Pretty Well Equipped

For nearly a month, fires have torn through the dense urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles, as fire departments struggled to control and contain the spread of the flames.

Among the number of factors contributing to the devastating spread of the fires was the fact that responders were attempting to fight the flames with a municipal water system.

Density and Fuel Loads

“One thing to keep in mind with these LA fires. As with most large scale fires—whether it be a large grass fire, large brush fire or forest fire—you can’t put enough adequate water on a fire like that to suppress it,” said Allen Robinson, Rawlins FIre Department fire chief. “You can kind of control where it goes [and] of course a lot of that comes from aircraft.”

Despite the fact that municipal water systems aren’t equipped to fight what are essentially wildfires in urban areas, the Los Angeles Fire Department tried to do just that. According to original reporting from High Country News, within the first 15 hours of fighting the Palisades Fire the water use peaked at four times the usual rate and caused 20% of the fire hydrants to go dry.

For both Rawlins and Saratoga, there is confidence that their municipal water systems could handle some of the largest fires they could see in their corporate limits.

“What’s going on in Los Angeles and what could be happening here is apples and oranges. You’ve got a lot of big fuel [loads] intermittently in LA, you’ve got a lot of wind,” said Emery Pener, director of public works for the Town of Saratoga. “The amount of fuel that exists within town is primarily just structures, there’s not a lot of dead standing timber all over town that would create a big, heavy fuel load which is going to create a big demand for water.”

Indeed, the Santa Ana winds led to wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour which carried embers to more fuel loads within the Los Angeles area. While there are trees in both Rawlins and Saratoga, they aren’t the large Ponderosa pines which have been pointed to as another cause of the spread of the wildfires.

“The biggest thing that we have [going for us] in town is there’s not a bunch of big, tall fuel loads all over town,” said Penner. “You get big ponderosas in town, those things burn hot and they burn for a long time. We, fortunately, don’t have a ton of trees all over town.”

Under Pressure

Another factor, along with the fuel loads, is the dense developments within the Los Angeles area. According to Robinson, as these structures burn they can contribute to the loss in water pressure.

“When you have a large-scale incident like that where you lose multiple structures, you have to keep in mind that most of those structures have a water tap. When you lose that structure, that water normally starts to free-flow,” said Robinson. “As pipes melt, those pipes come apart. Copper pipes, the solder joints will come undone and will push the pipe apart. If it was a three-quarter inch tap, now you have a three-quarter inch pipe spewing water out into the basement or out onto the ground.”

Take those three-quarter inch pipes and multiply them by the thousands, said Robinson, it leads to significant water loss.

“In Rawlins, if we were to lose multiple blocks of houses, it would drastically reduce the amount of water available for firefighting just because each one of those houses has a tap that’s running until we can actually go back in after the fact and shut all of those off individually,” said Robinson. “Anywhere there’s water flowing can definitely take away from the system.”

In the cases where there could be free-flowing water and a lack of water pressure, there would be ways to try and prevent the water loss and increase the water pressure.

“Say you had a really hot fire and you had some plumping that severed during that fire, if it was going to cause that big of an issue we’re probably going to shut the main line off in that area serving that structure until we can get the service shut off,” said Penner.

Similarly, Robinson said if the Rawlins Fire Department were working on just one structure fire, they typically call the water department.

“We have the ability to where, if they [Rawlins Fire Department] were to call us and let us know there was a fire and what side of town that’s one, we can shut off flow to one side,” said Stevie Osborn, water treatment supervisor for the City of Rawlins.

By shutting off flow to one tank, it would increase the water pressure for fire fighting and ideally prevent a sustained firefight from draining the system. The most recent example of a sustained firefight for Rawlins was in July 2024, on a fire near Rodeo Court. The fire, caused by fireworks, burned approximately five acres and required 40 personnel and 17 fire fighting apparatus. That firefight, said Robinson, used approximately one million gallons of water.

For Saratoga, the most recent large fire was the Saratoga Forest Management sawmill fire in 2018, which saw six million board feet of timber go up in flames.

“That put a lot of pressure on the water system, but it held up and that’s a significant fire,” said Penner.

How Much Water?

This, of course, would lead people to wonder exactly how much water do the communities of Rawlins and Saratoga have available? Much of that depends on some other circumstances.

At its maximum, the City of Rawlins has approximately 12 million gallons of water on reserve. This, said Osborn, often depends on the time of year. During the winter, for example, the water in the tanks fluctuates to prevent ice buildup and the water department works throughout the year to keep the water from going stagnant.

“If we were to turn our wells off and we weren’t pumping right now, we would have an active volume [in our tank] where we could maintain adequate pressure throughout the whole system,” said Penner. “We’ve got about 675,000 gallons, but that maintains pressure everywhere. We wouldn’t lose pressure on the hill, we’d have pressure throughout the whole system.”

When the wells are on, said Penner, it completely changes the game. The Town of Saratoga has five wells drawing from an aquifer which can produce up to “several hundred thousands of gallons” of water per day.

A generator at the well field serves as reserve power. That way, in case of a loss of power, water can still be pumped from the wells into the municipal water system.

Routine Maintenance

According to Penner, it is also important to do routine maintenance on the water system. Saratoga, he said, includes fire suppression—or fire flow—in mind when making alterations to the system.

“Making sure we maintain adequate fire flow, that there’s adequate storage in the lines to provide enough pressure during high fire flows,” said Penner. “When you see these lines getting replaced around town, that’s not just being able to supply homes. That does help us have more capacity in the system to provide and supply fire protection.”

In Rawlins, which has seen its fair share of water line breaks the past few years, both Robinson and Osborn are confident the water system can keep up with a potential multi structure fire.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a brand new system [or] if it's an old system. Anytime you tax a system with a large amount of water flow, anything can happen. Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of the time those breaks happen because things moved too quickly,” said Robinson. “If we train and do our part as the fire department and we open valves and do stuff as we should, we can help not break things that way. Once the water is established and flowing, it normally doesn’t cause problems. That being said, at any point and time something can fail.”

According to Osborn, there are a series of pressure relief valves (PRVs) throughout the system which reduce the pressure from the tank to protect the system.

“If it’s as massive as these California fires, if we do have a PRV fail that’s going to be the last thing on our minds because we’re trying to save people’s homes,” said Osborn.

Well Equipped

Keeping in mind that there are always unforeseen circumstances, both municipalities said they were well equipped for most fires that would occur within the town limits.

“I would say for structure fires, we’re pretty well equipped. It’s the same as flood mitigation: we can build up to the 100 year [event] and then you have a 1,000 year event that you’re not looking for,” said Penner. “I feel pretty confident with most structure fires, even if we had several at one time, we would have adequate fire protection for those. For the size of the community, we have a very active [and] very well prepared fire department.”

According to Robinson, if the Rawlins Fire Department had advance notice of a wildfire approaching the city they would institute techniques and tools used in fighting such fires.

“Depending on the amount of time we would have, if we were alerted to a wildfire coming at us and we know we have a couple days to prepare, there’s a lot of stuff we can do to prepare for that,” said Robinson.

Some of that preparation, he said, would include using sprinklers which would soak the ground to slow the approach of the fire.

“We could even go out ahead of the fire and burn off a little vegetation in a controlled manner so that when that main body of fire gets to the edge of town, we’ve already removed that fuel,” said Robinson.