Biden Floats Staggeringly Idiotic Reason LA Hydrants Ran Dry
President Joe Biden claimed on Thursday that the fire hydrants in Los Angeles were not working, as the city battles severe wildfires, because power was cut to the water pumps.
But that announcement appears to be only one angle on the issue, which has affected the ability of first responders to mitigate the historic disaster.
Biden remarked during a news conference hosted at the White House, “What I know from talking to the governor, there are concerns out there that there’s also been a water shortage,” according to a report from The Hill.
This is not true. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power told me that in LA, water pumps and water flows were not affected by power outages. https://t.co/HSKe3dKRyM
— Matt Hamilton (@_hamilton_matt) January 10, 2025
“The fact is the utilities, understandably, shut off power because they are worried the lines that carried energy were going to be blown down and spark additional fires,” he continued.
“When it did that, it cut off the ability to generate pumping the water. That’s what caused the lack of water in these hydrants,” Biden explained.
Biden then asserted that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection would bring in more generators to resolve the issue.
In a post on X in response to Biden’s remarks, LA Times reporter Matt Hamilton said, this was not the case: “Los Angeles Department of Water and Power told me that in LA, water pumps and water flows were not affected by power outages..”
At the same time, a report from The Wall Street Journal raised the point that Los Angeles did not implement basic fire safety procedures increasingly seen across the nation before the disaster started.
The outlet revealed on Thursday that regulatory filings show how the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power lacks a protocol to proactively turn off systems during windstorms, a measure used elsewhere to reduce the risks of sparks from power lines starting fires.
The system “remained energized until the windstorm caused significant damage and knocked out power for tens of thousands of customers,” according to the Journal.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has a service area that includes the Pacific Palisades, which is seeing the worst of the fires.
Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University, affirmed to the Journal that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power “is operating in a way that is very different from any of the investor-owned utilities in California or across the West at this point.”
Other utilities in the West, which is especially prone to wildfires relative to the rest of the country due to dry conditions, have developed proactive shutoff protocols.
Some of those adjustments in policy came after wildfires caused significant damage and after many utilities faced litigation.
No matter what happened with the original response to the fires in Los Angeles, we are either looking at a poorly designed fire mitigation system that failed firefighters when they needed that system most or a complete lack of preparation for the disaster that is claiming lives and destroying livelihoods.
Sorrowfully, as this crisis and this circus of a response continue to unfold, none of this should come as a surprise.
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