Any information about the Pacific Palisades Fire

[VINMAN]

Originally Posted by group911@aol.co

There is no amount of water in any system that can stop a wind driven fire.

Yep! Exactly.

Extinguishing fire is all about GPM vs BTUs. We have a saying in the fire service, " Big fire, big water.

When it gets to the point where the fire overcomes your water flow capabilities, you are SOL.

.

[speeder]

Yep. These absolute morons like Bill Maher and Harvey whatever the fk his name is whining about "red tape" after this disaster?? They want less building regulations? I thought that the moron line currently running is that this is the fault of allowing developers to build where no one should be allowed to build housing? Which is it?

There will be plenty of blame to go around once the ashes cool down on this one, as there always is after a disaster. The Eaton fire in Altadena was started by a spontaneous fire at the base of a power line tower where the power should have been shut off due to high winds by the power company. Corporate greed won out over concern for the city where they make their billions, though, and now they are down several thousand residential and commercial customers as a result.

Cutting "red tape" in order to speed up rebuilding after a massive natural disaster is SOP and not even worth mentioning. It's not a political football, as much as the California hating knuckle draggers want it to be.

[speeder]

Originally Posted by VINMAN

Yep! Exactly.

Extinguishing fire is all about GPM vs BTUs. We have a saying in the fire service, " Big fire, big water.

When it gets to the point where the fire overcomes your water flow capabilities, you are SOL.

.

Wait, so the empty reservoir in a city with hundreds of reservoirs didn't cause this?

Thanks for the reality check, Vinny. Apparently there are people on their couches thousands of miles away thinking that the reason for this disaster was that our Fire Dept. showed up to put out a grass fire and there was no water in the hydrants.

There is not a municipal water system in the world that could flow the amount of water that was being demanded during this fire. The water pressure issues were occurring after the fire became massive, not in the beginning.

[group911@aol.co]

You probably don't understand my statement or wind driven fires. Water systems are limited in their capacity by size and pressure. My guess it that the water mains at the top of each of those canyons was an 8 inch and you'd be lucky to have 80psi up there. That means about 5 good master streams at 2000 gpm. The reservoir would have added duration to the equation but unless you had monstrous sized mains throughout the system, wouldn't have increased the flow rate. Now factor in that every structure had it's own water supply which became an open butt when that structure burned, you just robbed the system of capacity and pressure before you even think about supplying the pumpers to fight the fire.
Now the actual wind driven fire. The reason you can't stop them is because you have to get in front of the fire to stop it and had anybody dumb enough to try that would be part of the body count. Picture this. You have steep, narrow canyons with basically one way in and one way out. You have a 50mph+ winds driving the fire directly at the rigs responding to it. With hydrants situated about every 1000 feet, the first rig stops short of the advancing fire and hope you get hooked up quickly enough to get your master stream going before it overruns you. At best you can hope to protect a few structures within the reach of your streams. You are absolutely not going to stop/ extinguish any fire outside of that. Now you hope the other 4 rigs were able to do the same setup and there you have it. 5 little pockets in a vast area that were saved and that fire went right by you to the Pacific.

Originally Posted by fintstone

Water seems to work everywhere but in CA. That is why aircraft dump water versus molasses on wildfires and why folks pray for rain when there are really big fires. Enough water will put out any fire (anywhere else).

They key is not to let them burn until they are out of control before you implement serious firefighting efforts and not to run out of water once you do.

Of course, prevention (reducing the amount of available fuel in advance) is always helpful.

[Crowbob]

Originally Posted by speeder

Wait, so the empty reservoir in a city with hundreds of reservoirs didn't cause this?

Thanks for the reality check, Vinny. Apparently there are people on their couches thousands of miles away thinking that the reason for this disaster was that our Fire Dept. showed up to put out a grass fire and there was no water in the hydrants.

There is not a municipal water system in the world that could flow the amount of water that was being demanded during this fire. The water pressure issues were occurring after the fire became massive, not in the beginning.

This post is disingenuous and you know it, Speedo.

Nobody says an empty reservoir that should have been full caused the fire. Your logic leads to the ridiculous notion that if a fire is big enough, it’s not the water management honcho’s fault. Everybody knew the dangers, even the people partying in Ghana. Every resource should have been at the ready. Apparently, hours went by before orders went out.

Nothing will change as long as the people responsible for mismanaging this disaster are not held accountable.

[group911@aol.co]

I'm going to throw it out there that this statement is true. "if a fire is big enough, it’s not the water management honcho’s fault." You literally can't design a system in an area like this that will flow enough water to fight a wind driven fire. The system they had worked exactly like it was supposed to until demand exceeded supply. The reason systems in cities seem to have an endless supply is that they are on a grid of water mains meaning water is coming from all directions and booster pump stations.
All of these canyons were no doubt on dead end mains at the top of a hill. The water and the pressure that was in those mains came from 3 1 million gallon tanks. They literally couldn't mechanically pump water to refill those tanks as fast as it was being used nor could the system have distributed it fast enough.
More rigs earlier would have only emptied the system earlier.
Like Vinnie said. "big fire, big water". Big enough water for this kind of fire in this setting from a municipal system isn't possible.

Originally Posted by Crowbob

This post is disingenuous and you know it, Speedo.

Nobody says an empty reservoir that should have been full caused the fire. Your logic leads to the ridiculous notion that if a fire is big enough, it’s not the water management honcho’s fault. Everybody knew the dangers, even the people partying in Ghana. Every resource should have been at the ready. Apparently, hours went by before orders went out.

Nothing will change as long as the people responsible for mismanaging this disaster are not held accountable.

[speeder]

Originally Posted by Crowbob

This post is disingenuous and you know it, Speedo.

Nobody says an empty reservoir that should have been full caused the fire. Your logic leads to the ridiculous notion that if a fire is big enough, it’s not the water management honcho’s fault. Everybody knew the dangers, even the people partying in Ghana. Every resource should have been at the ready. Apparently, hours went by before orders went out.

Nothing will change as long as the people responsible for mismanaging this disaster are not held accountable.

People are blaming the empty reservoir for being at least a significant part of not being able to put out this fire sooner before it burned up the Palisades. Not anyone with actual knowledge of what occurred and maybe not you but it's being mentioned by plenty of idiots. Would it have helped in the overall effort to have more water? Yes. Would it have stopped this fire once it got rolling? No.

You are correct and I agree about failures in leadership and wrong decisions leading up to these fires. The response in the Palisades was too little, too late. The fire to really be pissed-off about is the Eaton fire, which was 100% preventable if the power company had followed its own guidelines for cutting power in an extreme wind event:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-15/la-me-edison-ceo

[fintstone]

I don't understand how running out of water to fight a fire is not an issue in the fire not being contained or what having hundreds of reservoirs that did not provide water to the area that ran out (where the fire originated) makes a difference.

If "more rigs earlier would have only emptied the system earlier" as noted earlier, then why was the "system" not designed to provide sufficient water?

It seems to me that if a sufficient number of resources arrived quickly to fight the Palisades fire (including water which ran out quickly), I cannot see why it could not be extinguished before it became too large to fight. Even more so if not for the massive amount of dry scrub/growth allowed in the area.

If fires in CA are impossible to prevent or fight (unlike everywhere else in the world), I cannot imagine living there. If indeed that is actually the case, perhaps the state should not allow anyone to rebuild and depopulate what remains. It is just too dangerous. Make the state (or at least the LA metro area) a giant national park?

[Cajundaddy]

The Santa Inez reservoir was at the top of the Palisades and holds 300 Acre feet or 100,000,000 gallons of water. Yes, those fire hydrants could have put a LOT more water on homes if it was full during peak fire season with a red flag warning. Epic fail.

Should the LAFD have staged crews and choppers at the ready to douse any fires quickly at the ignition point before they become raging firestorms knowing that this was a red flag event with extremely dry and overgrown vegetation? It took 45 minutes from the 911 call to get the first chopper on scene at the point of ignition. Sorry guys, not fast enough. It's a 10 minute chopper flight from LAX to the Palisades fire. Epic fail.

An absence of leadership all around.

[speeder]

Water dropping aircraft cannot fly in 80 mph winds. They were not available during the first entire day of the fire. This was a perfect storm. Do some learning before you flap your pie hole.

[VINMAN]

Originally Posted by group911@aol.co

You probably don't understand my statement or wind driven fires. Water systems are limited in their capacity by size and pressure. My guess it that the water mains at the top of each of those canyons was an 8 inch and you'd be lucky to have 80psi up there. That means about 5 good master streams at 2000 gpm. The reservoir would have added duration to the equation but unless you had monstrous sized mains throughout the system, wouldn't have increased the flow rate. Now factor in that every structure had it's own water supply which became an open butt when that structure burned, you just robbed the system of capacity and pressure before you even think about supplying the pumpers to fight the fire.
Now the actual wind driven fire. The reason you can't stop them is because you have to get in front of the fire to stop it and had anybody dumb enough to try that would be part of the body count. Picture this. You have steep, narrow canyons with basically one way in and one way out. You have a 50mph+ winds driving the fire directly at the rigs responding to it. With hydrants situated about every 1000 feet, the first rig stops short of the advancing fire and hope you get hooked up quickly enough to get your master stream going before it overruns you. At best you can hope to protect a few structures within the reach of your streams. You are absolutely not going to stop/ extinguish any fire outside of that. Now you hope the other 4 rigs were able to do the same setup and there you have it. 5 little pockets in a vast area that were saved and that fire went right by you to the Pacific.

Excellent explanation Bob.

Posting from my phone. I had to make in short and sweet!

.

[speeder]

Originally Posted by fintstone

I don't understand how running out of water to fight a fire is not an issue in the fire not being contained or what having hundreds of reservoirs that did not provide water to the area that ran out (where the fire originated) makes a difference.

If "more rigs earlier would have only emptied the system earlier" as noted earlier, then why was the "system" not designed to provide sufficient water?

It seems to me that if a sufficient number of resources arrived quickly to fight the Palisades fire (including water which ran out quickly), I cannot see why it could not be extinguished before it became too large to fight. Even more so if not for the massive amount of dry scrub/growth allowed in the area.

If fires in CA are impossible to prevent or fight (unlike everywhere else in the world), I cannot imagine living there. If indeed that is actually the case, perhaps the state should not allow anyone to rebuild and depopulate what remains. It is just too dangerous. Make the state (or at least the LA metro area) a giant national park?

Are you to be taken seriously or is this just a trolling exercise? You don’t think that they are fighting this fire?

The water pressure issue has been sufficiently explained several times…it was a water volume issue. Not enough water anywhere to fight this using hydrants alone. Planes and helicopters could not fly.

California has the best wildfire fighters in the world.

[Danimal16]

-State water project was placed into service in 1972.

-Coastal Adqueduct completed in 1999/2000.

-Domenigoni Valley Reservoir/Diamond Valley Lake started in the 1990's completed and filled by 2003. (This doubled offline storage in Southern California).

But very little of any significance since.

The big problem is the absence of the second bank of pumps at the Harvey Banks Pump Station.

There is alot of issues that have inhibited the operation of the SWP as designed AND with the least environmental impact on the Delta. The design/operation of the SWP is based upon the natural hydraulics of Sacramento River/San Joaquin River Delta. If you understand only one thing about the delta and what is currently wrong with its operation, just look at the Unit Hydrography for that delta at the Clifton Court Forbay.

And there are many issues at the local/retail level with design standards including adequate zone storage and the replacement and update of both distribution and local transmission lines.

I did this type of work for over 30 years, none of this has been a surprise.

There are things we can do, but not for those who have been so destroyed by these events.

I will make the point with anyone that the issues we face in California when it comes to the operation and maintenance of water infrastructure AND the use of water resources is absolutely a matter of bad public policy rather than ANYTHING else.

[greglepore]

Yeah, I'd venture to say that the overwhelming majority of the critics have never worked in anything resembling the fire service nor do most have a rudimentary knowledge of firefighting hydraulics.

The most telling statement is Bob's body count comment. You simply can't imagine what a wind driven fire does, and these were hurricane force winds. Think about that for a moment. It'll leap anything, and its very very likely to kill you in the process. The primary way to fight a forest or brush fire of large magnitude is to cut or bulldoze large firebreaks, and you're not doing that in the LA hills.

[Cajundaddy]

Originally Posted by speeder

Water dropping aircraft cannot fly in 80 mph winds. They were not available during the first entire day of the fire. This was a perfect storm. Do some learning before you flap your pie hole.

The first chopper WAS on station 45 minutes after the 911 call and there were no 80mph winds at that time the fire started. They filled in as the night progressed.

Pie hole indeed...

[jyl]

Doesn’t matter how much water in the reservoir, what matters is how much water you can flow, and that is set by the water main diameter.

The fire started in the chapparal upwind from a development. By the time it was spotted, it was already several acres. It grew from 10 ac to 20 ac very quickly - less than an hour - with the 60-100 mph wind, and was already a large fire when it blew down into the streets and tightly packed houses. Blew down - it wasn’t spreading like you think of fire as doing, it was being blown by high winds. High wind is Nature’s flamethrower.

The houses were mostly wood, close up against the chapparal and densely surrounded by dry, flammable landscaping, right up to and overhanging the structures. The houses ignited very quickly - few minutes.

Clouds of flaming embers were flying downwind, I saw video and it was unreal looking, like rivers of fire in the air. The fire jumped downhill not one house at a time, but blocks at a time. Firefighters can set up and work on one house, meanwhile the fire is jumping over their heads and igniting dozens more houses further downhill. Hopeless.

I heard it said that there wasn’t much organized firefighting in Palisades in the first few hours, and that’s because the firefighters were trying to get people out, going door to door, lives come first. By 2-3 pm, so just a few hours after the fire was first spotted, it was already halfway through the neighborhood and making for the ocean.

The only way I can think you’d stop this fire is if a satellite was continuously monitoring for hot spots, water-dropping aircraft on call 24/7 like ready fighters on a carrier, immediately dispatch to any hot spot detected . . . you have maybe 30 minutes before the fire already covers 10 acres . . . oh wait, the planes can’t fly in winds that high . . . helicopters don’t carry enough water . . . engines can’t get into the hills . . . what’s Plan C? Maybe we humans just can’t always win against Nature.

[Scott Douglas]

One chopper dropping maybe 300 gallons of water is not going to do much, even with no winds, in that dry brush.

[Danimal16]

Originally Posted by speeder

The water pressure issue has been sufficiently explained several times…it was a water volume issue. Not enough water anywhere to fight this using hydrants alone. Planes and helicopters could not fly.

Denis, I need to jump in here as this is not accurate. But before I do, the final word on what operationally went wrong will need to be further sorted in the future.

I have a career's worth of experience in the design and operation of water systems, both retail and wholesale, think State Water Project contractor.

The questions that will need to be sorted and I do not have detailed knowledge of, is the storage standards, the age and size of the existing "local" in system transmission and the distribution system. Old developments to State Standards and NOT to modern standards such as those developed by the ISO (Insurance Services Office) AWWA (American Waterworks Association) and others. These standards, I am sure, have further changed since I retired in 2005. But again, this is something that needs to be seriously examined AND acted on; not ignored or covered up as in the past.

My most immediate concern has to do with the reported storage in the area. What I am hearing is that the entire fire area only had 3 MG of storage and had the 117 MG Santa Ynez Reservoir off line. I find it had to believe that there was only 3MGs available as with that size of service area, 3MG is not very much. That is where I think further investigation will clarify. A 117 MG reservoir that is off line, especially since the wet season has not started, is really disturbing.

Also, if the backbone system cannot readily transmit water from one part of the zone to the other, this will impact fire fighting supply at the critical point of demand.

The lack of adequate fire storage physically in each hydraulic zone (and this exists in older systems) is also a serious deficiency. Gravity is your friend and you can NEVER pump enough to meet fire flow requirements in a retail municipal distribution system in a fire flow demand situation.

My huge sadness of what has happened in the Palisades and Alta Dena does not completely eliminate my desire to find out what has caused these problems, the adequacy of the existing infrastructure and the operation of that infrastructure.

It is imperative to start the failure analysis now, and not let the potential deficiencies be once again overlooked/ignored and not corrected. This has been the case in the past.

[Crowbob]

So if fires like these are unpreventable, nobody should have been living there in the first place and nobody should move back in the second place. Unless, of course, it’s 100% at their own risk.

[Danimal16]

Originally Posted by jyl

Doesn’t matter how much water in the reservoir, what matters is how much water you can flow, and that is set by the water main diameter.

It absolutely depends on how much water is in the reservoir. Yes distribution and transmission deficiencies will seriously impact the availability at the point of use, especially in the high velocity/high volume case of a fire flow.

The other issue on storage is where the storage is. In zone storage is imperative to maintaining gravity flow that is so essential to a properly designed system that can meet fire flow. It is a fools game to design to deadhead firefly to pressure zones when needed. Gravity flow is your friend in a fire.