal laws protecting human and civil rights. The committee is also touting a partnership with L.A. County in which people can call 211 to report a concern during the tournament.

"Los Angeles is weeks away from hosting one of the largest sporting events in the world, and yet what has been posted is not a plan,” Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti‑Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School, said in a statement. “It is a list of laws and hotline numbers."

The human rights document also skirts fears around ICE and its potential presence at the tournament and surrounding celebrations. Todd Lyons, the agency's head, said earlier this year that ICE's investigatory branch will play a key role in security for the tournament.

But ICE and immigration enforcement aren't mentioned on the host committee's web page on human rights or in its outline of its approach to human rights. "Immigration status" only gets a mention in the list of existing anti-discrimination laws.

"It certainly could have been much stronger," Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, said of the plan. She added that her organization participated in a roundtable on the plan, and she was disappointed ICE and recent immigration sweeps weren't mentioned in the resulting document.

"In order for all of this to happen, immigrant workers are part of it," she said of the World Cup. "Your hotel workers, your service workers, stadium workers, drivers." 

LAist reached out to spokespeople for the host committee for comment via email, phone and text, but did not hear back in time for publication. FIFA's press team also did not respond to an email from LAist.

According to the host committee's website, the human rights plan is the result of coordination with the city and county of Los Angeles, the city of Inglewood, and 14 roundtable discussions held in the fall of 2025.

"As a non-profit organization, the Host Committee’s role is primarily and necessarily focused on aligning and collaborating with governmental and non-governmental organizations," the document sums up the committee's approach.

The plan also promises more actions, including "Know Your Rights" training for L.A. residents and visitors and "Know Your Responsibilities" training for businesses and vendors. The committee also says it will develop a "rapid response" strategy to respond to potential problems at the tournament.

Available details on those plans were scant. And with the tournament just 30 days away, labor unions and community groups are continuing to voice concerns about potential ICE presence at SoFi Stadium and other potential consequences of the tournament coming to town.

The mayor of Arcadia has agreed to plead guilty to a charge she acted as an agent for China, federal prosecutors announced Monday. She has resigned from her position with the city.

Eileen Wang, 58, faces one count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison.

What we know about the criminal case

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wang and Yaoning “Mike” Sun of Chino Hills worked at the direction of the Chinese government and with individuals based in the U.S. to promote pro-People’s Republic of China propaganda in the United States. Those actions occurred between 2020 and 2022, prosecutors said.

According to federal prosecutors, Wang and Sun operated a website — known as U.S. News Center — billed as a news source for the local Chinese American community in Los Angeles County. They posted content on the site, described as "pre-written articles," based on directives from Chinese government officials.

Sun, 65, pleaded guilty in October 2025 in federal court to acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. He is serving a four-year federal prison sentence.

Prosecutors also said Wang communicated with John Chen, whom they described as “a high-level member of the [Chinese government] intelligence apparatus,” in November 2021, and asked him to post an article from her website.

In a group chat, Wang referenced the article and wrote: “This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Chen pleaded guilty in New York to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China and conspiracy to bribe a public official. In 2024, he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison.

What's next

Wang, who was elected to the City Council in November 2022, was expected to make her first appearance in U.S. District Court Monday afternoon.

Citing a plea agreement, prosecutors said she's expected to enter the guilty plea within the next few weeks.

Arcadia's mayor is selected from the elected council members. A post on the city's website announced that Wang had resigned her position as of Monday and that a new mayor would be picked from the remaining council members at the next meeting.

The Supreme Court on Monday gave itself more time to consider a national ban on telemedicine access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

Justice Samuel Alito extended an earlier order he issued by three more days, so rules for prescribing mifepristone online or through the mail remain in effect through Thursday at a minimum.

The case at issue

The tumult over the future of telemedicine access to mifipristone started on May 1 with a ruling from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling re-instituted prescribing rules from before the pandemic that required patients to receive mifepristone in person in a doctor's office or clinic.

The Food and Drug Administration determined that the rule was medically unnecessary in 2021. The state of Louisiana sued last fall, arguing that telemedicine access undermines the state's abortion ban.

What is telemedicine abortion?

The telemedicine abortion process starts with a patient connecting with a healthcare provider on the phone or online. If the patient is eligible, that provider can prescribe two medications — mifepristone and another pill called misoprostol. Patients can pick up the medicine at a local pharmacy, or providers can mail the drugs to a patient's home.

That access is a big part of the reason why the number of abortions nationally has actually increased since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Now, most abortions in the U.S. use this combination of medications, and one quarter happen via telemedicine.

After the 5th Circuit ruling, some providers said they would continue offering telemedicine access to abortion medication using a different protocol that involves higher doses of misoprostol and no mifepristone.

Researchers say that method is just as safe and effective, but tends to cause more pain for patients and more side effects, like nausea and diarrhea. Misoprostol has other medical uses, such as treating gastric ulcers and hemorrhage, and has been on the market longer than mifepristone. It is likely to remain fully accessible, even if mifepristone is restricted.

Since the FDA's prescribing rules for medications apply to the whole country, a change to the rules about how mifepristone can be accessed has national impact. That means it affects states with constitutionally-protected access to abortion, states with criminal bans, like Louisiana, and all states in between.

States' rights

Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states submitted an amicus brief in this case, writing that the appeals court decision put the policy choices of states with bans above the choices of states "that have made the different but equally sovereign determinations to promote access to abortion care."

There are also stakes related to the power of FDA and other expert agencies to set rules. While the Trump administration's FDA did not respond to the Supreme Court's request for briefs, a group of former leaders of the agency, who served under mainly Democratic and some Republican presidents, wrote about this in an amicus brief.

They defended the FDA's process in approving the medication and modifying the rules for prescribing it, and say the appeals court decision "would upend FDA's gold-standard, science-based drug approval system."

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