President-elect idiocy
Believe it or not, the same guy who doesn’t know how maps work doesn’t understand engineering either.
It’s Friday. Allow me to geek out a bit. I worked for decades as a mechanical engineer, a P.E., specifically in piping departments of major consulting firms, even more specifically, in pipe stress analysis. (Here’s the Generative AI explanation.) The nonsense being spewed by Trump 2.0 and other RW hacks about the fires in Los Angeles and hydrants with no water gets under my skin. Especially Trump’s “little fish” idiocy.
Thursday night’s late-night shows were focused on the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, as well as incoming President Trump’s bizarre response to them.
“Daily Show” host Desi Lydic played a clip of Trump rambling on about smelt, continuing to spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the state’s water supply.
“I tried to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come — you’d have tremendous water out there — they send it out to the Pacific, because they’re trying to protect a tiny little fish — which is in other areas, by the way — called the smelt. For the sake of the smelt, they have no water,” Trump said.
Lydic offered a rebuttal, saying “And for the record, no, the L.A. fires have nothing to do with smelt. But in Trump’s defense, words are hard. And smelt only has one syllable, while climate change has three.”
In fact, “not in their own minds” experts tell the Washington Post that California’s reservoirs stand at historically high levels. Supply is not the problem. Demand is. Getting the water to where you need it is.
To provide reliable water pressure in hilly areas, cities install holding tanks like those at the top, positioned strategically at the top of local mountains, the way cities in flat areas pump water, slowly, to fill water towers standing high above the local terrain. In both cases, gravity does the rest. Keeping these tanks filled in a system under severe stress is a problem (emphasis mine):
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the fire made the water demand four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”
Ms Quiñones said hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts.
Refilling those tanks while the water system down below is under historic demand too is even tougher. In the case of the Pacific Palisades fire, like I said (Washington Post):
In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.
DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.
By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m. Wednesday.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” she said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”
Supply is not the problem.
Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, echoed those concerns. He said the agency’s water pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume whole neighborhoods.
“None of that’s ever been based on the entire neighborhood going up. If that’s the new norm, that’s something that’s got to be figured in,” he said. “Nobody designs a domestic water system for that. It would be so overbuilt and so expensive.”
Nobody would pay for that. Let’s get real. We heard similar complaints (from RW critics looking to score points) after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene hit my town.
Helene’s apocalyptic flooding at the end of September ripped out the major water mains supplying Asheville, leaving us without water pressure for weeks and without water certified drinkable until mid-November. Oh, but those lefties running Asheville who replaced the water mains that washed out in 2004 flooding were responsible/irresponsible because they buried the replacement lines ONLY 25 ft deep!
Donald Trump is not the only walking advertisement out there for the Dunning-Kruger effect.