Today, Explained - The politics of fire

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Wildfires overtook Los Angeles, firefighters ran out of water, and the political finger-pointing began. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Travis Larchuck, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Peter Balonon-Rosen, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A fire hydrant burning during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles county. Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's kind of hard to wrap your head around the scale of the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles. They've burned 40,000 acres throughout the city. That's roughly the size of Washington DC. Some estimates are putting the damage upwards of $250 billion. That'll make these the most economically devastating fires in the history of the United States. And then one thing people can't seem to get over is that in this wildfire-prone city,

in a wildfire-prone state, firefighters battling these blazes somehow ran out of water. We have no water on these streets and we have multiple structures taken off. Why was there no water in the hydrants, Governor? That's all being, that's all literally being... Is it going to be different next time? They have no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants today in Los Angeles. It was a terrible thing. And we're going to get that done.

Everyone gets that this is tragic. On Today Explained, we're going to try to understand why this has to be political. Okay, business leaders, are you here to play or are you playing to win? If you're in it to win, meet your next MVP. NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is your full business management system in one convenient suite. With NetSuite, you're running your accounting, your finance, your HR, your e-commerce, and more, all from your online dashboard.

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and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. This is Today Explained. Greg Pierce is the director of the UCLA Water Resources Group and a professor at UCLA, which means of course he lives in LA and like just about everyone else who lives in LA, he knows people affected by these fires. Yeah, I'm in Los Angeles.

I'm okay. Everyone I know is safe. A close relative lost their home and plenty of people were evacuated and facing much worse things than me. But yes, I am in Los Angeles. How quickly when these fires started, Greg, did you look at this and say, oh gosh, they're going to run out of water? Or did you have that thought at all? I can't say that I had that thought independently and I guess in some ways I think, you know, it's a little bit of a boring story, but what the public officials have been saying though is true by my judgment and everyone I've talked to who actually knows about the topic, which is that urban water systems aren't equipped to fight wildfires of this nature.

But when I first heard or actually saw the smoke plume as I was coming to UCLA that day, I didn't know that it was going to be such an intense fire. And that our ability to fight it would be so poor. or ability to fight it would be so poor. Can you help people understand how exactly firefighters would run out of water while fighting these wildfires in the Pacific Palisades? Yeah, it's pretty simple in a way, which is that the water system in the Pacific Palisades,

which is the city of Los Angeles' water system, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest and certainly among the most technically competent water systems in the county, if not the state, is not set up to fight wildfires. The fire hydrants and the fire flow are really there for everyday fires, structure fires, whatnot. And that capacity to fight wildfires is not something that I'm aware of that any water system in the world has, especially when they grew this quickly this fast. We all know that this has been an unprecedented event.

We also know that fire hydrants are not constructed to deal with this type of massive devastation and that the number one problem, especially on Wednesday, was the fact that we weren't able to do the air support because of the winds. The municipal water systems that service our homes and businesses continue to work effectively. However, they are not designed to fight wildfires. A firefight with multiple fire hydrants drawing water from the system for several hours is unsustainable. This is a known fact. Our hydrant ran dry about two minutes ago.

And is that the the water pressure issue? Because there's so many engines tapping the grid and multiple grids we're basically just taking all the water out of the grid. That's not to say that if some things had not been different that the water would have lasted a bit longer and gone a bit further but it certainly wasn't gonna stop a fire of this nature in its tracks and probably wasn't going to even make a big dent. I understand that's a kind of a frustrating or non-intuitive answer for folks, but that is the reality. And again, it's been confirmed by everyone who seems to know about the topic.

You know, first of all, part of the reason why the water pressure runs dry is that, I mean, rationally, individual homeowners are leaving on their hoses and other things trying to water their own place. So the pressure is dropping because a lot of the private property around is trying to water. But when firefighters run out of water, the pressure runs low. They go to private pools, because there's a lot of private pools in these areas, which tend to be quite wealthy.

And they started to drive tanker trucks up with water to try to fight the fire. But if they don't have water, they need to get off the ground for their own safety, get out of that area because there's nothing they can do and just rely purely on sort of aerial approaches and dropping other types of wildfire retardants or foams. So it's a pretty bleak picture. If they run out of water, they're basically useless, especially if there's not some truck around that's got reserves. Yeah.

And it is the, I mean, you've heard the really big frustration of the fire agency and agencies that they are entirely reliant on the water systems to provide the water. It's not like the firefighters have their own reserve of water. So they do show up and, you know, hope, pray it works. And in this case, it didn't work as well as anyone would have liked. But again, I think in some ways that was to be expected if we were realistic about it. I saw someone just draw, like post a map on social media

of the Palisades fire. And then they circled the ocean right next to it. And they said, you know, here's some water guys. Why don't we just put a hose in the ocean and then spray the fire with the ocean? Okay, can someone please explain to me why they can't use the water from the ocean that's like right by where a lot of the fire is happening

to put out the fire? For people who just can't fathom how these hydrants ran dry and they didn't just stick a straw in the ocean, what are they missing? Yeah, I do get the intuition, but they're missing several things. Most important, traditionally, although you could say maybe none of this should matter because it's an emergency, is that salt water is corrosive, so it damages sort of the infrastructure

and the vehicles that pick up the water for future use, and it damages the environment and the ecology when you drop a bunch of salt water on landscapes and leads to other sort of toxic cleanup effects. Another aspect of this was the unusually strong wind event that occurred. And so asking people to go fly helicopters, or I guess maybe planes, and try to pick up water from the ocean in those conditions, You're putting people at great risk directly. And that also made fighting the fire, actually for aspects that don't involve water,

like aerial fighter fighting, dropping wildfire foams on the fire, which are incredibly important in hilly areas like this, nearly impossible in the early hours of the fire. But yes, in some other ways, again, just our systems, our water systems and our power systems, we're not built to fight wildfires encroaching right in our urban areas.

So in order to think about really being robust to fight them or really think about not rebuilding in certain areas, but to do that build back, build back so resilient that we could actually fight a fire of this nature. We're just talking about, no one knows the exact number, but five to 10 times more expense. So it probably can be done, but it will just be incredibly expensive. What would it look like if there were the money to build these houses along with water systems that actually were sufficient to put out these kinds of fires?

What would that look like and how would it be done? It's really just a lot more and sort of we would say positive redundancy in three aspects. One is the actual water supply, the raw water. I mean, there's a lot of misinformation about how water from Northern California to Southern California would have made a difference. It wouldn't.

But just having more water in that specific area that happened to have the extraordinarily bad luck of having a reservoir offline is a big factor, as well as the infrastructure. And you heard a lot about fire hydrants. There's not super clear evidence around the fire hydrants performing poorly, but certainly having top of the line and more fire hydrants, as well as tanks, holding tanks. This isn't very exciting stuff. You need all of that. But the biggest thing is probably improvements, some of which aren't technologically feasible

at this moment around how to move water around. And that's really about power and how quickly you can move water around a network. And there are some core sort of physical limitations we still face with moving water quickly up hills that we have to, I guess, burst through, as it were, if we really wanna make systems like this work in hilly areas. But you're saying the expense makes this an impossibility.

So absent the money to invest to make these communities safe. What do we do? It sounds like we're going to rebuild in the same neighborhoods and we're not going to make it safer to live there. Where does that leave us? Yeah, that's a question a lot of people are asking, who are honest about this.

But yes, it appears the politics, you know, I'm not insensitive to the personal loss, had personal loss in my family through one of these fires. But the politics are dictating that apparently we're going to try to rebuild back everywhere. Don't turn your back. Don't walk away because we want you to come back rebuild and rebuild with. With so many homes and businesses lost, we are already putting plans in place to make sure that we aggressively

rebuild. My office is leading the city effort to clear the way. Red tape, bureaucracy, all of it must go. I do want to make it clear though, I think we can do maybe 50% to even 200% better with some expensive but not crazily expensive adjustments that would help us fight the typical fire better but if a wildfire of the same nature or worse occurs which is not outside the realm of possibility then yeah we're looking at a five to fifteen times more expensive system and we could do that we could pay for that but that's a societal choice.

And there are all sorts of sort of trade-off questions and societal value questions there that are really difficult to sort through. It's a political question, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And you've already seen the politics at the city level, at the state level, and the federal level play into this. There's a lot of finger-pointing going on in the city of Los Angeles right now. At the local level, at the state level, at the federal level, incoming president level. Whose fault do you think it is, Greg, expert, water expert at UCLA, that there wasn't enough

water to save every last house when the firefighters needed it. Well, I don't think it was anyone's fault that there wasn't enough water because again, from what I've been told and seen, that wasn't really possible. And no one, I can tell you for sure, no one was really talking about this a week ago or calling out that this area needed more water or that Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wasn't well equipped to fight this fire. So I think they're going to find things already things have been found that could have been done

better. But I think the finger pointing there is largely political and was started at the city level and just escalated. But in terms of finger pointing about what could be done, in the future, I think that's more about how we've allowed people to get comfortable and not really anticipate that the climate change stories that we've already seen elsewhere hadn't quite experienced here with respect to fire, we're going to come to bear here, as well as us not wanting to pay for things that once they occur and hit us really hard we wish we had paid for, but I'm not sure we'll even be willing to pay for again in two years when some of this has settled down and people who weren't directly personally

affected and lost their homes, or worse, forget about this. Greg Pierce, University of California, Los Angeles. The politics of fire, when we're back on Today Explained. Support for the program today comes from Better Mint. You thought I was gonna say something else. Better Mint asks, do you want your money to be motivated? Do you want your money to rise and grind? Do you think your money should get up and work?

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For a limited time, our audience can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash explained. That's v a n t a dot com slash explained for one thousand dollars off Today explain is back David Siders is here He's an Angelino and also a politics editor at Politico. so he's poised to help us understand how quickly these fires became political. Well, I'd say nearly instantaneously. You had Trump posting about it by Wednesday morning, pointing blame at California leaders. I think that Gavin is largely incompetent, and I think the mayor is largely incompetent,

and probably both of them are just stone cold incompetent. What they've done is terrible. Other Republicans talking about Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, and broadly, I think a condemnation by Republicans of Democrats. So I think it started within hours. What are the arguments that people like Trump, I know his vice president, Elon Musk, has opinions to? What are the arguments that people like Trump, I know his Vice President Elon Musk has opinions to?

What are the arguments they're making? I think the most prominent one is also probably the most baseless, which is so interesting. And that's about the Delta smelt that he says that Gavin Newsom diverted water to protect this endangered fish. I've been trying to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come. You'd have tremendous water up there. They sent it out to the Pacific because they're trying to protect a tiny little fish,

which is in other areas, by the way, called a smelt. And for the sake of a smelt, they have no water. They have no water. It's a small, not very nice looking fish. And it's just not the case. There are controversies in California, huge ones around the Delta smelt. There's always controversy around water. And it has to do with, I mean there are restrictions

that are meant to protect that fish and also the ecosystem around it. And those restrictions may come at the cost of various farmers, for example, in central California. You're exactly right. It's about the agriculture interests there, the farmers and some communities further south. Can you imagine you have farmers that don't have any water in California? They have plenty of water. They don't have a drought. They send it out to the Pacific. And it's crazy. But in this case, authorities have been very clear that the reservoirs were full.

That this wasn't an issue of turning on the taps in the delta of north. And obviously, when firefighters are running out of water, it makes it easier to point fingers. What are the recipients of the pointed fingers saying? Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor, Karen Bass. They're saying that this is disinformation and Newsom has been very aggressive about this. I don't know what he's referring to

when he talks about the Delta smelt and reservoirs. The reservoirs are completely full. The state reservoirs here in Southern California, that misinformation, I don't think advantages or aids any of us responding. Local water authorities are saying the same thing. DUSSUM is also inviting Trump to visit California. So that's the other part of the response, I would say. And then not a direct response, but one that tacit of the response, I would say. And then not a

direct response, but one that tacitly acknowledges, I think, the conservative criticism. We saw Newsom sign an executive order suspending some environmental regulations to help streamline rebuilding after the fires. And LA Mayor Karen Bass has perhaps been the biggest recipient of blame here. Obviously not helping her case. She was not in the city of Los Angeles when these fires began. And this is after she pledged to not be

such an international figure before she took office and maybe once she entered office. How is she responding? Yeah, she was brutalized too, as you say for being abroad at the time. We've got a mayor that's out of the country, and we've got a city that's burning, and there's no resources to put out fires. Do you think you should have been visiting Ghana while this was unfolding back home?

How are you not there with your team? Who gives a heck about Ghana? She's pushing back in similar ways. She's faced some disinformation too. The fire department budget, for example. There is not agreement as to whether or not the budget was cut. On the other hand, there's been concern for a long time in the area about staffing levels with FD. I think the problem for her with being away is that she had really cultivated this image of being a mayor who was in the

weeds, prioritizing local issues. Although I was not physically here, I was in contact with many of the individuals that are standing here throughout the entire time when my flight landed, immediately went to the fire zone and saw what happened in Pacific Palisades Not being there at the start no matter what she says that hurts and I think that hurts her image and even Democrats Acknowledge that that's a liability for her So we've been talking about the politics that have arisen in the wake of these fires, but of course Preventing future fires is also a political issue.

Where do you think California needs to focus after seeing this, perhaps, again, one of the most destructive fires in its history and certainly in terms of financial losses, economic losses? Well, I think there'll be a lot of immediate things they need to do, right? And some of it we're already seeing, like they have to finish putting out the fires, right? I mean, that's not done,

and they have to do all of that immediate kind of work. And then the midterm stuff, like, and this could take a long time, like getting the utilities back in place, clearing the lots, demolition. The broader question, I suppose, or some of the broader questions they have to deal with is a land use question, first of all, like in housing, where to build, how to build, something about resiliency probably.

And then there's this bigger question too about climate change and what does not only the state do about that, but then I think if you're a democratic leader in the state you're looking for this to be some kind of catalyst for more climate action. And yet so much of the talk right now from Gavin Newsom, from Karen Bass, from the residents who have lost their homes is about rebuilding and I don't want to blame or question these people who have been through this traumatic experience, especially in this moment. But when you hear that and you just think about this rationally, it feels like that may not be

the answer because this could just happen again in five, 10, 15 years, if not sooner. What do you think it takes for us to start talking about how we build houses in this country when it comes to preventing them from being at risk of going down in wildfires? Yeah. And not only how, but where. And there has been some criticism online. Why do these people live here?

And I think some people grappling with it themselves. And there has been some criticism online. Why do these people live here? And I think some people grappling with it themselves. Yes, we will be rebuilt, but why are we doing it here? And I guess I think about it, well, first of all, it's a personal decision some people in very high profile ways have made, right? They've left Malibu or they've left the Palisades or Altadena because of climate change. And many of us in California know people who have shed investments in this state and looked elsewhere because they see a climate future that looks better somewhere else. I mean, it's tough for a couple of reasons, right?

A home is not just four walls. It's where their kids go to school and it's a job. It's also, it comes from an incredible place of privilege I think to think yes, I could move to a different state. Not everybody is in that kind of position and then ultimately Individual decisions to move somewhere else Might be good and rational for them, but that doesn't solve the the climate problem So let's say I go to northern Minnesota or somebody else in this area does, that might be very good for a lot of years.

But ultimately, that catches up to you, right? Unless there's something done. I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should be careful about where we build and jeez, I mean, people in California knew that tucking themselves into the foothills like this, getting so close to nature came with this kind of risk. And I think it's only going to get harder now. You think about the fragile insurance market and the regulations and the reality of something like this happening.

But I don't think this problem is solved simply by individual decisions to move. DavidSidersPolitico.com. We'd also like to thank Matt Hamilton from the LA Times. The LA Times is a great place to go if you're looking to better understand these constantly evolving fires in Los Angeles. Abhishek Artsy and Travis Larchuk made our show today. They were edited by Amin Alsadi, fact checked by Laura Bullard and Peter Balanon Rosen and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter. It's today explained.