(The Center Square) – An Illinois fire department says the systems needed to fight a fire as large as the ones in California don’t exist.
Government officials, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have been criticized for their perceived lack of preparedness to the historic fires in Southern California. Pacific Palisades resident Rachel Darvish confronted Newsom and demanded to know why hydrants are running dry.
“Why is there no water in the hydrants, governor? Is it going to be different next time? I would fill up the hydrants myself,” Darvish said in a video that went viral.
According to the fire department in Normal, Illinois, when a fire hydrant is opened, it takes a large volume of water out of the system rapidly, which affects the remaining supply and lowers the available pressure elsewhere.
Eventually, Illinois state Sen. Neil Anderson, R-Andalusia, who is also a firefighter, said the pumps that refill the tanks won’t be able to keep up with the water that is being pumped out and pressure will drop.
“Ultimately, you’re going to exhaust that system, and as they [Normal] said, that main pump can’t keep water to flow into the hydrant, so it ends up being the equivalent of [drinking through a straw] and the straw has a hole in it, and you can’t get the fluid into your mouth no matter how hard you try,” said Anderson. “In a case like this, you’re flowing as much water as possible from as many lines as your engine will allow, and if you don’t shut down your fire engine, you’re going to cavitate and ruin your pump, because that pump is pulling and sucking from that hydrant, and there’s no more flow there because it’s being dispersed so many different ways through that system.”
However, Anderson said there’s some blame to go around and that the elected officials in California should have made clearing forest underbrush a priority.
“No municipal water supply is designed to handle the kind of strain that the firefighting efforts in California are putting on it,” stated the Normal, Illinois fire department on social media. “Firefighting on the ground is virtually impossible in this scenario, and the aerial tanker initially couldn’t fly due to the high winds.”
After LA residents criticized officials’ response, the Normal, Illinois fire department urged residents to be cautious of “misinformation.”
“In a 24-hour news cycle, there is a lot of time to fill, and sometimes there’s a lot of filler and opinions and not a lot of actual facts being shared,” stated Normal Fire Department.
Anderson is also reacting to Newsom launching a new site to ensure the public has access to fact-based data around the Southern CA wildfires.
A Newsweek report revealed that the California state budget signed by Newsom included a $101 million reduction in wildfire and forest resilience funding. Newsom dismissed these reports as a “ridiculous lie.” The LA Fire Department budget for this fiscal year was cut by more than $17.5 million.
Anderson said LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley attributed some of the fire response to the budget cuts.
“There’s an extraordinary circumstance going on there, that is the main cause, but when the fire chief gets on national news and says, ‘yeah, of course it’s attributed to that,’ there’s no reason for her to talk about that right then and there, if it’s not true,” said Anderson. “When it comes to budgets and taxes, there’s very few things that our founders and the initial government set up … to spend tax dollars on. But one of them is public safety.”
Anderson said cities should have a serious conversation amongst themselves about what their priorities are.
“They had the record snowfall in the north in Lake Tahoe, and they ended up diverting all that runoff back to the ocean instead of reservoirs to protect the smelt [fish],” said Anderson. “It comes down to the priorities. When you’re diverting an abundance of water from a record snowfall away back into the ocean because you’re worried about a fish over the priority of your citizens, the taxpayers, that’s when you know you need a change in government.”
