4 ms·

Can somebody fact check the LA firefighters running out of water despite being next to an ocean? I already know their trucks can pump sea water just fine.

burmanm 2y ago
Seriously? The fires started in the area of Pacific Palisades that has altitude of hundreds of meters above sea level with few kilometers of distance. In which world can such pump work? Are those firetrucks embedded with gravity defying technology? Perhaps a slight reading of how water pumps work (with even elementary physics classes) would be a nice starting point for these silly accusations.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Trucks can drive up hills, can't they? If they have no water, the ferrying water up the hills with trucks is better than no water.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    You think they said "fire hydrants are empty, guess we'll just wait for it to burn out?" > Water pressure in the system was lost due to unprecedented and extreme water demand to fight the wildfire without aerial support. This impacted our ability to refill the three water tanks supplying the Palisades causing the loss of suction pressure. This impacted 20 percent of the hydrants in the area, mostly in the higher elevations. As soon as LADWP identified the risk of losing water in the tanks and water pressure in the system, we immediately deployed potable water tankers to sustain support for firefighting efforts. https://www.ladwpnews.com/pacific-palisades-fire-correcting-misinformation-about-ladwps-water-system/ https://www.ladwpnews.com/pacific-palisades-fire-correcting-...
- XorNot 2y ago
  Why look anything up when you can "just ask questions?!" (/sarcasm obviously)
- sbuttgereit 2y ago
  You do know that structures right on the seashore have been burned in the Palisades Fire? https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/carbon-beach-palisades-fire-billionaire-homes-20027619.php https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/carbon-beach-palisades-fir... Whether or not the fire started there, or even if any amount of water would have helped, the idea that the fire was localized far away from the ocean isn't universally true. Much of the fire was/is far away from the ocean... some areas of that fire were right at the shore.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
sbuttgereit 2y ago
"Seawater in Southern California Wildfires January 12, 2025 In this episode, Sal Mercogliano—a maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner — discusses the use of seawater and how it can be utilized to fight the wildfires in southern California." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1N2BwcAT-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1N2BwcAT-s
- striking 2y ago
  Source articles from the description of the video: "Here’s why firefighters can’t use ocean water to put out the deadly LA wildfires" https://thetab.com/2025/01/09/heres-why-firefighters-cant-use-ocean-water-to-put-out-the-deadly-la-wildfires https://thetab.com/2025/01/09/heres-why-firefighters-cant-us... "Can firefighters use ocean water to douse wildfire blazes?" https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/can-firefighters-use-ocean-water-to-douse-wildfire-blazes https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/can-firefighters-use... "Why Doesn’t Los Angeles Use Seawater in Its Fire Hydrants?" https://x.com/amuse/status/1877390791695282570 https://x.com/amuse/status/1877390791695282570
  - sbuttgereit 2y ago
    Yes, these are sources from the video as listed in the video description, but it would be incorrect to suggest that he's using these for support: in fact, he's listing them because he's being critical of some of their assertions. In one part he reads some of "the source" material linked and then continues by saying, "Let's talk about what's completely wrong about that statement."
    - striking 2y ago
      I'm not much of a video watcher, my bad
illwrks 2y ago
I’ve see a video pop us of a woman watch her house burn down with fire fighters outside it watching it, you can hear them say there’s no watch. The pumps were dry for her at least. Lots of down votes… here’s the video I was referring to. I wasn’t there, I’m not affected so it’s obviously not first hand observations on my part: https://youtube.com/shorts/mBLMOe4-7YQ?si=zDi8nYq2npets0ku https://youtube.com/shorts/mBLMOe4-7YQ?si=zDi8nYq2npets0ku
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  I did some napkin math on this. Pacific Palisades and Altadena (at the time I looked) had about 8,200 acres burned (not including the wildlands). Assume 30% of that is actual structures, then assume only 10% of those structures are on fire at any one time. Assume there are no 60 - 100mph winds blowing embers miles ahead of the fire lighting more fires. Even then, you'd expect to need ~375,000 gallons per minute to suppress it. The entire area is pressurized by 3 water tanks that each hold 1 million gallons, so that'd be exhausted and the system depressurized within 10 minutes. It stayed pressurized for longer than that because in practice it's pretty much impossible to produce 375kgpm of flow out of fire hydrants (you'd need several hundred simultaneously).
  - tomohawk 2y ago
    Doesn't that depend on when the firefighters started attacking the fire? You don't have to put out the full extend of the fire if you can stop it. Example: a grease fire starts in my kitchen and burns down my house. I don't need the water required to stop a full bore house fire to put out the grease fire in my kitchen and save my house. The hydrants ran out of water very quickly, because the reservour feeding them was taken out of commission because there was a tear in its cover. It's been offline since last February. The cover is only needed to prevent evaporation. They could have had water in it, which very well may have been enough to stop the full spread of the fire. This is gross negligence.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Here's the timeline for the Palisades fire (one of several): Hour 0 at detection by an automated system: 10 acres Hour 1: 200 acres Hour 4: 1260 acres The first few hours were in the wildlands which are difficult to access, don't have fire hydrants every 500 feet, and aircraft were grounded due to 60 to 100mph winds No, the fire hydrants did not run out of water because the Santa Ynez reservoir is down for repair. They ran out of water because the system depressurized. The fundamental issue is extremely dry vegetation and extreme wind. The dry fuel is caused by increasingly violent oscillations between extreme wet seasons (causes lots of growth) and extreme dry seasons (causes dryness). This is exactly the "hydroclimate whiplash" predicted by climate models: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climate-future-ucla-study https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat... Yes, it is gross negligence, but at a much more massive scale than you're suggesting.
throw0101a 2y ago
> Can somebody fact check the LA firefighters running out of water despite being next to an ocean? It has been fact checked. Having more water is better than having less, but just because you have the reserves (or an ocean) does not mean your distribution can handle the volumes needed: > Water runs short: […] “There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighborhoods at once. […] * https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/11/la-fires-unprepared-palisades-altadena-california/ https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20... > The firefighter clarified, "Well, we were flowing an amount of water that the system couldn’t … it was overbearing, just because of how much water these firefighters were utilizing." * https://www.tmz.com/2025/01/13/california-governor-gavin-newsom-elon-musk-los-angeles-wildfires-water-shortage/ https://www.tmz.com/2025/01/13/california-governor-gavin-new... * https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1878661950021960013 https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1878661950021960013 Another problem is that most folks do not (know to) shut off their main water connection when you evacuate: this is because if your how burns down all your pipes are now open and start spewing out water. And if the neighbourhood burns down all the houses start spewing water. So there's gallons/litres of water being sucked out of the system dropping pressure that taking up capacity that could be used for fire hydrants. Further, even if you had water and distribution, it may not be possible to have crews battling the fires due to other factors: > “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said. > When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires. […] > The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018. > “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman. * https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/10/la-fires-containment-winds-firefighter-challenges/ https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
llamaimperative 2y ago
1) The entire region is extremely hilly -- you're familiar with gravity, yes? 2) Fire trucks and municipal water supplies aren't designed to fight wildfires, never mind wildfires through an urban setting
- input_sh 2y ago
  3) Salt water corrodes the metal in every fire fighting equipment. 4) Throwing salt water on the ground and making it drier is generally not a good idea.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Sal's video debunks these talking points. Salt water puts out fires very well. The ground in coastal areas is already filled with salt, a bit more does no harm. Salt water in truck pumps and tanks causes no short-term damage and if flushed with fresh water later, incurs only minimal long-term maintenance burden. He's a firefighter besides being a maritime expert, with experience fighting fires at sea and on land, and besides his experience and credentials what he's saying seems like plain common sense.
MrSkelter 2y ago
Non locals don’t understand the geography. LA is massive and spread out. There are very few straight roads in the Palisades. I would guess zero. You would need to move that seawater many miles in some way that protects the hoses from fire. Not at all simple.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  If only they had trucks.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    If only they had a genius like you there to inform them :(
  - jjkaczor 2y ago
    Or helicopters and aircraft designed to gather and disperse water...

burmanm 2y ago

Seriously? The fires started in the area of Pacific Palisades that has altitude of hundreds of meters above sea level with few kilometers of distance. In which world can such pump work? Are those firetrucks embedded with gravity defying technology? Perhaps a slight reading of how water pumps work (with even elementary physics classes) would be a nice starting point for these silly accusations.

lupusreal 2y ago
Trucks can drive up hills, can't they? If they have no water, the ferrying water up the hills with trucks is better than no water.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  You think they said "fire hydrants are empty, guess we'll just wait for it to burn out?" > Water pressure in the system was lost due to unprecedented and extreme water demand to fight the wildfire without aerial support. This impacted our ability to refill the three water tanks supplying the Palisades causing the loss of suction pressure. This impacted 20 percent of the hydrants in the area, mostly in the higher elevations. As soon as LADWP identified the risk of losing water in the tanks and water pressure in the system, we immediately deployed potable water tankers to sustain support for firefighting efforts. https://www.ladwpnews.com/pacific-palisades-fire-correcting-misinformation-about-ladwps-water-system/ https://www.ladwpnews.com/pacific-palisades-fire-correcting-...
XorNot 2y ago
Why look anything up when you can "just ask questions?!" (/sarcasm obviously)
sbuttgereit 2y ago
You do know that structures right on the seashore have been burned in the Palisades Fire? https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/carbon-beach-palisades-fire-billionaire-homes-20027619.php https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/carbon-beach-palisades-fir... Whether or not the fire started there, or even if any amount of water would have helped, the idea that the fire was localized far away from the ocean isn't universally true. Much of the fire was/is far away from the ocean... some areas of that fire were right at the shore.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

sbuttgereit 2y ago

"Seawater in Southern California Wildfires January 12, 2025 In this episode, Sal Mercogliano—a maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner — discusses the use of seawater and how it can be utilized to fight the wildfires in southern California." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1N2BwcAT-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1N2BwcAT-s

striking 2y ago
Source articles from the description of the video: "Here’s why firefighters can’t use ocean water to put out the deadly LA wildfires" https://thetab.com/2025/01/09/heres-why-firefighters-cant-use-ocean-water-to-put-out-the-deadly-la-wildfires https://thetab.com/2025/01/09/heres-why-firefighters-cant-us... "Can firefighters use ocean water to douse wildfire blazes?" https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/can-firefighters-use-ocean-water-to-douse-wildfire-blazes https://www.kxan.com/news/national-news/can-firefighters-use... "Why Doesn’t Los Angeles Use Seawater in Its Fire Hydrants?" https://x.com/amuse/status/1877390791695282570 https://x.com/amuse/status/1877390791695282570
- sbuttgereit 2y ago
  Yes, these are sources from the video as listed in the video description, but it would be incorrect to suggest that he's using these for support: in fact, he's listing them because he's being critical of some of their assertions. In one part he reads some of "the source" material linked and then continues by saying, "Let's talk about what's completely wrong about that statement."
  - striking 2y ago
    I'm not much of a video watcher, my bad

illwrks 2y ago

I’ve see a video pop us of a woman watch her house burn down with fire fighters outside it watching it, you can hear them say there’s no watch. The pumps were dry for her at least. Lots of down votes… here’s the video I was referring to. I wasn’t there, I’m not affected so it’s obviously not first hand observations on my part: https://youtube.com/shorts/mBLMOe4-7YQ?si=zDi8nYq2npets0ku https://youtube.com/shorts/mBLMOe4-7YQ?si=zDi8nYq2npets0ku

llamaimperative 2y ago
I did some napkin math on this. Pacific Palisades and Altadena (at the time I looked) had about 8,200 acres burned (not including the wildlands). Assume 30% of that is actual structures, then assume only 10% of those structures are on fire at any one time. Assume there are no 60 - 100mph winds blowing embers miles ahead of the fire lighting more fires. Even then, you'd expect to need ~375,000 gallons per minute to suppress it. The entire area is pressurized by 3 water tanks that each hold 1 million gallons, so that'd be exhausted and the system depressurized within 10 minutes. It stayed pressurized for longer than that because in practice it's pretty much impossible to produce 375kgpm of flow out of fire hydrants (you'd need several hundred simultaneously).
- tomohawk 2y ago
  Doesn't that depend on when the firefighters started attacking the fire? You don't have to put out the full extend of the fire if you can stop it. Example: a grease fire starts in my kitchen and burns down my house. I don't need the water required to stop a full bore house fire to put out the grease fire in my kitchen and save my house. The hydrants ran out of water very quickly, because the reservour feeding them was taken out of commission because there was a tear in its cover. It's been offline since last February. The cover is only needed to prevent evaporation. They could have had water in it, which very well may have been enough to stop the full spread of the fire. This is gross negligence.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Here's the timeline for the Palisades fire (one of several): Hour 0 at detection by an automated system: 10 acres Hour 1: 200 acres Hour 4: 1260 acres The first few hours were in the wildlands which are difficult to access, don't have fire hydrants every 500 feet, and aircraft were grounded due to 60 to 100mph winds No, the fire hydrants did not run out of water because the Santa Ynez reservoir is down for repair. They ran out of water because the system depressurized. The fundamental issue is extremely dry vegetation and extreme wind. The dry fuel is caused by increasingly violent oscillations between extreme wet seasons (causes lots of growth) and extreme dry seasons (causes dryness). This is exactly the "hydroclimate whiplash" predicted by climate models: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climate-future-ucla-study https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat... Yes, it is gross negligence, but at a much more massive scale than you're suggesting.

throw0101a 2y ago

> Can somebody fact check the LA firefighters running out of water despite being next to an ocean? It has been fact checked. Having more water is better than having less, but just because you have the reserves (or an ocean) does not mean your distribution can handle the volumes needed: > Water runs short: […] “There’s no urban water system engineered and constructed to combat wildfire,” said Michael McNutt, a spokesman for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves 75,000 people in northwest Los Angeles County. The system was intended to supply water to homes and businesses, he said, and to help fire crews defend a large structure or several homes, not multiple neighborhoods at once. […] * https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/11/la-fires-unprepared-palisades-altadena-california/ https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20... > The firefighter clarified, "Well, we were flowing an amount of water that the system couldn’t … it was overbearing, just because of how much water these firefighters were utilizing." * https://www.tmz.com/2025/01/13/california-governor-gavin-newsom-elon-musk-los-angeles-wildfires-water-shortage/ https://www.tmz.com/2025/01/13/california-governor-gavin-new... * https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1878661950021960013 https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1878661950021960013 Another problem is that most folks do not (know to) shut off their main water connection when you evacuate: this is because if your how burns down all your pipes are now open and start spewing out water. And if the neighbourhood burns down all the houses start spewing water. So there's gallons/litres of water being sucked out of the system dropping pressure that taking up capacity that could be used for fire hydrants. Further, even if you had water and distribution, it may not be possible to have crews battling the fires due to other factors: > “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said. > When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires. […] > The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018. > “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman. * https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/10/la-fires-containment-winds-firefighter-challenges/ https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...

llamaimperative 2y ago

1) The entire region is extremely hilly -- you're familiar with gravity, yes? 2) Fire trucks and municipal water supplies aren't designed to fight wildfires, never mind wildfires through an urban setting

input_sh 2y ago
3) Salt water corrodes the metal in every fire fighting equipment. 4) Throwing salt water on the ground and making it drier is generally not a good idea.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Sal's video debunks these talking points. Salt water puts out fires very well. The ground in coastal areas is already filled with salt, a bit more does no harm. Salt water in truck pumps and tanks causes no short-term damage and if flushed with fresh water later, incurs only minimal long-term maintenance burden. He's a firefighter besides being a maritime expert, with experience fighting fires at sea and on land, and besides his experience and credentials what he's saying seems like plain common sense.

MrSkelter 2y ago

Non locals don’t understand the geography. LA is massive and spread out. There are very few straight roads in the Palisades. I would guess zero. You would need to move that seawater many miles in some way that protects the hoses from fire. Not at all simple.

lupusreal 2y ago
If only they had trucks.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  If only they had a genius like you there to inform them :(
- jjkaczor 2y ago
  Or helicopters and aircraft designed to gather and disperse water...