The Great Fire of San Francisco burned more than 28,000 structures back in 1906. The “Great Fires” in cities like Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco were instrumental in American cities developing great firefighting capabilities. Those disasters are the whole reason why we developed fire hydrants.
So, how is it possible that we’re once again having a “great fire” in Los Angeles—in 2025? A lot of this catastrophe could have been prevented if Los Angeles leaders had implemented some of the lessons learned during the 9/11 attacks.
When the Twin Towers collapsed in Lower Manhattan on that Tuesday morning, the sheer weight of the buildings collapsed straight down into the ground. It severed the city’s water mains completely. As firefighters were trying to put out the blazes that were breaking out, they discovered the same problem that popped up in the Pacific Palisades community of Los Angeles.
The hoses were just sucking air out of the fire hydrants. Complex city water systems have to stay pressurized so that water just comes rushing out of a fire hydrant when you hook the hose up to it. There was no pressure because of the collapsed towers, so no water. Pacific Palisades didn’t have water in the hydrants as the community burned to the ground, but it’s the same problem.
Even though New York City’s last competent mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had not appointed any fat unqualified lesbians to run the fire department, they quickly came to a solution.
Fire boats.
The NYFD’s fire boats are normally used in case of emergencies on ships in the harbor. They can spray tons of water into the air. A decent fire boat can pump about 40,000 gallons of water per minute. Two of them pumping simultaneously could fill an Olympic-sized pool in just eight minutes. Plus, the boats are sitting directly on an endless supply of water.
Using their toxic masculinity and white privilege, the fire boat captains pulled up to a pier in Manhattan and jury-rigged a system to pump water directly into New York’s water mains. It worked! There was water in at least some of the fire hydrants between the Hudson River and where the towers collapsed.
What does the City of Los Angeles have… right… next to it? It’s sort of off to the left of L.A. and it’s big and blue on the map. Oh, right! It’s a freaking ocean!
One of the disaster readiness recommendations for port cities in America that came about because of 9/11. It was to adapt the infrastructure so that fire boats could pump water directly into the hydrant system. You never know when an earthquake or another disaster is going to collapse the pipes and cause a disaster like we just saw in Pacific Palisades.
It’s been 23 years since the 9/11 attacks, but Los Angeles city leaders have never implemented that simple trick as a redundant system to keep water in the fire hydrants. That would have required building a pier along the Pacific Coast Highway so that the fire boats could pull up to it. They couldn’t build the pier because it might harm a snail darter or some crap like that.
Environmental regulations from governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom prevented the city from taking the important steps that would have saved thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades.
My daughter was working on a movie in Pacific Palisades back in 2018. I used to drive her to movie sets because I could sit in the truck and work on my laptop. I always kept a sawed-off shotgun under the seat in case I had to regulate some Harvey Weinstein-like fellow. As we got up toward the top of the hillside, we encountered a gigantic, 10-inch vertical crack in the street.
I asked a nice neighbor lady how long the street had been like that. She informed me that the street had cracked when the Earth shifted during the 1989 earthquake. It had been almost 30 years and the city leaders had never sent a crew up to fix the street, in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in America. They’ve paid for plenty of transgender parades, though!
