Firefighters Find Failing Hydrants as Wildfires Rage in Los Angeles Neighborhoods

LOS ANGELES — As fires raged across Los Angeles on Tuesday, some firefighters battling the Palisades fire reported on internal radio systems that hydrants in Pacific Palisades were coming up dry.

"The hydrants are down," said one firefighter.

"Water supply just dropped," said another.

L.A. developer Rick Caruso, who owns Palisades Village in the heart of the Westside neighborhood, told The Times he was receiving similar reports from his staff at the shopping center.

"There's no water in the fire hydrants," Caruso said. "The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there's nothing they can do — we've got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never happen."

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A spokesman for the Department of Water and Power acknowledged reports of diminished water flow from hydrants but did not have details on the number of hydrants without water or the scale of the issue.

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In a statement, the DWP said water crews were working in the neighborhood "to ensure the availability of water supplies."

"This area is served by water tanks and close coordination is underway to continue supplying the area," the DWP said in its statement.

It's unclear how widespread the hydrant issues were or their precise cause. In November, the lack of water from hydrants hurt the effort to combat the Mountain fire in Ventura County, when two water pumps became inactive, slowing the process to deliver hillside water.

Caruso, a former commissioner of the city's Board of Water and Power who also ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2022, contended that the problem stemmed from the issues with the reservoirs that feed the neighborhood's hydrants.

"This is a window into a systemic problem of the city — not only of mismanagement, but our infrastructure is old," Caruso said.

The DWP and the Los Angeles Fire Department could not be immediately reached for a response to Caruso's remarks.

Caruso, who evacuated Tuesday from his home in Brentwood, said his daughter's home was destroyed in the blaze Tuesday, and his family was waiting to hear if one of his sons had also lost his home.

Caruso said late Tuesday that several homes around his Palisades Village shopping center were "fully engulfed" in flames, and his shopping center, which opened in 2018, suffered damage. He said that, like thousands of others in the neighborhood, he was waiting through the night to see how his property would fare — and the full scale of the damage.

"We are feeling the very personal effects of this," he said.

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