Why did the hydrants run dry? Was it incompetence? Mismanagement? A conspiracy? I’ve heard all of these reasons and more put forth over the past few days.

The simple answer is because we don’t engineer municipal water systems to battle forest fires. It’s just not feasible, even if we wanted to, even if Southern California wasn’t a desert with wind-swept hills.

The amount of storage, the volume of water, would be 100x+ what has currently been built. The pipes would have to be massively upsized throughout the entire system. The sheer forced of this flow would require all manner of bracing and support. This would be one of the largest public works projects undertaken, if not the largest. And it’s not clear you could even procure enough water to store (it is a desert).

And, if we built that, the system wouldn’t really work for regular water usage. You wouldn’t have enough turnover in the system and so water in the pipe would go stale. The disinfection would run out before it could be used. You would probably need a separate system entirely for normal use.

People suggesting that somehow the municipal water system failed here, even if they say things like “Strong Towns was right,” don’t know what they are talking about. There is no municipal water system in the world that could handle two days of this, let alone as long as it has gone on.