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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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