Subject: Re: Just Three Months Ago
That Trump does not acknowledge this is the worst kind of insidious lying.... and everybody whose head is not up their ass knows it.

"<The true> 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 travel uphill through pipes to homes and fire hydrants — 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 travel to 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.

That decreased the water pressure, which is needed for the water to travel uphill.

“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.

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.”

Indeed, fire hydrants have also run dry in the case of other wildfires that spread to urban areas, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire, 2024’s Mountain Fire and 2023’s Maui wildfires.

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.”