He's lucky, goofy. Anecdotes like this are interesting but I guarantee you this: the more people who try, the more will die or end up like my old childhood aquaintance, George.

He didn’t stay. He set up the system, started the pump, and left along with his wife and kid. In the story he talks about coming back and expecting to find the place burned down, but it wasn’t, even though several of his neighbors’ houses were.

At that point he hung around, spraying the neighbor houses and tamping out any remaining embers so they wouldn’t flare up and threaten his house again. He did *not* put himself in personal danger, he prepared a “set and forget” system, turned it on, and galloped down the highway.

And yes, he was lucky, it might not have turned out that way. But he used his own resources at hand (swimming pool) rather than relying on the public utility water because - as it turned out - that was a super-demanded service which was unable to cope with the simultaneous demand from so many areas, including homeowners with hoses, fire departments opening hydrants, and so on.

No, it was not “water shortage” or “empty reservoir” as the uninformed Right is proclaiming, it was inability to supply everything, everywhere, all at once - a phenomenon we also see during disasters when cell phone service is overloaded, or when supply relief trucks enter a post-combat zone to feed displaced civilians. Of course the “government is always wrong” types complain about that, too, even though they complain about paying taxes to be over-prepared for the rare times when it happens.

But they’re happy to play the “know it all”, even though they are more apt to know nothing.