There are misconceptions circulating about who’s at fault for the fires burning tens of thousands of acres across Los Angeles.
By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff
For water to reach the cliffside Los Angeles neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades, water is sent down from the mountains of Northern California to a city reservoir where the water is then pumped uphill into one of three storage tanks holding one million gallons each. After making the trek, the water is then flushed into homes and fire hydrants, thanks to gravity.
But the demand for water to combat the Palisades Fire, which has already burned over 23,000 acres has overwhelmed the system. Fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades were drained dry as firefighters tried to quell the flames last week. All the while, amid water pressure issues around Pasadena, fire crews fought more flames like the Eaton Fire that has burned 14,000 acres including most of the historically Black neighborhood of Altadena.
As the hydrants across northwest Los Angeles ran out of water, the city sent several 4,000-gallon water trucks as well as a dozen smaller trucks to refill hydrants and get more water pumping through firefighter hoses. These stopgap measures have helped a little. Over 3 million gallons have been sprayed on the fires. But the Eaton Fire was 33% contained as of Monday afternoon, while the Palisades Fire was still just 14% contained.
Alongside the fires, there’s a misconception raging as well – that the wildfires around Los Angeles are still untamed due to a water shortage. In reality, the lack of water flowing from hydrants highlights a problem within the city’s emergency infrastructure. It simply was not designed for a prolonged, neighborhood-wide fire fight, or for these out-of-season wildfires that are getting more unruly as climate change worsens.
Unsurprisingly, the issue has become politicized – with incoming President Donald Trump blaming California Governor Gavin Newsom for “a true disaster!” while Newsom pushed back on the criticism.
Others have pointed the finger at the Beverly Hills-based billionaire couple who own the Wonderful Company, America’s largest pistachio and almond seller. Both are notoriously water hungry crops. Aside from their water-hungry nuts, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the cofounders and co-owners of the privately held food company, also grow oranges, mandarins, lemons, limes and pomegranates. They have a lot of power within California’s water system.
The Resnicks are worth an estimated $12.6 billion combined and have some of the deepest pockets when it comes to purchasing water on the open market, which can drive up the price of water. The Resnicks also own a majority of the Kern Water Bank, a natural gem of an aquifer that has one of the largest water storage capacities in the country.
In 1994 the Resnicks brokered a sweetheart deal for their 57% of the water bank, in exchange for state deliveries of water. The state had been planning to shut down the bank, which was failing under the state’s guidance. Stewart Resnick was approached to bail it out. In what some critics have called secret meetings, some of his most trusted advisors negotiated with several leaders from southern California water districts and state water officials. Two decades later the bank still provides the Resnicks with nearly unrivaled access to water in Southern California, which it uses to ensure it can irrigate some 130,000 acres of farmland in the state.
But their influence within California’s water system has nothing to do with the burning of the Palisades and other fires around Los Angeles. The cruel irony is that water is currently abundant in Los Angeles. The reservoirs for the city of Los Angeles, through the metropolitan water district, are full. (The Eaton Fire, with 16 fatalities and 7,000 structures lost, is in another water district.)
“They are completely unrelated topics,” says Dr. Mark Gold, director of Water Scarcity Solutions, Environmental Health for the National Resources Defense Council. “We have more water stored at this time of year than in the history of the agency. In light of the catastrophic loss of life and property, it’s insensitive.”
These fires will be recorded as the worst that the county of Los Angeles has ever had, and most expensive. That’s because of “a perfect storm” of contributing factors, says Gold, who is also a board member at the Metropolitan Water District, which oversees municipal water for 19 million in Southern California, including Los Angeles. After two very rainy years, brush on the hillsides of Los Angeles had a chance to grow – into lots of kindling. That was coupled with there being nearly no rain – less than two-tenths of an inch since May 2024 – making it the second-driest period on record in Los Angeles over the last 150 years. Fire needs air as well as fuel – which a massive Santa Ana windstorm provided starting on Tuesday. The winds – the worst in 15 years or more – gusted up to 100 miles per hour. It made fighting the fire by plane and helicopter – to dump water and fire repellant from above – impossible.
“Everything is bone dry. If you can’t fight it with aerial resources you don’t have a prayer,” says Gold. “You don’t fight these kinds of fires with fire hydrants and hoses and fire trucks.”
Gold added that in addition to taking a harder look at how much water storage is needed, in the future the city and county could look to other ways to reduce fire risk, like de-energizing power lines when a wind event is set to take place, or a better use of remote sensing to spot fires and predict behavior.
“We are seeing such tremendous climate extremes that how we look at safety and security for people has to completely change,” says Gold. “The Palisades almost got wiped off the face of the planet. It’s beyond anybody’s worst nightmare.”
For its part, the Wonderful Company says attacks on the Resnicks over the fires are antisemitic, and as Seth Oster, chief corporate affairs officer for Wonderful, says, “the hamster wheel has spun to a new level of absurdity.”
“There is zero truth that any individual or company, much less ours, owns or controls most of the water in California. It’s also not true we have anything to do with water supplied to Los Angeles. Water intended for municipal use is not taken for agricultural purposes or food production,” says Oster.
“The right questions to ask are not about any one sector or company, but about what the government could have done differently and to acknowledge the challenges of climate change rather than wasting time with hateful rhetoric and bizarre claims from extreme and boring conspiracy theorists,” adds Oster.
There are no easy fixes to Los Angeles’ water issues, which date back to early 20th century and have been exacerbated by the city’s unrelenting growth. Redesigning regional water utilities where wildfires are common would be a good place to start, but Kathryn Sorensen, the director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University says it’s not as easy as just rethinking old structures. Los Angeles neighborhoods may need more water storage to supply their fire hydrants, for example, but increasing storage capacity often comes with the tradeoff of potentially having water quality issues since there would be more water sitting around in tanks. And since America’s safe drinking water act has “very stringent” requirements, “there’s very little flexibility.”
“We know the value of water when we don’t have it,” says Sorensen. “It’s relatively easy to look back and say it would have been beneficial to increase storage but there’s usually pushback whenever these utilities try to increase rates to pay for aging infrastructure. It’s important to support these systems all the time so they can be in a position to perform when it’s needed.”
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