I have some limited firefighter training (was a volunteer first responder). Hydrant systems are not designed to have hundreds of hydrants operational at the same time, they are designed for typical firefighting, a house, a business, not thousands at the same time. Even if water tanks hadn’t run dry and the like, this fire likely would have caused tremendous damage, but some people likely would have had their houses saved had the mistakes not been made…but that is human nature. Back in the 60’s there was a brush fire that ended up devastating Bel Aire. The problem was at the time that in responding, they did what most fire departments do in urban areas, they send a responding unit, then if it looks bad, they call in others. The issue was that by the time they called in other units it had gotten away from them, and they changed procedure, so today if a brush fire is reported they send out a lot of units, and if it is not a big threat pull the other units back.
Unfortunately it is usually after disasters that we find the holes in things.
There were mistakes made, that seem evident now (that sadly again are being used for the wrong purposes). One thing I heard on the news was that the gravity fed water tanks (those water towers you often see with the name of a town on them), couldn’t be refilled because the pumps couldn’t work because they didn’t have electricity. Why didn’t they have backup generators? Or maybe they did and didn’t work. Where I live there are wells for the county water system close to my house, and they have backup generators that can keep going for weeks if need be, to keep water supply going.
The other big problem is the prior year (2023), that region had massive storms, I remember the mudslide threats and the like. Because of all the rain, vegetation as is common in dry areas kind of exploded. Since then, they have been really dry and there is all that vegetation that grew during the rains. Fire officials have said that for whatever reasons (I have heard different explanations, environmental regs, cost cutting) that normally they would have done controlled burns and massive pruning for just this reason, to cut down the amount of fuel a fire would have. I will add that I suspect given how dry it has been there (1% humidity!), and the incredible wins, even if all that had been done I suspect the fires would have done incredible damage, but perhaps it would not be quite as bad (that can be debated). I am pretty sure that because of the winds and the heat/turbulence from the fire, that the lack of being able to use drop planes pretty would have doomed a lot of structures no matter what.
There definitely needs to be investigations into what happened, what started this all (was it a homeowners accident, was it set, etc) and also what were the contributing factors and what can we do going down the road to try and prevent this again (if even possible). Some might be simpler, like the brush cutbacks and having redundancy with the water supply (if that is true), some might involve techniques in fighting the fire, code changes where new construction has to be let’s say masonary buildings with metal roofs (the getty museum survived, in part because the building is masonary and the roof has gravel on it, so embers can’t burn it). One big contributing factor I don’t know how they can address, is the density of housing there, how close the houses are to each other.
