[GK3]

I think the most succinct analysis I've seen is that public firefighting infrastructure is designed to put out isolated house fires, not combat an extreme natural disaster sweeping into a highly populated suburb.

This is exactly right. I've designed municipal water systems for nearly 40 years and we do not design them with massive wildfires in mind. Those are natural disaster, Force Majure, Act of God scenarios (even if god is an electric company) and no one can afford water systems capable of fighting that. I've done systems across California, on Maui, and Santa Rose after the Coffee Fire that melted underground distribution piping. 

Community, mutual, and municipal water systems are organized into pressure zones. Hilly terrain including the most devastated locations in LA will need many pressure zones. Potable water for domestic consumption, irrigation, fire fighting, and emergencies is fed into each pressure zone by gravity or pumping and stored within that zone (tanks) or fed through pressure regulators to a lower zone or by booster pumps into a higher zone. Each zone is supplied its maximum day demand from a wholesale source like SFPUC or Valley Water or groundwater. Demand varies across the day and those spikes in demand (peak hour) must come from water stored within the pressure zone or stored water brought into the pressure zone from another pressure zone. 

Fire flow demands are on top of that peak hour demand. We design the pumping, storage, and distribution systems (pipes and hydrants) to deliver fire flows during a peak hour so that we do not have an unacceptable pressure loss (no less than 20 psi residual during a fire anywhere in the system) that can lead to back siphoning contaminants into the system and leading to health problems. The working assumption is one fire at a time within the pressure zone. If the zone is entirely residential, that's a single house. A code fire demand might be 1,500 gallons per minute (gpm) for two hours. That equates to 180,000 gallons that need to be stored on top of storage for peak hour demand and other emergencies. Plus you never want to completely drain a tank because they leads to lower residual pressure in the system. If the pressure zone is mixed use with commercial and industrial development, the fire demand might be 4,000 gpm for four hours or 960,000 gallons of storage for fire.  I think the UFC and ISO charts top out at 8,000 gpm for 4 hours and there are allowances for sprinklered buildings, etc.

I have done lots and lots of 200,000 gallon tanks and 2 million gallon tanks. The largest ever for me was 6 million gallons.  Why not just play it safe and build mega tanks everywhere?  Cost, impact, and problems with water quality. Usually fires are fought with potable water. The same water we all drink and use daily. With a mega tank and no fires, that water stagnates in the tank and we start having problems with circulation, water quality, and again health. The chlorine residual, if chlorine is used for disinfection, just dissipates over the long time that water sits there waiting for a fire. Occasionally we have designed dual systems for that very reason, but again, expensive.

So, take thousands of homes multiplied by 1,500 gallons per minute and you run out of water pretty quickly. It is no one's fault. Certainly not the Delta smelt's. Wildland fire fighting takes over with tankers, lake water, ocean water, whatever they can do.  Unfortunately though, removing fuel in urban areas isn't like the wildland, where swaths of trees can be chain sawed. That was driven home in Santa Rosa when even Highway 101 proved to be an inadequate fire break.

I worked with an attorney today and the subject came up. There will be time for recriminations and responsibility. He showed me a phone picture of his friend in Altadena who had snapped a picture of the transmission lines sparking in the high winds. She (his friend) evacuated and is now famous on the internet for the picture. Her home was spared (for now) by the direction of the wind. This is awful and hopefully we can all help our southern neighbors. Searching for early blame doesn't help, in my opinion.

This came up on something I was watching making dinner. (CNN maybe?) 'How can the hydrants run dry? Incompetence!' I had to turn it off.

I'm always grateful to you for actual expertise in these matters.

But to my way of thinking, the failures (or problems) with fire fighting are largely emblematic. The real problem is disastrous forestry policies, reflecting the excessive influence of environmental dilettantes (such as the Sierra Club, the great sacred cow of the environmental movement, and others.) To blame this on any particular administration, as Trump has done, is shortsighted. The perilous condition of the forests reflects 50 years or more of mismanagement.

The failure to do the aggressive controlled burning that California forests require, or to permit responsible logging to accomplish the same sort of thinning, has resulted in wildly overgrown forests that are as a practical matter tinderboxes waiting to explode. When you drive up US 50 or the like and admire the greenery, you are not looking at a healthy forest. You are looking at the arboreal equivalent of the slums of Calcutta. All this was publicized during the last spate of massive fires (circa 2019 or thereabouts). But there has been no change in policy or even an attempt to do so. Newsom is responsible for that.

To environmentalists, logging companies are the moral enemy. But the forests managed by Weyerhauser and the like are healthy, productive, and never burst into flame. They are of course vulnerable to lightning strikes, power line accidents, and arsonists, but the accumulated fuel in the form of dead trees, fallen branches, and all the rest aren't there to fuel the fire. 

If I were king of the world, I'd open up vast areas of the Sierra to commercial exploitation, under utility commission regulation. The premise of the 
Sierra Club that they should be preserved as 'wilderness' is completely misguided. They aren't wilderness, and haven't been since human beings began protecting them from natural hazards, the most notable being fire. They're about as much true wilderness as Disneyland.

Finally, again emblematic, ten years ago or so the voters of this state approved a substantial bond issue to expand dramatically the water infrastructure of this State. My (mis?)information is that even in dry years there is sufficient run off to take care of the water needs of both farmers and general population, if we did not allow so much of it to run off into the sea. As of this writing, not a single spadeful of earth has been turned over to begin construction of a single dam. I respect jacketree's common sense about the inadequacy of water resources, but expanded infrastructure couldn't possibly have hurt.

This is the type of political post that one of the mods expressly said we should stop.  Anyway, as far as I know, no one was or is proposing to do logging in the Palisades or Altadena.  Logging, if it were to expand, would occur in the eastern part of California, not in the middle of the nation's second biggest city.  Similarly, no one is proposing that we construct a dam in Pasadena to capture rainwater runoff from the San Gabriel mountains.  LA, however, is investing in efforts to capture more rainwater instead of allowing the water to spill into the ocean.  For example:
https://www.latimes.com/environment/stor...er-capture
https://www.stormwater.com/stormwater-ma...management

You are correct.  Plus, I believe the Forest Service's view on putting out any and every fire as fast as possible ceased long ago.  If you travel through the forested areas of Northern Calif and Southern Oregon in the Spring you are almost certain to run into controlled burns.  I think far more focus needs to be put on standardized requirements for utilities to turn off their power when certain conditions exist in a particular local.  At the moment I think every utility has its own standard and DWP's are ridiculous.  The standards should be tough and they should be enforced.  It is not much fun not to have any power to light your home, run you well etc, but many of us in Northern California deal with this all the time now that PG&E has been taken to the woodshed for its failures and believe me, we pay the price when we get our power bills every month.  To my way of thinking enforcement of Abatement rules should happen when it is supposed to happen.  So you skip a weeks training, when you train all the time it doesn't makie a big difference.
If you are interested in the Forest Servide's current attitude, you should read this: https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technolo...aging-fire
The Forest Service is NOT the ogre in this case
Once all the weeping, crying and nashing of teeth has taken place, there will be endless hearings and investigations as after the Camp Fire in Northern California. Then piper will have to be paid. Unfortunately, it is apt to be the rate payers who will get bigger bills and have extreme difficulty getting insurance.
What we need to be focused on NOW is saving lives and property plus trying to figure out how we can best help those who lost their homes and/or businesses.

[GK3]

I think the most succinct analysis I've seen is that public firefighting infrastructure is designed to put out isolated house fires, not combat an extreme natural disaster sweeping into a highly populated suburb.

This is exactly right. I've designed municipal water systems for nearly 40 years and we do not design them with massive wildfires in mind. Those are natural disaster, Force Majure, Act of God scenarios (even if god is an electric company) and no one can afford water systems capable of fighting that. I've done systems across California, on Maui, and Santa Rose after the Coffee Fire that melted underground distribution piping. 

Community, mutual, and municipal water systems are organized into pressure zones. Hilly terrain including the most devastated locations in LA will need many pressure zones. Potable water for domestic consumption, irrigation, fire fighting, and emergencies is fed into each pressure zone by gravity or pumping and stored within that zone (tanks) or fed through pressure regulators to a lower zone or by booster pumps into a higher zone. Each zone is supplied its maximum day demand from a wholesale source like SFPUC or Valley Water or groundwater. Demand varies across the day and those spikes in demand (peak hour) must come from water stored within the pressure zone or stored water brought into the pressure zone from another pressure zone. 

Fire flow demands are on top of that peak hour demand. We design the pumping, storage, and distribution systems (pipes and hydrants) to deliver fire flows during a peak hour so that we do not have an unacceptable pressure loss (no less than 20 psi residual during a fire anywhere in the system) that can lead to back siphoning contaminants into the system and leading to health problems. The working assumption is one fire at a time within the pressure zone. If the zone is entirely residential, that's a single house. A code fire demand might be 1,500 gallons per minute (gpm) for two hours. That equates to 180,000 gallons that need to be stored on top of storage for peak hour demand and other emergencies. Plus you never want to completely drain a tank because they leads to lower residual pressure in the system. If the pressure zone is mixed use with commercial and industrial development, the fire demand might be 4,000 gpm for four hours or 960,000 gallons of storage for fire.  I think the UFC and ISO charts top out at 8,000 gpm for 4 hours and there are allowances for sprinklered buildings, etc.

I have done lots and lots of 200,000 gallon tanks and 2 million gallon tanks. The largest ever for me was 6 million gallons.  Why not just play it safe and build mega tanks everywhere?  Cost, impact, and problems with water quality. Usually fires are fought with potable water. The same water we all drink and use daily. With a mega tank and no fires, that water stagnates in the tank and we start having problems with circulation, water quality, and again health. The chlorine residual, if chlorine is used for disinfection, just dissipates over the long time that water sits there waiting for a fire. Occasionally we have designed dual systems for that very reason, but again, expensive.

So, take thousands of homes multiplied by 1,500 gallons per minute and you run out of water pretty quickly. It is no one's fault. Certainly not the Delta smelt's. Wildland fire fighting takes over with tankers, lake water, ocean water, whatever they can do.  Unfortunately though, removing fuel in urban areas isn't like the wildland, where swaths of trees can be chain sawed. That was driven home in Santa Rosa when even Highway 101 proved to be an inadequate fire break.

I worked with an attorney today and the subject came up. There will be time for recriminations and responsibility. He showed me a phone picture of his friend in Altadena who had snapped a picture of the transmission lines sparking in the high winds. She (his friend) evacuated and is now famous on the internet for the picture. Her home was spared (for now) by the direction of the wind. This is awful and hopefully we can all help our southern neighbors. Searching for early blame doesn't help, in my opinion.

This came up on something I was watching making dinner. (CNN maybe?) 'How can the hydrants run dry? Incompetence!' I had to turn it off.

I'm always grateful to you for actual expertise in these matters.

But to my way of thinking, the failures (or problems) with fire fighting are largely emblematic. The real problem is disastrous forestry policies, reflecting the excessive influence of environmental dilettantes (such as the Sierra Club, the great sacred cow of the environmental movement, and others.) To blame this on any particular administration, as Trump has done, is shortsighted. The perilous condition of the forests reflects 50 years or more of mismanagement.

The failure to do the aggressive controlled burning that California forests require, or to permit responsible logging to accomplish the same sort of thinning, has resulted in wildly overgrown forests that are as a practical matter tinderboxes waiting to explode. When you drive up US 50 or the like and admire the greenery, you are not looking at a healthy forest. You are looking at the arboreal equivalent of the slums of Calcutta. All this was publicized during the last spate of massive fires (circa 2019 or thereabouts). But there has been no change in policy or even an attempt to do so. Newsom is responsible for that.

To environmentalists, logging companies are the moral enemy. But the forests managed by Weyerhauser and the like are healthy, productive, and never burst into flame. They are of course vulnerable to lightning strikes, power line accidents, and arsonists, but the accumulated fuel in the form of dead trees, fallen branches, and all the rest aren't there to fuel the fire. 

If I were king of the world, I'd open up vast areas of the Sierra to commercial exploitation, under utility commission regulation. The premise of the 
Sierra Club that they should be preserved as 'wilderness' is completely misguided. They aren't wilderness, and haven't been since human beings began protecting them from natural hazards, the most notable being fire. They're about as much true wilderness as Disneyland.

Finally, again emblematic, ten years ago or so the voters of this state approved a substantial bond issue to expand dramatically the water infrastructure of this State. My (mis?)information is that even in dry years there is sufficient run off to take care of the water needs of both farmers and general population, if we did not allow so much of it to run off into the sea. As of this writing, not a single spadeful of earth has been turned over to begin construction of a single dam. I respect jacketree's common sense about the inadequacy of water resources, but expanded infrastructure couldn't possibly have hurt.

This is the type of political post that one of the mods expressly said we should stop.  Anyway, as far as I know, no one was or is proposing to do logging in the Palisades or Altadena.  Logging, if it were to expand, would occur in the eastern part of California, not in the middle of the nation's second biggest city.  Similarly, no one is proposing that we construct a dam in Pasadena to capture rainwater runoff from the San Gabriel mountains.  LA, however, is investing in efforts to capture more rainwater instead of allowing the water to spill into the ocean.  For example:
https://www.latimes.com/environment/stor...er-capture
https://www.stormwater.com/stormwater-ma...management

You are correct.  Plus, I believe the Forest Service's view on putting out any and every fire as fast as possible ceased long ago.  If you travel through the forested areas of Northern Calif and Southern Oregon in the Spring you are almost certain to run into controlled burns.  I think far more focus needs to be put on standardized requirements for utilities to turn off their power when certain conditions exist in a particular local.  At the moment I think every utility has its own standard and DWP's are ridiculous.  The standards should be tough and they should be enforced.  It is not much fun not to have any power to light your home, run you well etc, but many of us in Northern California deal with this all the time now that PG&E has been taken to the woodshed for its failures and believe me, we pay the price when we get our power bills every month.  To my way of thinking enforcement of Abatement rules should happen when it is supposed to happen.  So you skip a weeks training, when you train all the time it doesn't makie a big difference.
If you are interested in the Forest Servide's current attitude, you should read this: https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technolo...aging-fire
The Forest Service is NOT the ogre in this case
Once all the weeping, crying and nashing of teeth has taken place, there will be endless hearings and investigations as after the Camp Fire in Northern California. Then piper will have to be paid. Unfortunately, it is apt to be the rate payers who will get bigger bills and have extreme difficulty getting insurance.
What we need to be focused on NOW is saving lives and property plus trying to figure out how we can best help those who lost their homes and/or businesses.