Not long after a series of devastating wildfires began ravaging parts of Los Angeles in early January, people were demanding answers: What caused it? Why couldn’t it be stopped? Who, or what, is responsible for why so many lost so much? Those questions soon found their way into the mirror world that is social media and the internet, where a wave of disinformation and misinformation—some of it propagated directly from President Donald Trump and his surrogates—compounded the crisis. Much of it concerned the state’s most precious resource: water.

There are legitimate questions worth investigating, of course. Some fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, for example, ran dry, leaving firefighters without a primary resource for checking a blaze. News outlets jumped on the fact that a water supply reservoir in a Palisades neighborhood was “offline” due to maintenance when the fires broke out. 

Former LA mayoral candidate Rick Caruso was quick to translate these phenomena into “absolute mismanagement” and blast the city’s current mayor, Karen Bass. President Trump fanned the flames, blaming California governor Gavin Newsom’s environmental policies and an “essentially worthless” fish called the Delta smelt for why water in the northern part of the state was not available to Southern California. Trump offered no evidence to back up his claims. Later, Newsom called for an investigation into the county’s water management.

Though critics were quick to point fingers, in truth, municipal water systems were never designed to combat wildfires or urban conflagrations of this scale, says Gregory Pierce, research and coexecutive director at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.

“Nothing could have stopped these fires,” he told Sierra.

The Eaton and Palisades Fires sparked at exactly the wrong time, fueled by unusually high winds and bone-dry vegetation. Ironically, an extra-wet year likely contributed to a build-up of fuels in the chaparral landscape, said Alex Hall, director at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, in a webinar. “That probably was a factor in the extreme nature of the fires.”

Fire hydrants allow firefighters to tap into local water distribution systems; they’re typically used to fight and contain fires that affect one or a few structures. Storage tanks, which hold treated water, are located at elevations above the hydrants and help pressurize the system. As multiple hydrants are tapped simultaneously, supply may not keep up with demand and the system can lose pressure. This is what happened in Los Angeles. At a January 8 press conference, an official described how the “tremendous” pressure on the water supply system—four times the normal demand for 15 hours straight—depleted three reservoirs faster than they could be replenished. 

This is not the first time firefighters battling an urban conflagration have seen hydrants go dry. It happened in the Oregon towns of Talent and Phoenix in 2020, when the Almeda Fire destroyed over 2,600 structures, and in Lahaina, Hawai'i, in 2023. In these cases, it’s likely that multiple ruptured water lines sent water pressure plummeting.

Firefighters weren’t just relying on hydrants to supply water to fight the Los Angeles blazes. Helicopters and fixed-wing tankers dropped water and retardant from above, resorting to seawater after depleting local reservoirs. “Unprecedented” high winds grounded aircraft at times during early phases of the Palisades and Eaton Fires, hampering efforts to check the blazes.

All the political angling and national media attention on hydrant failures has culminated in over-scrutiny of water systems, says Pierce. “I’m not saying water systems can’t or shouldn’t do better,” he explains. “But the narrative about these fires [has been] more about water supply and firefighting and much less about other components of firefighting like home hardening and vegetation management that are much more impactful, and that we should really be looking at going forward.”

Water quality concerns

Along with the physical destruction, toxic ash, and hazardous air quality, massive suburban fires can compromise drinking water systems. When water pressure drops, contaminants can enter water lines and adhere to pipes. Microbial contamination after fires is common. Chemical contamination is a less well understood phenomenon that’s being studied as large, destructive fires proliferate.

In Los Angeles, as the Palisades and Eaton Fires progressed, several affected water districts issued temporary “Do not drink” warnings.

Sarabeth Belon, a resident of west Altadena, evacuated during the Eaton Fire with her partner and animals. Though her home was spared, the fire leveled several others on her block and damaged the property immediately next door.

“The garage has fire damage, and their yard is completely gone,” says Belon. On February 7, Belon’s neighborhood’s water utility, Lincoln Avenue Water Company, issued an unsafe water alert. It explained that water testing revealed levels of benzene above acceptable standards and warned residents to not drink, cook with, or boil their tap water, and to avoid activities like bathing and clothes washing that use warm water.

Benzene is a “volatile organic compound” and known carcinogen. Short-term exposure can affect the nervous and immune systems; lifetime exposure can cause chromosome aberrations and cancer, according to the EPA. Heating contaminated water can release benzene into the air, increasing the chances of exposure.

Belon says she only learned about the warning by visiting the utility’s website. 

“I’m a young person, so I’m on social media,” says Belon. “How about older people in our community. Do they know not to use the water?” She thinks physical notices on doors could help ensure everyone gets the information. 

Belon and her family have been staying elsewhere while ash and smoke damage is remediated. She doesn’t want to move back into her home until the water is deemed safe to heat and drink. She trusts the information the water company is providing, but she doesn’t believe unheated tap water is any safer than heated water.

“It just doesn’t make sense to me,” she explains. “That’s why I’m choosing not to use it at all.”

An emerging concern

Benzene contamination in tap water has been documented after several recent, highly destructive fires, including the Tubbs Fire, which destroyed neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, California, in 2017, and the Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise, California, in November of 2018.

After local utilities and a state agency found benzene and other VOCs in numerous samples from water mains, hydrants, and service connections in Paradise, the Paradise Irrigation District issued a Do Not Drink/Do Not Boil advisory for homes that hadn’t burned. The advisory remained in place until May 2020.

After the Camp Fire, Gina Solomon and researchers at the Public Health Institute studied contamination in the town’s water supply system, analyzing over 5,000 samples that the local water utility had collected over a 17-month period. These samples were taken from different parts of the water supply system, both in locations that had burned and those that had escaped the fire. 

Benzene was detected in 29 percent of the service connections to destroyed structures but in just 2 percent of those that served standing homes. As the water system was flushed and contaminated sections of pipe were replaced, benzene detections and concentrations dropped.

The researchers took tap water samples from standing homes 10 months after the fire; just two of 136 samples contained benzene, and neither was above the regulatory limit. However, they also discovered an unwelcome surprise: elevated levels of another chemical, methylene chloride, in 19 percent of the tap water samples. The researchers did not conclusively state where this cancer-causing chemical originated, but noted possibilities include burned plastic pipes or the interaction of other chemicals with iron pipes.

Pierce advises affected residences to heed warnings from their local utilities and to rely on alternative sources until they are lifted. 

“If you’re not trying to drink water in an area that burned, or in an evacuation zone, and you don’t have a notice from your drinking water system, you should not have any new concern about your drinking water quality because of the fires,” he says. 

For those moving back to properties that burned and/or who are building back, the situation is more complicated. Plumbing pipes on private property “tend to burn more easily and leach more easily,” says Pierce. “In some cases, you’ll have to replace infrastructure; in other cases, it’s a matter of flushing out the water and using an additional filter.” 

He recommends getting water tested before using it.

A flood of disinformation

“Fire and water are the two extremes that we experience in California,” says Hall, the UCLA climate scientist. Some politicians could not resist capitalizing on both.

On January 20, Trump signed an executive order titled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California,” which demands that federal agencies “route more water from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” 

In fact, the Los Angeles region did not run out of water. Instead, local supplies were depleted more quickly than they could be replenished. 

“It’s irrational to link what happened to the overall water supply,” says Sam Luoma, research ecologist at the University of California, Davis. “We’ve had a couple of wet years. Reservoirs are full around here as a result.”

On February 2, under President Trump’s direction and with little warning, the Army Corps of Engineers released water from two reservoirs in Tulare County. Over three days, about 2 billion gallons of water spilled into Tulare Lake.  

The president praised the action on Truth Social: “These once empty ‘halfpipes’ are now brimming with beautiful, clean water, and heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles. Too bad they refused to do this during my First Term—There would have been no fires!!”

The released water is part of the Central Valley Project, a complex of some 20 reservoirs and a vast network of canals, pumps, and diversions that store and convey water from rivers in the northern part of the state to California’s Central Valley. Much of the water is used for agriculture. Some also supplies the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco—but not Los Angeles.

“This is a really technically complicated system,” says Luoma. “It’s not helpful for someone who knows nothing about it to demand specific actions take place. It’s just not helpful.”

California senator Alex Padilla decried the release, noting that the “unscheduled” releases occurred after the fires were nearly fully contained. The swiftness of the action put people at risk, he wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “It appears that gravely insufficient notification was given, recklessly endangering residents downstream.” 

As the political spears fly, residents in the aftermath of these horrific fires are grappling with basic concerns: determining whether their homes are safe, navigating insurance claims, and in many cases, literally rebuilding their lives. With climate change unchecked, more people in fire-prone towns and cities across the West will no doubt face these same challenges.