Earlier today when I wrote about the wildfires I mentioned that there were reports the hydrants were simply running dry, leaving firefighters no way to battle the flames. Here's Rick Caruso, former candidate for LA mayor, describing the problem.

"This is like a 3rd world country"

Rick Caruso says there is 0 water coming out of the fire hydrants. Mayor Bass is in Ghana. pic.twitter.com/GPXmDVvLS1

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 8, 2025

FIle this next clip under "too good to check" but apparently this morning one local LA anchor tried to discount what Caruso was saying only to have a reporter contradict him a minute later.

In an attempt to debunk Rick Caruso, LA morning anchor Melvin Robert is embarrassingly fact-checked by their own on-the-ground reporter: pic.twitter.com/lCvfMEnXxJ

— MarioFakerREAL 🥸 (@mario_faker) January 8, 2025

That knee-jerk urge to contradict whatever criticism Democrats are getting is one surefire way the media consistently sets its own credibility on fire. 

By this afternoon, authorities in LA were finally owning up to the problem and admitting that, yes, Pacific Palisades did run out of water.

Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the Palisades water system sustained four times its usual demand for 15 hours straight. That made it difficult to refill water tanks quickly enough to maintain pressure, she said, which in turn disrupted the water supply to hydrants in the hills. According to the water department, crews trying to reroute water at one point had to evacuate because of the fire’s intensity.

“We have three large water tanks, about a million gallons each. We ran out of water in the first tank at about 4:45 p.m. yesterday. We ran out of water in the second tank about 8:30 p.m. and the third tank about 3 a.m. this morning,” Quiñones said at a news conference Wednesday...

“We pumped over 3 million gallons of water on that fire, so it does strain that system, and they’re doing everything they can to fill it back up,” Los Angeles Fire Capt. Sheila Kelliher told MSNBC...

Experts in urban water management said it’s unlikely that poor planning or negligence were to blame for the water tanks’ drying up.

Something similar appears to be happening with the Eaton fire north of Pasadena. The NY Times reports a homeowner watched his historic home (built in 1887) burn down saying, "The fire department was there but said they ran out of water, he said. The whole thing is made out of wood. So it just went up like that." The fire chief admitted the problem.

Chief Chad Augustin of the Pasadena Fire Department said that fighting the Eaton Fire had stretched water resources, since dozens of fire engines were drawing water.

I think we're going to hear a lot more about this in the coming days and weeks, at least we should. One of the problems with living in a one-party state like California where everyone is effectively on the same team is that you don't necessarily find out that someone screwed up when it happens because no one wants to harm members of their own party. In other words, there may be a lot more to this story but don't expect Mayor Bass or Gov. Newsom to volunteer that information because why would they?

At a minimum, even if there isn't any immediate scandal here, it's obviously a failure of planning. California has been dealing with massive wildfires for a decade now. If we don't have a plan to make sure the fire hydrants in these areas have water in case of a wildfire, what the hell are we even doing?