Resilience expert says the wildfires are an example of a “cascading disaster,” a situation involving “an initial shock” — in this case, a fire — that leads to a secondary shock: the strain on water systems.
A series of devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area that began on Tuesday continue to wreak havoc on communities there, claiming the lives of at least five people and forcing tens of thousands from their homes.
Reporting indicates that officials are quickly running out of water resources to fight the blazes. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that many fire hydrants, when tapped, had “little to no water flowing out.”
Daniel Aldrich, a Northeastern professor, director of the university’s Resilience Studies Program and co-director at the Global Resilience Institute, says it’s possible that local systems simply aren’t equipped to battle such intense fires.
“We’ve seen this before in the Kobe earthquake in 1995, when the pipes broke, so firefighters were unable to get enough pressure to be able to spray the water,” Aldrich says. “Those fires destroyed a lot of the area.”
It’s an example of a “cascading disaster,” a situation involving “an initial shock” — in this case, a fire — that leads to a secondary shock: the strain on water systems, Aldrich says.
Officials representing the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, including L.A. City Councilwoman Traci Park, spoke about the city’s limited water resources on Wednesday. Park blamed “chronic under-investment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure.”
For Aldrich, the issue is central to what is happening on the ground.
“This is an old struggle in the field of resilience, which is how much can you invest ahead of time to make a system redundant and have failsafes,” Aldrich says. “The fact is there is only so much water infrastructure you can build in — and there’s only so much ability to pull water from the system at one time without spending a lot more.”
He continues: “Typically these urban systems are old; Los Angeles is literally several hundred years old now, like many other major cities; and those cities have multiple layers — it’s very challenging and very, very expensive to completely redo them.”
“This is really an infrastructure resilience question: how much money was California willing to spend in the past to ensure that its systems can handle a major fire, and able to have water pressure, whether through the suburbs or elsewhere, to fight it,” he says.
The frequency of extreme wildfire risk has grown by nearly 20 times in recent decades due to climate change, research has shown.
“These fires are part of a broader pattern that we’re seeing that we call the polycrisis, which is a fancy way of saying that more things are happening in higher intensity more often,” Aldrich says. “What we’re seeing is that things like urban or human interface fires and other extreme weather events are happening more often and, as a result, the damage they are causing is much higher.”
Another problem, Aldrich says, are the secondary health effects.
“Right now people are talking about things like property loss, which of course is a huge problem,” he says. “But we also know from lots of studies that the impact of breathing the very small particles that fires put out has short-, medium- and long-term effects.”
Aldrich continues: “The third thing I would say that we’re not talking about enough is insurance. Many of the people who are fleeing probably don’t have fire insurance. We know this because unfortunately when most disasters strike, whether it’s a flood, fire or an earthquake, many people of those affected — whether a rental home or an owned home — don’t have insurance at all, or insurance to cover the damage.”
“It’s too early right now for people to be thinking about this, but that’s another big issue here,” he says.