Kevin Tidmarsh
is a producer for LAist, covering news and culture. He’s been an audio/web journalist for about a decade.
Published January 9, 2025 6:00 AM
Firefighters run as the Palisades Fire burns on January 7, 2025.
(
David Swanson
/
AFP via Getty Images
)
Topline:
City officials stressed that the shortage was due to low water pressure, not a complete lack of water. But what caused it, and can it be prevented?
Why it matters: The water pressure in the Palisades has been kept in balance by three tanks of one million gallons each. LADWP had decreased the volume in these tanks due to heavy water use, and officials knew the tanks couldn’t keep up the drain forever.
The backstory: Municipal water agencies like LADWP are largely built to respond to smaller blazes, not wildfires.
What's next: According to one expert, keeping enough water to prevent hydrants from running dry in emergency scenarios is possible, it's just "incredibly expensive."
It’s a headline no one would want to see: Fire hydrants being used to fight the Palisades Fire were running dry.
The fast-moving fire tested the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s municipal system: The final tank used to maintain water pressure in the area ran dry by 3 a.m. Wednesday, according to officials.
The news drew ire both on social media and from prominent figures like Rick Caruso. The former mayoral candidate and Pacific Palisades landowner went on local TV news stations to complain about the situation, telling Fox 11 it was an “absolute mismanagement by the city.”
The news triggered Governor Gavin Newsom to announce an investigation into the issue, saying that the lack of functioning hydrants "likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors."
"We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires," Newsom wrote on X Friday.
Officials say they were and are operating in extreme conditions. We looked into how exactly the shortage happened, and what, if anything, could have been done to prevent it.
Water supply was too slow, not too low
LADWP’s explanation for the shortage comes down to three nearby water tanks, each with a storage capacity of about a million gallons. These tanks help maintain enough pressure for water to flow from fire hydrants in uphill areas — but the pressure had decreased due to heavy water use, and officials knew the tanks couldn’t keep up the drain forever.
“We pushed the system to the extreme,” LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
According to LADWP, the tanks’ water supply needed to be replenished in order to provide enough pressure for the water to flow through fire hydrants uphill. But officials said as firefighters drew more and more water from the trunk line, or main supply, they used water that would have refilled the tanks, eventually depleting them.
“I want to make sure that you understand there's water on the trunk line, it just cannot get up the hill because we cannot fill the tanks fast enough,” Quiñones said.
That decreased the water pressure, which is needed for fire hydrants to work in higher elevations.
A strain on LADWP’s resources
Water pressure became a big issue as firefighters tried to fight the Palisades fire.
(
David Swanson
/
AFP via Getty Images
)
The first LADWP water tank ran out at about 4:45 p.m. Tuesday, while the second ran out at approximately 8:30 p.m. that day and the third and final tank ran out at about 3 a.m. Wednesday. Officials said this was to be expected due to the constraints of the municipal water system, which L.A. County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said is “not designed to fight wildfires.”
“A firefight with multiple fire hydrants drawing water from the system for several hours is unsustainable,” Pestrella said in a news conference Wednesday. “This is a known fact.”
In these cases, firefighters have to rely on other water sources. For the Palisades Fire, LADWP brought in 19 water trucks, each with capacities of 4,000 gallons.
“There is no lack of water flowing through our pipes and flowing to the Palisades area,” LADWP spokesperson Mia Rose Wong said in a statement to LAist. “Water remains available in Palisades, but is limited in areas at elevation impacting fire hydrants.”
Tanks are commonly used across the LADWP system for both daily and emergency purposes. For reference, the million-gallon tanks are much smaller than LADWP’s major reservoirs, which can hold hundreds of millions, or even billions, of gallons of water (and are miles away from the Pacific Palisades).
Officials said that normally, emergency teams would rely more on air support like firefighting helicopters, which would lessen the strain on water tanks by using more water from other sources like above-ground reservoirs. However, high winds and a lack of air visibility have meant those firefighting operations were grounded Tuesday and Wednesday, Pestrella said.
“County and city water reservoirs — open reservoirs — are available and on standby once [aerial firefighting] support becomes available,” he said.
Hydrants: a known concern
An opened fire hydrant in Pacific Palisades on Wednesday.
(
Eric Thayer
/
Getty Images
)
While the news of dry fire hydrants came as a shock to many local residents, it’s a known concern that firefighters have run into in the past: As homes burn and water lines begin to leak, overall water pressure drops, meaning that hydrants can run dry before long.
Generally speaking, wildfires quickly cause strain on local water supplies.
“It happens pretty quickly in almost any wildfire in most contexts, but especially one like this,” said Greg Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group.
In order to have a system that could have handled the demands of continuous firefighting through fire hydrants, Pierce said LADWP would need to keep much larger reserves of water physically on hand near the locations of possible wildfires.
“There is a theoretical world, and maybe a world we're entering into, where we could pay much, much more to have redundant water and power supply — because you need both [to fight fire], especially in terrains like this,” Pierce said. “I'm not even sure that would have made a difference when it comes to these types of wildfires, but that's possible.”
Pierce said that level of financial commitment would be “incredibly expensive,” but that’s what would be needed in order to keep fire hydrants running — especially in mountainous or hilly regions where local agencies also have to contend with pumping water uphill.
“There's no reason to think that DWP was particularly ill-prepared, no one was talking about them being ill-prepared for wildfires,” he said. “This caught everyone off guard, as far as I know.”
Conserving water will help
As in the case of the Mountain Fire, officials are asking LADWP users to limit their water usage.
“I need our customers to really conserve water, not just in the Palisade area, but the whole system,” Quiñones said. “The fire department needs the water to fight the fires, and we're fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”
Since the added stress has decreased the water quality near the Pacific Palisades, officials have issued a 48-hour boil water notice to residents of the 90272 ZIP code and nearby communities north of San Vicente Boulevard.
“Because we're pushing the water system so hard, our water quality is decreasing,” Quiñones said. “We have a lot of ash in our system.”
And one of the biggest ways to reduce stress on municipal systems is for local residents to have their own water supplies — like tanks or even pools — for emergency personnel to use. To learn more about these tanks, see here.
Do you have a question about the wildfires or fire recovery?
Check out LAist.com/FireFAQs to see if your question has already been answered. If not, submit your questions here, and we’ll do our best to get you an answer.
This image released by HBO shows Noah Wyle in a scene from “The Pitt.”
(
HBO
/
via Associated Press
)
Topline:
A California appeals court has found that “ER” and “The Pitt” have enough similarity that a lawsuit brought by the widow and estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton alleging “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot can move forward.
Why now? A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the trial court judge was correct to reject a motion to throw out the case from “The Pitt” production company Warner Bros. Television, which also produced “ER.” But the judges dismissed Noah Wyle — the star of both shows and a producer on “The Pitt” — as a defendant along with two other producers who worked on both series.
The backstory: The lawsuit is a clash between the makers of multiple Emmy-winning TV series that were each among the most important and acclaimed shows of their eras. Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” and many other novels that became hit movies and TV shows, wrote the pilot script for “ER,” the NBC show about a Chicago emergency room that redefined the medical drama genre and drew tens of millions of weekly viewers in its run from 1994 to 2009. The lawsuit brought by Sherri Crichton was filed two years ago, before a single episode of “The Pitt” had aired. The HBO Max series that shows a real-time day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency department has since become perhaps the most lauded series in television, winning two Emmys for best drama for its first two seasons and two best actor Emmys for Wyle.
What's next: Along with more technical legal issues, the judges had to decide whether the shows had at least the minimal similarity that would give the lawsuit enough merit to move forward. Their decision applies only to this early legal challenge and they did not rule on whether the plaintiffs had proved the “The Pitt” is derivative of “ER.”
A California appeals court has found that “ER” and “The Pitt” have enough similarity that a lawsuit brought by the widow and estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton alleging “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot can move forward.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the trial court judge was correct to reject a motion to throw out the case from “The Pitt” production company Warner Bros. Television, which also produced “ER.” But the judges dismissed Noah Wyle — the star of both shows and a producer on “The Pitt” — as a defendant along with two other producers who worked on both series.
The lawsuit is a clash between the makers of multiple Emmy-winning TV series that were each among the most important and acclaimed shows of their eras.
Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” and many other novels that became hit movies and TV shows, wrote the pilot script for “ER,” the NBC show about a Chicago emergency room that redefined the medical drama genre and drew tens of millions of weekly viewers in its run from 1994 to 2009.
The lawsuit brought by Sherri Crichton was filed two years ago, before a single episode of “The Pitt” had aired. The HBO Max series that shows a real-time day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency department has since become perhaps the most lauded series in television, winning two Emmys for best drama for its first two seasons and two best actor Emmys for Wyle.
Along with more technical legal issues, the judges had to decide whether the shows had at least the minimal similarity that would give the lawsuit enough merit to move forward. Their decision applies only to this early legal challenge and they did not rule on whether the plaintiffs had proved the “The Pitt” is derivative of “ER.”
The court agreed with the plaintiff that “both shows provide commentaries on the healthcare system; they focus specifically on the emergency room and the difficult conditions under which the medical staff operates. Both shows take place, with little exception, in the emergency room, as opposed to other medical shows which track patients as they move out of the emergency room, or indeed never enter it.”
The opinion also said that both feature “very fast pacing, and reactions to multiple overlapping crises. The fast-paced dialogue is (to a layperson) frequently incomprehensible shorthand and jargon, lending an air of immediacy and accuracy.”
Warner Bros. Television said in a statement that “WBTV continues to maintain that ‘The Pitt’ is an entirely original series and that the claims against it are without merit. Nothing in the Court of Appeal’s decision establishes otherwise, and WBTV looks forward to defending its position as the case proceeds.”
The defendants argued in legal filings that the shows have “generic similarities” that would exist in “any dramatic story” that features “overworked doctors and staff.”
The panel also unanimously dismissed as defendants Wyle, John Wells, who created “The Pitt” and worked on “ER,” and R. Scott Gemmill, a “Pitt” executive producer who also worked on both shows. The judges found there was no evidence the three men knew the provisions of the Crichton contract that the lawsuit alleges they interfered with.
Sherri Crichton’s lawsuit alleges “The Pitt” is a rebranded version of an unauthorized “ER” reboot that she had rejected.
Her husband had secured a coveted “frozen rights” provision in his contract for the series, prohibiting Warner Bros. from proceeding with any sequels, remakes, spinoffs or other productions derived from “ER” without Crichton’s consent, or his estate’s consent after his death from cancer in 2008.
After the production company could not reach an agreement with Sherri Crichton over a proposed “ER” reboot, the TV studio proceeded to develop and produce a series based on the same premise without permission, the lawsuit alleges.
Archaeologist at the University of Bern Gino Caspari touches a cannabis plant in the Altai Mountains, Siberia, Russia, in Sept. 2016
(
Gino Caspari, Frozen Corpses Golden Treasures, T.Wallace & G. Caspari
/
Associated Press
)
Topline:
People may have been getting high off cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.
The findings: Archaeologists who led a dig at a monumental tomb in Siberia said they turned up evidence of the earliest known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes. The findings point to cannabis consumption at least 300 years earlier than previously known use in neighboring China. It’s not clear whether the cannabis was consumed through inhalation or ingestion, he said.
The backstory: Ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about inhabitants of Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 B.C., and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs across its highlands. The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds turned up sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.
People may have been getting high off cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.
Archaeologists who led a dig at a monumental tomb in Siberia said they turned up evidence of the earliest known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes.
Ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about inhabitants of Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 B.C., and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs across its highlands.
The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds turned up sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.
“It’s extremely rare that we have both preserved plant parts and human soft tissue with the active compounds in it in the same context,” said co-author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern.
“It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.
It’s not clear whether the cannabis was consumed through inhalation or ingestion, he said.
The dig took place starting in 2017 at a large burial mound at the Tunnug 1 site in the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia, home to one of the earliest monumental tombs showing material culture of the Scythians — ancient nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine.
The team, deployed “essentially out in the middle of nowhere,” lived in tents for months and faced a spring-to-autumn season that variously featured swamps, snowstorms, frosts and swarms of mosquitoes. Herds of horses ran freely across the grassy steppe.
Larger artifacts on the site include weapons in the burials, horse gear and animal-style motifs. But the team “struck gold” as it also found tiny black spots that turned out to be cannabis seeds along with preserved human hair, Caspari said.
“It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.
Radiocarbon dating on some of the more than 1,000 seeds helped establish the time of origin, and “they are not there by accident” but deposited within the tomb, suggesting that the plant material had significance in the community, he said.
Results were published Thursday in the journal Science.
Not all independent experts were convinced.
The hair analysis “is scientifically weak” and there’s not enough evidence to tell whether cannabis was used, wrote Volker Auwaerter, head of the forensic toxicology section at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, in an email.
“For a central part of the study, the article falls far short of what would have been possible,” Auwaerter said. “This matters because the hair data carry the abstract’s main claims (cannabis consumption and use for its psychoactive properties).”
Today, scholars don’t consider ancient accounts trustworthy without corroborating evidence. Because the cannabis plant has other uses — seeds are pressed for oil and fibers used for cloth — their presence alone doesn’t confirm drug use.
Auwaerter, who was not part of the study, said the data didn’t distinguish consumption from external exposure — in other words, the hair could have picked up traces of weed simply by being buried together with it. He said a lab test involving forensic toxicology expertise would have been advisable and easy to arrange.
But Elisa Guerra Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who has written about use of consciousness-altering substances in European prehistory, said toxicological hair analysis was not new in archaeology and has been used to identify consumption of psychoactive substances. She was not involved in the study.
In an email, she credited the authors for showing, through their methodology, that “cannabis was not merely deposited as a funerary offering but was actually consumed by individuals associated with the burial rite.”
Keep up with LAist.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
San Fernando Valley native, Micki Boden, loves LAUSD's famed coffee cake. So much so she turned it into her wedding cake.
The backstory: Boden attended elementary school in Studio City and middle school in Sherman Oaks before graduating from a Reseda high school.
The ask: She reached out to the district to see if they'd bake her a cake. Miraculously, they said yes.
Read on ... for the full story.
Micki Boden wanted a wedding cake that checked off a couple of big boxes — personalized and tasty. Instead of a traditional tiered cake, the San Fernando Valley native went with a favorite from her school days.
“My favorite cake of all time is the coffee cake that I ate through my entire K-12 education going to LAUSD public school,” Boden said.
Boden attended elementary school in Studio City and middle school in Sherman Oaks before graduating from a Reseda high school.
Boden and her husband, Matt Stollman, met in 2016 while working on the reality television show Big Brother and eventually started dating.The two got engaged in 2025.
With the groom’s family traveling from the East Coast for their wedding in October, the couple wanted to provide a uniquely L.A. experience.
Micki Boden and Matt Stollman cut into their LAUSD coffee cake wedding cake.
(
Micki Boden
)
“We wanted something that was gonna be fun, that was gonna be memorable for people,” Boden said.
They held their wedding at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, surrounded by San Fernando Valley memorabilia, and got a California favorite — an In-N-Out truck — to serve guests.
The search for a cake that fit
But when it came to the wedding cake, the couple struggled to find something suitable. Neither Boden nor Stollman liked frosting, and traditional wedding cakes didn’t excite them.
“We explored the more traditional tiered cake setup, and it just wasn’t meshing well,” Boden said.
The Stollman's wedding cake, decorated by the chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, sits in a pastry box.
(
Micki Boden
)
How LAUSD made it happen
Thomas Cohen, a public relations representative at the district, and Manish Singh, the director of food services, arranged for a chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa to prepare the wedding cake. The chef also shaped part of the cake into a heart just for the couple.
Singh said the district doesn’t take cake orders from the public — but made this exception.
“We were doing it just to make one of our Angelenos, an ex-LAUSD student, make her special day even more special,” Singh said.
For the bride, it was the icing on her big day.
“I think it’s all just part of being an L.A. student,” she said. “The fact that we have these amazing memories from childhood, I think it’s just so meaningful for a lot of people.”
Ballots are sorted the day after California’s primary election at the L.A. County Ballot Processing Center, June 3, 2026, in City of Industry.
(
Jae C. Hong
/
Associated Press
)
Topline:
The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday moved to dismiss its own lawsuit that sought to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged went to noncitizens until their immigration status could be verified. The request to dismiss the case comes days after Republicans’ significant losses in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master was slated to evaluate the accuracy of the list. California officials have previously said the list is out of date and includes legitimate voters — a sentiment that the federal judge presiding over the case echoed in his blistering order denying the federal government’s request.
Why it matters: The case was at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to assert control over state-run elections across the country, which Trump has said are rife with illegal voting without providing evidence.
The backstory: The Department of Justice remains enmeshed in litigation with multiple immigrant and voting rights groups seeking to limit its use of the list of what is says are suspected noncitizens. Another controversial suit it filed in Alaska at Trump’s direction before the election to block the victory of the Democrat in that state’s Senate race was swiftly dismissed by a federal judge. The administration is appealing that ruling but has yet to file a full brief at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. California had processed roughly 9 million ballots as of early Friday, with nearly 5 million still left to be counted, according to state election officials. The motion to dismiss the lawsuit said that, by the time of the upcoming hearing, the state will have already irreparably “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones.”
The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday moved to dismiss its own lawsuit that sought to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged went to noncitizens until their immigration status could be verified.
The request to dismiss the case comes days after Republicans’ significant losses in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master was slated to evaluate the accuracy of the list. California officials have previously said the list is out of date and includes legitimate voters — a sentiment that the federal judge presiding over the case echoed in his blistering order denying the federal government’s request.
The Department of Justice remains enmeshed in litigation with multiple immigrant and voting rights groups seeking to limit its use of the list of what is says are suspected noncitizens. Another controversial suit it filed in Alaska at Trump’s direction before the election to block the victory of the Democrat in that state’s Senate race was swiftly dismissed by a federal judge. The administration is appealing that ruling but has yet to file a full brief at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
California had processed roughly 9 million ballots as of early Friday, with nearly 5 million still left to be counted, according to state election officials. The motion to dismiss the lawsuit said that, by the time of the upcoming hearing, the state will have already irreparably “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones.”
“The relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available—rendering voluntary dismissal necessary,” the motion said.
Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, previously argued in court that the lawsuit would be irrelevant after election day, because there would be no way to sequester the ones allegedly belonging to noncitizens. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, when ballots had been sent to all of the state’s 23 million registered voters, and after hundreds of thousands of ballots were already processed. Once a ballot is processed, it is completely anonymized.
Essayli said at the time the lawsuit was filed that his goal was to “safeguard the integrity of the election so it doesn’t have an effect on the upcoming election.”
“We want to stop the illegal voting. We don’t want to chase it later,” he said outside of court the week before the election.
California prosecutors in recent weeks have arrested over 30 noncitizens who are accused of illegally registering to vote. Some who were arrested were also accused of voting in previous elections. Elections clerks around California in the week before the election were sent subpoenas to testify before grand juries slated to convene in November. It’s not clear who is being criminally charged in those cases, but the department does not typically subpoena people whom it regards as targets of a criminal investigation to appear before a grand jury.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter appointed the special master in late October, shortly after allowing California to proceed with elections as planned. Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, argued in his blistering order that separating ballots at that late stage would risk disenfranchising citizens and warned it would “wreak havoc” on the midterm elections.
The special master would have also considered whether or not California election officials did in fact have a mechanism for separating the ballots.
