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.

As Los Angeles homeowners grapple with the expense of rebuilding after last year’s devastating fires, an L.A. City Councilmember is putting forward an idea that could lower some costs.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Pacific Palisades, has introduced a motion to explore waiving part of the city’s portion of the local sales tax for fire victims who purchase rebuilding materials in the city.

The 1% of the local 9.75% sales tax that goes into the city’s general fund would be given back to consumers under the proposal. The waiver could apply to lumber, appliances and other rebuilding goods purchased within the city.

The motion, introduced Friday by Park and seconded by Councilmember John Lee, says: “The City should do everything within its power to alleviate the financial burden for these residents and businesses in order to facilitate their return and stabilize the Pacific Palisades community.”

Would it make much of a difference? 

Economists told LAist the proposal could help many homeowners mitigate the high cost of rebuilding, but likely wouldn’t tip the scales for under-insured, under-resourced property owners.

“It wouldn't hurt if it's very well designed and easy to use,” said Alexander Meeks, a director at the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute. “But I'm not sure if it's really going to tackle the scale of the financial challenge that survivors are facing.”

Meeks noted that the tax waiver wouldn’t lower up-front costs such as environmental testing, architectural design and permitting. And it may not help homeowners sourcing raw materials from outside the city.

Zhiyun Li, a UCLA Anderson School of Management economist, said the waiver could help some homeowners justify the additional cost of rebuilding more fire-safe structures.

“Homeowners must typically pay out of pocket to upgrade to IBHS+ standards, which are more stringent,” Li said. “The tax waiver could encourage upgrading to IBHS+ standards or investing more in mitigation, thereby reducing future risk and improving the likelihood of maintaining insurance coverage.”

What’s next for the proposal? 

The proposed tax relief would not be available to properties that have been sold since the fires started in January 2025.

The motion has been sent to the City Council’s budget and fire recovery committees. If approved by the full council, it would require the city administrative officer, the Office of Finance and the city attorney to report back to the council within 60 days on options for crafting a tax relief plan.

The motion calls for the report to consider factors such as how to minimize the burden of administering the tax relief, what documentation homeowners would have to submit and what it would cost the city to oversee the program.

Senate and House Republican leadership have resurrected a stalled plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security after a record 47-day funding lapse.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a joint statement on Wednesday that the House will take up a measure passed by the Senate last week to fund most of DHS except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of September.

Republicans would then attempt to fund ICE and Border Patrol for three years using a party-line budget reconciliation bill that would not require support from Democrats.

"In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited," Thune and Johnson wrote.

The agreement comes nearly a week after House Republicans dismissed an identical plan, refusing to take up the Senate-passed measure and instead passing a 60-day short term funding bill for all of DHS that had little chance of overcoming Democratic opposition in the Senate.

Johnson called the agreement a "joke" and President Donald Trump declined to publicly endorse the deal. Trump had previously resisted any package that did not include his push to overhaul federal elections known as the Save America Act.

"I think any deal they make, I'm pretty much not happy with it," Trump told reporters last week.

Democrats welcomed the agreement as in line with their pledge not to give ICE any more money without reforms after immigration enforcement agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. But the deal does not include any of the policy demands Democrats are pressing for, such as a ban on masks for immigration enforcement officers and requiring warrants issued by a judge, not just the agency, to enter homes.

"For days, Republican divisions derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in a statement Wednesday. "Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered."

Trump seemed to bless the revived plan earlier Wednesday, writing on social media that he wants a party-line bill to fund immigration enforcement on his desk by June 1.

"We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won't be able to stop us," Trump wrote.

Despite the shutdown, ICE has been minimally impacted because Republican lawmakers approved $75 billion for ICE through another party-line budget reconciliation bill last year.

Congress is on a two-week recess, but the Senate and House could move to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP as early as Thursday using a procedure known as unanimous consent that allows the chambers to circumvent formal voting as long as no member objects.

Even during a recess when most members are not in Washington, this could be unpredictable, especially in the House, where many hard-line conservatives oppose a deal that does not fully fund DHS.

"Let's make this simple: caving to Democrats and not paying CBP and ICE is agreeing to defund Law Enforcement and leaving our borders wide open again," Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, wrote on X. "If that's the vote, I'm a NO."

If a member does object, that could require waiting for another vote when all members are back from recess.

Claudia Grisales contributed reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

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