The Los Angeles Fires And America's Overwhelmed Water Infrastructure
By Joseph W. Kane
The Los Angeles fires are already one of the most devastating disasters in California — and national — history. Fanned by high winds and fed by a prolonged drought, the blazes rapidly spread across thousands of acres in the nearby Santa Monica Mountains and into several neighborhoods. More than a week since the fires erupted, they have destroyed at least 5,000 homes and countless other structures, in addition to causing numerous deaths, evacuations, and other impacts. Costs are ballooning, with initial estimates reaching $50 billion or more — nearly five times the cost of the largest wildfire ever previously recorded.
While the visible destruction to homes, businesses, and livelihoods has understandably garnered most of the attention, the fires are also a reminder of the struggles to recognize and reinvest in the country’s water infrastructure.
Typically out of sight and out of mind before any disaster hits, the plants, pipes, reservoirs, and other systems responsible for treating, moving, and storing water are facing a variety of threats in Los Angeles and beyond. Immediate challenges became evident from a lack of water to help combat the rapidly spreading fires, with dry hydrants, depleted storage tanks, and drained reservoirs struggling to keep up. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) — the primary utility responsible for overseeing this infrastructure — faces soaring demand yet has few resources to respond, financially or otherwise. And these short-term impacts do not begin to touch all the long-term concerns around water quality and supply likely to emerge from the wildfire’s various byproducts and contamination.
As frustration and confusion mount alongside the fire’s damage, the finger-pointing has already started. The state has launched investigations into the fire’s cause, including the dry hydrants. Private lawsuits are hitting the DWP. And pundits and policymakers, including President-elect Donald Trump, are pushing different claims (and falsehoods) about the region’s water resources.
But the ultimate reality facing Los Angeles and the DWP — similar to many other communities and water utilities nationally — is one of underrecognized and underinvested infrastructure.
The city’s existing water infrastructure faced an impossible expectation — and task — as the historic fire spread. While Los Angeles has endured recent droughts and dry vegetation helped ignite the fire, water supply was not as much an issue as the infrastructure’s underlying design and function. The hydrants, pipes, and other systems were built to service ordinary residential, commercial, and industrial customers — not to combat unprecedented wildfires or other disasters. Simply operating and maintaining these systems represents a formidable challenge for utilities such as the DWP, which provides 163 billion gallons of water across 739,000 service connections annually.
Whether during a disaster or normal operating conditions, the DWP and other utilities too easily get ignored or blamed by policymakers, residents, and other stakeholders amid a lack of sustained, proactive investment to manage existing and evolving infrastructure needs. Nationally, more than $744 billion is needed to address all the various drinking water and wastewater improvements over the next two decades, from fixing leaking pipes to upgrading treatment plants. Los Angeles is just one piece in that complicated puzzle. Local utilities tend to not only be the primary owners and operators of all this infrastructure, but also the primary investors, responsible for more than three-quarters of all public water spending each year despite often lacking durable and predictable customer revenue, state support, and federal funding. When combined with increasingly extreme impacts fueled by climate change (including wildfires), these investment needs are only increasing over time.
Rather than being used to cast blame at underequipped and overwhelmed utilities, disasters such as the Los Angeles fires should serve as a rallying cry to get ahead of these infrastructure challenges. Federal, state, and local leaders need to prioritize the immediate wildfire response and recovery, but they have a collective need — and opportunity — to ensure existing systems offer safe, reliable water service at all times, not just during a crisis. This takes additional money, of course; federal funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) needs to play a key role, especially by targeting investments in more climate-resilient upgrades. More innovative and flexible financing at a state and local level geared toward these upgrades matters too. But meeting this need also requires more comprehensive regional planning, data collection, and capacity-building (e.g., staffing and technical knowledge) around evolving climate threats.
Improving water infrastructure alone will not prevent or solve disasters like the Los Angeles fires. And no single actor or action will solve all of Los Angeles’ or the country’s water infrastructure challenges overnight. But repeated disasters — from the Los Angeles fires to past tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina — serve as continued reminders of the need for proactive water infrastructure planning and investment. Doing so will not only help limit future devastation, but also support improved environmental and economic outcomes over time.
Joseph Kane is a senior research associate and associate fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
This research was originally published by The Brookings Institution.