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First, California has been mismanaged all to hell since the days when that was bipartisan consensus because there were republicans in government. Not filling the reservoirs over ‘a stupid and worthless fish called a smelt’ is just California being California and the lack of water in the hydrants is probably not solely attributable to that. Second, it’s not like, a fixable issue. The sorts of people running California are not willing to compromise the iron law of bureaucracy mission of state agencies in order to serve the public. Political heads will not roll; this is a one party state.
The reservoirs are currently near full, everyone saying that this this the problem is plainly pushing a political agenda instead of trying to understand the world around them.
https://x.com/jhensonpogue/status/1877228724476612612
Reservoir capacity is the problem, it doesn't matter how full they are when the infrastructure was built for a population a third this size, and the money promised for expansion vanished into a black hole of environmental studies and other busywork.
Eh, if the reservoirs aren't depleted, then the lack of water pressure at the hydrant is from some other bottleneck. The processing plants, lift stations, and distribution system are almost certainly not designed for this sort of load. Are they underdesigned? Who can say without intimate knowledge of the system itself.
I think the over-abundance of fuel (from the admittedly complex lack of prescribed burns issue discussed below), lack of manpower, and lack of equipment for LAPD are better indicators of dysfunction than the hydrants running dry.
Yeah, for this particular case it's hard to even judge because the speed and scale of the fires would make almost any level of preparedness inadequate. (Although the lack of recognition of the looming impossible problem is itself kind of an indictment of the dysfunction. All these gated hill developments went through billions in planning, EIS, and other government processes without catching any of this! It's not like they were just building unregulated shanty towns up there.)
People are pointing out the general dysfunction of the firefighting and water systems, and others are seizing on "ha look, the reservoirs are full so they don't know what they're talking about!!" as the easiest talking point to swing back with.
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I don’t think the problem is that they depleted all the reservoirs.
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If reservoir capacity was the problem, wouldn't we see the reservoirs drain, and then demand for water go unfilled only after the reservoirs were excessively drained instead of near-full? If they're not draining significantly away from full, then reservoir capacity cannot be the only issue; whatever problem is preventing water in small-but-full reservoirs from being used would presumably also thwart attempts to use water from large-and-full reservoirs.
We do see that in the summers. Right now is when fall rain fills up reservoirs (and the snowpack forms in the mountains), and both this year and last year have had well above average rainfall statewide. It's a bit like saying "battery capacity can't be the problem with my solar system, it's full at 1pm!"
That's not to say that reservoir capacity is hurting firefighting right now, which is a mix of local distribution and storage being a mess (part of what was supposed to be fixed by the bond but wasn't), and this sort of fire being really hard to fight.
The seriously wealthy people whose mansions have their own fire suppression systems and emergency water storage seem to have come out pretty well. Which could mean that a) they over prepared more than was cost-effective, or b) the state massively under prepared to deal with wildfires due to mismanagement.
The loss of fire insurance coverage indicates to me that everyone with a real financial stake in the outcome knew how bad things were and pulled out of the market to avoid the inevitable consequences.
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The lack of water in hydrants isn't anything surprising. No water system is designed for a wildfire that's impacting 2000+ structures. Depending on how the system and lift stations and such are planned out, you're typically planning for 1 or 2 residential fires per zone, more for commercial, more for industrial. And you have to keep in mind that once a structure becomes compromised, their water pipes are going to be effectively turned on at max (the pipes and valves being compromised by heat or gravity loads) creating even more demand on the system. Reservoirs are pretty much your best and only affordable option for water for wildfires and such.
I keep seeing this take, and it frustrates me.
Somebody was tasked with designing a system to deliver water to fire hydrants. They designed the system in a way where it fails during a fire.
California is a cargo cult of government competence. It's all performative. They make things that look functional until they need to be used and, like the bamboo airplanes, they do nothing when needed.
It's basic infrastructure engineering. You can allocate nigh-infinite resources to making something safer or stronger or higher capacity and there will still be a theoretical load case that will exceed it. We don't have anything close to nigh-infinite resources to throw at anything so you determine an acceptable level of risk or design load case based on the probability of exceedance and the cost of mitigation and that is what you design to. This isn't California specific, this is the case in all responsible engineering everywhere.
What is possibly California specific is not having additional options available when their design cases are exceeded, i.e. reservoirs holding that excessive rain from last year. Or if some of those videos are to be trusted, not even having extra buckets and hoses for LAFD to use.
If California is so determined not to collect rain water, I don't see why they don't invest in (nuclear?) desalination plants. Would solve a great deal of the water disputes they seem to be having with adjacent states as well.
California is (unsurprisingly) anti-nuclear. They were planning to shutter their final remaining nuclear power plant (Diablo Canyon) last year, and the only reason it didn't happen was because the resulting blackouts would have been a political disaster for Newsom et al.
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California has many reservoirs, but it doesn't help you at all that cachuma lake has 170k AF of water when it's a hundred miles away. The problem is not that there's no water, the problem is supplying water to all the hydrants (at elevation!) when they're in use and domestic water lines are leaking after the houses burned down.
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