The Santa Ynez Reservoir, a 117-gallon water resource near the Pacific Palisades, was under renovation and empty when fires tore through the Los Angeles neighborhood last week and firefighters quickly depleted available water resources, city officials said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday he was launching an independent state investigation into the loss of water pressure and unavailability of water from the reservoir. He directed Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power (DWP) to prepare a “comprehensive review” of their efforts to ensure available water supply in case of emergencies.
The Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, Jan. 7, and by 3 a.m., the three 1-million-gallon water tanks in Pacific Palisades ran dry due to “extreme demand,” officials said. Winds gusting over 100 miles per hour prevented air support from helping to douse the flames with other water sources.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” said Janisse Quiñones, the DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer, in a press conference Wednesday. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
Here’s what we know about the reservoir and its role in the Palisades water supply system.
Why was the Santa Ynez Reservoir empty when the fires broke out?
The reservoir was taken out of service to “meet safe drinking water regulations,” the DWP said in a statement. A tear in the reservoir’s cover made the water supply subject to contamination, the Los Angeles Times reported, leading the agency to drain it in February.
“The water system serving the Pacific Palisades area and all of Los Angeles meets all federal and state fire codes for urban development and housing,” the release said.
DWP representatives did not respond to further questions about the reservoir from CBS News. The agency’s statement suggested that the fact the reservoir was empty for nearly a year was in part due to the process of contracting a company to carry out the repairs.
“To commission the support and resources to implement repairs to Santa Ynez, LADWP is subject to the city charter’s competitive bidding process which requires time,” the statement read.
Some social media users falsely claimed the reservoir sat empty for over a decade, pointing to satellite images as supposed evidence. A floating cover was installed on the reservoir in 2011, changing the appearance of the reservoir in satellite imagery, but the reservoir was returned to service in 2011, according to DWP’s website.
Could the reservoir have helped combat the fires?
The reservoir is intended to provide water storage “for domestic use and fire fighting purposes in the Pacific Palisades area” according to city documents.
DWP says that the agency is conducting its own investigation on its “water resiliency.” But experts and officials agree that the extent of the wildfires would have put a strain on the city’s water supply regardless of whether the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been full.
In his letter to DWP, Newsom wrote, “While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish wildfires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors.”
David Freyberg, PhD, a hydrologist and water resources specialist at Stanford University, told CBS News in an email that while a full Santa Ynez would have had benefits, it’s not clear how much impact it would have had.
“The reservoirs above Pacific Palisades were not designed to support fire-fighting at the scale of [this] fire,” he wrote. “Water supply reservoirs are typically designed to cope with house fires, not wildfires.”
He added that the situation has made it clear that larger-scale solutions are necessary.
“It is clear that communities vulnerable to wildfire are going to need to think carefully, i.e., rethink, about design criteria for these systems,” Freyberg said. “Not just reservoirs, but pipe sizes [and] pressure management.”
Julia Ingram is a data journalist for CBS News Confirmed. She uses data analysis and computation to cover misinformation, AI and social media.
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