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Originally Posted by opendoor
Wasn't it just 1 reservoir that was undergoing repairs that was empty?
And that's all kind of a red herring. You don't fight fires of that scale with water from hydrants in city distribution systems. Those are designed to fight smaller fires, like a few houses, a smaller industrial area, or absolute worst case, part of a neighbourhood.
The amount of water needed to fight the Palisades fire can't realistically be supplied by a municipal water system. Particularly given that basically every burnt house creates a new water demand as the pipes burst. Trying to oversize the drinking water system to match that theoretical demand would introduce a ton of other problems and be obscenely expensive. Theoretically they could have a discrete firefighting water system, but no city actually does that because of the massive cost.
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Why do you assume that the reservoirs only supply a municipal system? They can also be used to provide non-salt water for fire tankers, water bombers, etc.
Also, properly designed hydrant systems connected back to reservoirs with adequate supply can provide millions of gallons per water in short order if the system is designed properly.
End of the day outside of fire re tar dant being used, the primary source of extinguishing fire is water. A large scale fire like that obviously is very hard to control, but access to abundant water gives the firefighters better options.