LA County Wildfires Emergency Update from Sup. Kathryn Barger, LACPW, LADWP, LAFD

Kathryn Barger: Thank you for joining us here today. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors declared today, January 9, a day of mourning in solidarity with the federal government in honor of the passing of former President James Earl Carter. Ironically, today has turned into a day of mourning for more reasons than the one. As we mourn the loss of lives and property across our county, we are still facing significant threats. I am hopeful that the tide is turning.

Thank you, Chief Marrone. Thank you, Chief Crowley. Yesterday afternoon, as the winds died down, we saw the return of aerial drops and aerial firefighting—a truly, truly welcome tide.

First and foremost, I want to assure our residents in Los Angeles County that the City of LA and the County are working hard and working hand in hand to bring every resource available to the table. Last night, the County opened the Pomona Fairplex as an additional shelter for those evacuating and those who have suffered losses. The Fairplex will also continue to take in large animals that are in need of a home.

The County is working to harness and utilize the incredible outpouring of generosity from individuals, nonprofits, and companies that want to help. We have heard that many companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft are offering free or subsidized services for those impacted by the fires in Los Angeles County. We will be sharing all of these resources on our recovery.lacounty.gov website.

In addition, the State has activated CAL FIRE Management Team Three and assigned them the Eaton Canyon incident. They will be joining Federal Management Team Five in their ongoing efforts. We hope as early as tomorrow, CAL FIRE Team Three will be tasked with overseeing victim search operations and damage inspections, facilitating debris removal operations, and setting up disaster recovery assistance centers. This will allow Federal Management Team Five to focus on firefighting operations and the active front. As Supervisor Horvath mentioned yesterday, wildfires do not care about jurisdictional boundaries between the City and the County. We are managing the various resources that are coming online with the increasing demands on our first responders.

I saw this firsthand driving through the streets of Altadena yesterday, driving up Lake Avenue. The devastation could not be missed. The number of homes, businesses, and buildings that were on fire dwarfed any sense of available resources. Altadena is a very unique and special part of the Fifth District. It is a community that embodies the spirit of a big, small town—a community full of rich culture and history and one that passionately supports the small businesses that drive its economy and community. It is also one of the only communities in Los Angeles County that manages the urban-wildland interface. Altadena is a resilient community. They have seen some significant battles before, but the scale of the impact today is larger than anything that I have seen in my career. The loss of historic resources at Eaton Canyon Nature Center, Farnsworth Park, and the Altadena Golf Course cannot be measured.

I saw fire engines and companies from El Dorado County and other parts of California joining Los Angeles County Fire in an effort to protect life and property in the midst of the emergency.

We've all seen individuals who are targeting vulnerable communities by burglarizing and looting homes. This is simply unacceptable. You will be hearing from our District Attorney, DA Hochman, shortly regarding his efforts to hold these individuals accountable, and I promise you, they will be held accountable. Shame on those who are preying on our residents during this time of crisis.

The emergency order will be strictly enforced by the Sheriff's Department, who are proactively patrolling to protect these communities from looting and any criminal activity. They have made 20 arrests of individuals who will be held accountable for the actions that they've taken.

I want to thank President Joe Biden and Governor Gavin Newsom for pledging to bring federal and state resources to help Los Angeles County in our moment of need. President Biden's disaster declaration includes the promise of public assistance and individual assistance. We will begin the process of rebuilding. We will have critical resources available to ensure the residents of our communities are not fighting these battles alone. I intend to bring in a motion with Supervisor Horvath as my co-author to ratify the County's emergency proclamation at the next Board of Supervisors meeting.

Make no mistake, this Board and this County will continue to do everything in our power to ensure the safety of our residents as we look forward to the path of recovery.

…

Mark Pestrella:  First, I want to say my heart goes out to everyone affected by the devastating event. I toured many of the areas yesterday and met with residents. As everyone here has described, it's an absolute tragedy, including the life-safety support system, our infrastructure that has been destroyed, that supports life in these communities. I know from personal experience that feeling of loss from a wildfire, and I have tremendous respect for our firefighters and other first responders, our police force, and the sheriff's department, for the work they are currently doing.

In fact, our current mission, which has been going 24/7 for three days now, is to support our fire department, our sheriff’s department, and the local PDs in their efforts to save lives. That is our number one mission right now. What we are currently continuing to do, unfortunately, as this event is still active, we are also focusing on the inevitable recovery and repopulation of the areas. We will build back and build back strong.

The current focus is on utility restoration. I know many people are already asking about that—your sewer, water, power system, and transportation system have all been significantly damaged. The heat of this system, and the wind that blew also knocked down thousands of trees into the roadway. We have a tremendous amount of debris throughout the communities that have experienced this fire. This debris has been moved enough to let our firefighters and our sheriff, PD, into the area to do their work, but it's going to need to be processed and moved safely out of the area. We are coordinating across LA County to do debris removals. The debris removal will be necessary to restore the community to its former way of life.

The debris on private property is considered hazardous and may be toxic. I want to warn everybody now that’s either there, remained behind, or is visiting the areas, as was mentioned earlier, it is not safe. It is not safe to touch the debris. It is not safe to remove the debris yourselves. There is a process for that, and we will be mobilizing with the City of Los Angeles to provide a health review of every property and ensure that when we move that debris, it’s done safely—for you and the other residents who remain behind in the area.

We are also working on the water supply system. The water supply system currently is still supplying fire suppression. Last night, we got to see the wonderful use of our reservoirs—the city’s reservoirs and our reservoirs—to take water from the reservoirs and actually use it in the firefighting event aerial attacks. You saw that difference that was made in the firefight last night. Those reservoirs are full and continue to be ready and at the disposal of our firefighting friends. The municipal water system continues to suffer poor water quality due to the introduction of ash and debris into our reservoirs and into our filtration systems. There are specific areas that we are asking for water to be boiled. I would just say, with all caution, to anyone who’s remained behind, if there is any residence in your area that is burned to the ground and you are still there, you should just go ahead and boil water.

We will be actively coming to communities the next day, within this day, or the next day, delivering water—delivering domestic water to people who remain in the fire zone area. LA County will coordinate that effort, not only for District 29 but also with the City of LA to deliver water to residents who have remained behind or who again have partial damage and are maybe staying in their homes.

I want to again just mention that a firefight with multiple fire hydrants drawing water from municipal water systems for several hours is just not sustainable. That’s why the air support is so important.

Our residents in the Sunset Mesa to Topanga Beach area, Coastline Drive on the south, and Shore Heights Drive on the north—are partially damaged areas or threatened areas. The Topanga Canyon Road, the Carbon Canyon Road, Mesa, as well as other areas, are threatened– all I just talked about applies to you residents who are there now.

What can we do? What can the public do?

What you should be doing, as we sort of still have an active fire: I will reiterate that it’s extremely important to listen to the sheriff and to PD. When you are asked to evacuate, evacuate immediately. Do not hesitate. Do not wait. Your life is not worth it.

The systems that you're leaving behind, are going to be impacted, and they cannot be restarted easily. I know a lot of people are talking about starting up. If you're thinking about creating your own water, sewer, and power system at your home, I want you to be very careful about that. That is not something that a licensed contractor should be doing, or our utility folks. Please don't do that.

As I said yesterday, if you're leaving your home, I want to make sure that you lock that home, that you close that home up tight, and that you leave access for firefighters by not closing gates or creating situations where they can't get to your home to fight off the fire.

The road system is impacted heavily throughout LA County, including city and county areas. There are multiple—in fact, hundreds—of stop signals that are currently flashing red. I want to remind everybody that you treat that as a stop sign, and you stop for that flashing. If you come to a barricade, you turn around because those streets are closed for recovery.

Please do not argue with the sheriffs that are there or the PD. If the road is closed, there's a good reason for it, because it's not safe for you to be in that area. And that safety includes the debris I was talking about—trees down, potholes, road systems–destroyed. There could be breaks in the roadway that could cause major damage to your vehicle. I'm asking that you comply with all road closures until further notice.

We are available as a 24/7 agency. You can reach our department at 1-800-675-HELP.

We do need every citizen's help. If you see something, please tell us about it, whether it's a gas leak, whether it's a utility line down, if it's a signal that's not functioning, if it's a sewer system leak—any of those things that keep our life safety system going. We need to know about them to catalog them and get to them.

Please know, and I do need to mention, that all of the utility workers—not just my folks at LA County Public Works, but the folks at the City of Los Angeles, the folks at Southern California Edison, the gas company—we are all coordinating with each other to restore your systems. Our folks are all working 24/7. There are many heroic stories like the sheriff and fire departments have of our utility folks out in the middle of the night, 24/7, getting those systems back up into place. And I want to thank all of the utility workers who are out there doing their job, who are not going home to family at night—they are actually working 24/7 as well.

With that, I want to introduce the CEO and Chief Engineer of the Department of Water and Power, Janisse Quiñones.

Janisse Quiñones: Good morning. I am Janisse Quiñones, CEO and Chief Engineer of LA DWP. LA DWP crews continue to work around the clock to restore power and support firefighting efforts.

On the power front, we have restored about 200,000 customers so far since the windstorm started, and as of this morning, we have approximately 95,000 customers out. We have 118 DWP crews working around the clock to restore power as fast and as safely as possible.

We're expecting mutual aid crews coming from PG&E to arrive today and support the restoration efforts. Our restoration times are ranging from 24 to 48 hours. We are prioritizing wires down. So, if you see a wire down, please call 911, and we'll send crews immediately to make the area safe.

If you live in fire-impacted areas or near those areas, you might experience longer outages, because either our equipment has been compromised, we’re unable to access the area, or we’re proactively shutting off power for firefighters and first responders. On water, the boil water notice for policy states on zip code 90272 continues in effect, and it will remain in effect for at least 48 hours. I have water quality engineers taking samples around the system to ensure that the water quality remains a priority for our consumers.

We continue to support LAFD and CALFIRE in water supply issues and firefighting response, including opening our water reservoirs. As mentioned by Mark, yesterday the Hollywood Reservoir was a critical asset when we were fighting the Sunset Fire. So all our reservoirs are open for aerial firefighting assets.

We continue to work around the clock with other water agencies to increase the supply and pressure of the water system, including the Metropolitan Water District. I want to end this by thanking DWP crews and personnel for their commitment and efforts to support the restoration of LA.

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Kristen Crowley: Southern California is continuing to endure some of the most historic fire conditions on record. Extreme fire weather driven by strong and erratic winds and low humidity have ignited multiple fires across our region. The LA FD is fully committed to continuously monitoring and adapting to the evolving nature of this weather event and stands ready to respond to any additional incidents that may arise. Now. How did we prepare? We prepared in many, many ways, but I want to focus on two main things. We augmented our staffing levels and strategically pre deployed our additional resources. In addition, we have recalled off duty,LAFD  firefighters to augment a response across the entire city. I'll be providing a brief on a few of the incidents within the city.

As we know, the Palisades fire continues to demand significant local, regional, state andfederal resources. Currently,the fire is over 15,800 acres and is growing with 1792 personal personnel who are currently assigned. And as we know, I want to be very, very clear that this incident is very, very dynamic as we speak.

The good news, the winds have subsided a bit enough to allow our fixed wing and rotor wing aircraft to provide critical air support to this fire. Next up is the hearse fire. The hearse fire has grown to over 700 acres, with 260 personnel assigned to this specific incident. There are evacuation orders in place with multiple structures that are threatened. We continue to focus on fire and life safety. The Woodley incident, it is controlled and approximately has burned 30 acres.

I want to clarify a little something before chief Marrone comes up that the Eaton fire, we are closely monitoring this specific fire. It is in the county, and we are absolutely paying very, very close attention to see how else we can assist. If it does come into the city, we are ready now.

In addition to the large scale brush fires, in the past 24 hours, the LAFD has responded to an additional 3,950 911 calls for service within the city. This also includes 10 structure fires. We have treated and transported an extensive number of medical emergencies throughout the city now, the LAFD also continues to assess and allocate resources to ensure timely and effective responses across the entire city as the situation evolves. The LAFD remains steadfast in its mission, working closely with our local, state and federal partners to mitigate the impacts of this unprecedented fire condition.

Also, I want to talk about a few of the challenges and adaptations multiple incidents throughout this region. We're going to talk about all of these fires within southern California. We're utilizing mutual aid partners from across the region, state and adjoining states and firefighters are surging into Southern California as we speak.

Also the challenges with water pressure in the Palisades, standard firefighter and adaptations for water. What we do when water is limited. We have the ability to pull water from ponds. We can pull water from pools. We're utilizing as many water tenders that we have, and we're working very, very closely with DWP on this.

Next, we will continue to focus, and we'll make very, very clear, saving lives first, evacuations and rescues, we are not out of danger. You can see the active fires that are burning with strong winds that are going to continue throughout the night. I can tell you and assure you that firefighters and first responders remain focused on protecting lives and property.

We urge the public to help us by doing the following. Stay informed through trusted news and officials. Be prepared to evacuate if you live near wild land areas. Follow all evacuation warnings and orders without delay.

We also ask the public to stay off the roadways and away from any of the impacted areas. Now the LAFD and other partners were working so closely together, we are absolutely united in our top priority, and that is saving lives, ensuring that the safe evacuation and rescue of a resident in harm's way remains our absolute top priority and our focus during this wind driven fire. Thank you, Mayor bass, the elected leaders who are here and for all in every single first responder boots on the ground that are doing the work together we can continue to protect our communities and keep everybody safe.