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- Records show L.A. County missed dozens of opportunities for water infrastructure improvements that experts say likely would have helped firefighters during the Palisades fire.
- Some of the long-delayed projects were specifically aimed at improving “fire flow” and ensuring enough water during emergencies.
- A county official said that the water system “performed as designed” during the Palisades fire, and that additional water would have saved “relatively few homes.”
Los Angeles County officials missed dozens of opportunities for water infrastructure improvements that experts say probably would have enabled firefighters to save more homes during the Palisades fire, public records show.
As crews battled the blaze, attempting to extinguish flames that burned huge swaths of L.A. County and killed at least 11 people, some hydrants ran dry.
The lack of water has come under scrutiny since the wildfire broke out Jan. 7, with officials scrambling to explain why the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir was left empty for maintenance.
But thousands of pages of state, county and municipal records reviewed by The Times show the disaster was years in the making. Red tape, budget shortfalls and government inaction repeatedly stymied plans for water system improvements — including some that specifically cited the need to boost firefighting capacity.
Many projects on a list of about three dozen “highest priority” upgrades compiled by county officials in 2013 have yet to break ground in communities devastated by the fires.
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said that the fire department has deployed all available resources and positioned fire patrols and engines in high-risk areas across Los Angeles.
The county wrote that the upgrades would achieve “critical goals,” including ensuring the system had enough water to meet “fire flow needs.” The estimated cost was less than $57 million and construction would have taken about seven years.
Plans to build tanks that would have provided more than 1 million gallons of additional water storage in fire-ravaged Malibu and Topanga were left on the drawing board. Replacements of “aging and severely deteriorated” water tanks were postponed, according to county records, along with upgrades to pumping stations and “leak prone” water lines in the two communities, whose water system is run by the county’s Department of Public Works, or DPW.
A plan to build a new connection to draw water from a neighboring water system during emergencies has also been delayed for years.
County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said in an interview that the water system in Malibu and Topanga “performed as designed” during the Palisades fire. He said it was built to supply enough water to fight fires in individual homes or structures, not massive wildfires.
“Could we do more? Every engineer, every firefighter’s going to tell you more is better,” Pestrella said. “When a firefighter says if he had more water he could have done more, that’s not necessarily true.”
He argued that the proposed upgrades would have had only a minor impact: “It really is just giving an opportunity to save a relatively few homes. ... Would you be better off if you had more water here or there? They might have had more opportunity, maybe.”
Residents of fire-affected areas said they were furious to learn the county had failed to complete projects that perhaps could have helped limit the damage.
“I’m disappointed in the leaders of my community,” said Kathy King, whose Malibu home was one of the only ones left standing in her neighborhood after the Woolsey fire in 2018. “I think people are worried about spending a little bit of money, but I think if you live in a community like this it’s an obligation you have. With the water problem, you’ve got to have a better system.”
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A long stretch of extremely dry weather combined with powerful wind gusts had already created a recipe for disaster when the Palisades fire erupted. But experts said the projects that L.A. County failed to complete would have made a difference in the emergency response.
“Clearly it would have helped if many or all of these projects would have been built,” said Gregory Pierce, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who has studied L.A. County’s water systems and the impacts of water availability on wildfires.
Another UCLA professor and water expert, Edith de Guzman, agreed with that assessment: “Some homes could have been saved. It is absolutely possible that it would have been able to help a little bit.”
Pestrella said the county’s 2013 list “wasn’t a promise to build, it’s a master plan for capital improvements.” But cost became an issue, which contributed to repeated delays.
After Palisades natives banded together on WhatsApp and raised more than $120,000 on GoFundMe, they face what experts say has become a common scenario after natural disasters: Unexpected scrutiny and challenges as they attempt to manage and distribute the funds.
In 2019, the county compiled a new “Priority Project List” that included several action items left over from six years prior. The 13 upgrades would have cost about $59.3 million, and all but one was scheduled to be complete by September 2024.
One of the projects considered most essential, according to city of Malibu records, was a planned connection to the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District that the county estimated in 2019 would cost about $4.1 million.
A 2015 county planning document said the Las Virgenes connection could be used “in the event of a catastrophe ... to prevent water shortages.”
Three months ago, Malibu’s Planning Commission gave its stamp of approval to the project. Construction is expected to begin in summer 2026, according to county records.
The lack of progress on many of the plans has been driven in part by residents’ opposition to potential increases to their water rates, already among the highest in the county. Ensuring compliance with environmental regulations can also take years, according to Pestrella, the county’s public works chief.
Anti-development sentiment has been an especially limiting factor in Malibu, where Pestrella said the city has at times used insufficient water access as an excuse to restrict new construction.
“The community is not demanding it,” he said when asked why so many projects have failed to move forward.
“They’re not pro-development. They’re still utilizing the water system as a way to restrict development in Malibu. That’s the bottom line. That’s why it’s not happening at the pace it could happen at.”
Jorge Rodriguez, a spokesman for the city of Malibu’s Emergency Operations Center for the Palisades fire, provided a brief statement via email: “As a small city with just over 10,000 residents, Malibu relies heavily on outside agencies and partners to provide essential services and manage certain aspects of our operations.”
Coverage of the Eaton and Palisades fires, including stories about the unprecedented losses, issues firefighters faced and the winds.
The long-delayed measures would have been a drop in the bucket compared with the billions of dollars in estimated damage caused by the fire.
The county’s 2013 project list included a proposed $186,000 “fire flow enhancement” for Coastline Drive, an approximately half-mile span of unincorporated L.A. County roadway that begins at Pacific Coast Highway and brushes the Pacific Palisades border. The same stretch was flagged again in 2019 as needing to have “over 2,000 feet of leak prone, aging, and severely deteriorated” water line replaced at a cost of $2.8 million.
The project “will improve system fire-flow and reliability,” according to county Department of Public Works records. Work was expected to begin this spring for $6 million, the county wrote last year.
It’s not clear whether hydrants on Coastline Drive were among those that ran dry. But firefighters reported that others in the area did lack water.
On Jan. 8, the day the after the Palisades fire broke out, Jessica McIntyre, 41, returned to her apartment on the stretch of Coastline Drive where the water line is set to be upgraded. Most nearby buildings had been reduced to rubble — hers escaped the flames.
“We just kind of assumed our home was gone,” she said as she loaded possessions into her ash-covered sedan.
As she packed, a fire crew worked to extinguish a burning house up the street. The firefighters drew water from a tanker truck instead of a nearby hydrant.
“I know all the emergency services are doing everything they can,” McIntyre said. “This could get worse and that’s really scary. I certainly hope it doesn’t.”
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One of the storage tanks that supplies water for firefighting purposes in Malibu stands behind a “no trespassing” sign and a padlocked chain-link gate topped with barbed wire.
The imposing concrete structure, known as the Lower Busch Tank, shows signs of age, with a latticework of cracks across its facade and splintered wood ringing its upper rim.
Several years ago, a county document listed a $4-million plan to replace the “aging and severely deteriorated 300,000-gallon concrete tank” with a larger steel one. One goal of the proposed fix was to “improve fire-flow.”
The upgrade, which the county had identified as a “priority” project in 2019, never happened.
Records show multiple other plans to either build or upgrade area water storage tanks — described by Pestrella as part of a county push to create “a more resilient fire system” — have repeatedly stalled.
A proposal to boost water capacity a mile west of the Palisades fire burn zone in Malibu has been delayed more than a decade.
Darian Wong, a Department of Public Works environmental engineering specialist, said in a November webinar that the county plans to break ground on what is now a $13-million project to build a 1.1-million-gallon water tank and replace “old and undersized water pipe infrastructure” there in summer 2027.
The existing infrastructure does “not provide sufficient capacity to provide fire flow protection for the service area,” according to a public works study published last fall.
Coverage of the fires ravaging Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena, including stories about the devastation, issues firefighters faced and the weather.
It’s not just Malibu that’s experienced long waits for water system upgrades.
Ryan Ulyate, co-president of the Topanga Canyon Fire Safe Council, an organization that educates area residents on wildfires and how to harden their homes, said firefighting efforts in a Topanga neighborhood called Fernwood were key to preventing the Palisades fire from spreading farther up the canyon.
A $2.7-million project “to improve fire-flow and reliability” by replacing two “aging and severely deteriorated 50,000-gallon” tanks in Fernwood with a single 200,000-gallon tank was included in 2020 and 2021 county planning documents. The plan never came to fruition. Instead, county records show, one of the existing tanks was rehabilitated.
While Ulyate acknowledges that water system upgrades alone wouldn’t have stopped the wildfire, he said they could have helped his community weather it.
“You have to do your best to make sure the water infrastructure is as good as it can be,” he said. “They’re going to learn lessons from this.”
