Following the devastating fires in Eaton and Palisades, local water agencies are facing scrutiny over whether they had adequate water supplies available to combat the blazes. As someone who manages a public water agency, I’ve been navigating this issue, explaining the challenges our water systems face, particularly those that have transformed from supporting agriculture to serving urbanized residential areas.
I like to use a simple metaphor to help people understand the limitations of our water systems. Picture a small coffee shop that usually sells 200 to 300 cups of coffee daily, but on occasion can manage 400 cups. This is how our community water systems operate, designed to handle regular demands plus occasional spikes, like small fires primarily tackled by aerial methods.
However, imagine that coffee shop suddenly getting an order for 40,000 cups in one day. They wouldn’t be able to fulfill it—there wouldn’t be enough coffee, cups, or staff. This extraordinary demand resembles the pressure on our water systems during the Eaton and Palisades fires.
For that coffee shop to prepare for such an unlikely event, it would need to expand drastically, hire more staff, and maintain a large stock of coffee, most of which would spoil. While it’s theoretically feasible to set up a coffee shop that can handle such occasional, massive demands, it would be costly. They’d have to charge exorbitant prices just to stay in business, and customers would likely look elsewhere.
In contrast, public water systems don’t have the option to close down. We guarantee a continuous supply of drinking water. While it’s possible to build the capacity for those rare, high-demand days, this would require substantial financial investment, more than most communities can justify. In California, where Proposition 218 allows residents to contest water rate hikes, people have made it clear that they prefer lower water costs.
Although we could design a system capable of handling disasters occurring once every few decades, it’s not an efficient use of resources. Instead, water systems should focus on enhancing emergency preparedness and updating outdated infrastructure while addressing the needs of growing population densities.
Communities will likely see a greater benefit in investing in strategies to make homes less susceptible to fires and maintaining defensible spaces to slow fire spread. While water remains essential for firefighting, expecting systems to manage fires of Eaton and Palisades’s intensity isn’t feasible due to the prohibitively high costs.
Fortunately, there are cost-effective solutions. By continuing to use and develop affordable fire prevention methods, communities can better protect themselves without overwhelming their water systems.
Tom Majich, who oversees the Kinneloa Irrigation District, has firsthand experience with this balance, having dealt with the burn areas from past fires.
