California: Newsom orders investigation into hydrant water shortage during Los Angeles fires

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure in local hydrants and the unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez reservoir.

He explained that this is a "deeply troubling" development as wildfires continue to ravage the Los Angeles area.

"I am calling for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir," Newsom said in a statement posted on his X account.

In that regard, the governor explained that "while water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish wildfires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants Iikely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors."

"We need answers to how that happened. Therefore, I have directed state water and firefighting officials to prepare an independent after-incident report examining the causes of lost water supply and water pressure in municipal water systems during the fire events, and to identify measures that local governments can implement to provide adequate water supply for emergency response during future catastrophic events," Newsom said. 

The investigation comes at a time when fires continue to plague the state. It recently became known that the wildfire crisis in Los Angeles will be the most costly in financial terms in the entire history of the country, according to various analyses published Thursday.

Although early estimates of the damage caused by the fires did not indicate that the crisis would be the most costly, as the hours passed, the initial data were recalculated due to the uncontrolled spread of the flames in several counties.

According to Jimmy Bhullar, an analyst at JPMorgan, the total economic losses from the fires are, for the moment, approaching $50 billion, which represents double the estimate from a day earlier, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.