The empty reservoir that keeps packing a political punch

AS THE SMOKE CLEARED AFTER the devastating Palisades fire, the Santa Ynez Reservoir quickly emerged as a potent symbol of civic dysfunction.

Situated in the hills above Pacific Palisades, the reservoir holds up to 117 million gallons of water and could have been full the day the firestorm erupted. Instead, it was bone dry, shuttered for repairs. 

In the year and a half since the blaze, homeowners have sued the city and the Department of Water and Power over the empty reservoir, alleging their homes might have been saved had it been operating. Republicans in Congress have launched a probe into the fire and empty reservoir. And Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the reservoir and what impact, if any, its absence had on the firefight.

Now, the reservoir has emerged as a major issue in the city’s mayoral election. 

Spencer Pratt, whose candidacy’s raison d'être is rage over his burned-out Pacific Palisades home, touts the empty reservoir almost every chance he gets.

Mayor Karen Bass has had to parry Pratt’s drumbeat on the reservoir, including at the recent mayoral debate – where, as she often has, she minimized the impact the empty reservoir might have had on the blaze.

Despite the starring role of this water infrastructure complex in the mayor’s race, both Pratt and, to a lesser extent, Bass, have not always been accurate in their descriptions of it.

The details may seem arcane, but one of the most important — and little-understood — mayoral duties is overseeing DWP, the nation’s largest municipal utility and a foundation of Southern California’s economy. 

Bass’ campaign spokesman, Alex Stack, did not fully address the scope of the mayor’s remarks but said late Sunday, “No urban water system is designed or prepared to tackle a wildfire of that scale.”

Pratt directed his ire at DWP and Bass, adding in a statement that if elected he would “immediately clean house of everybody who made these egregious mistakes, like dragging heels on the Santa Ynez repairs for over a year, draining the reservoir again ahead of another fire season.”

Fact-checking what the candidates say about the reservoir

Pratt declared during the debate that the former DWP CEO and General Manager, Janisse Quiñones, “drained” the Santa Ynez Reservoir and another, smaller reservoir in the Palisades. 

“Without those two reservoirs filled….these firefighters had to fly all the way to Malibu and Encino to get water,” Pratt said. “That to me is the most dangerous thing that [Bass] put us up against.”

This is not accurate. 

The smaller 5-million-gallon reservoir, Palisades Reservoir, has been offline since 2013 because of significant leaks and concerns about its structural integrity. 

The larger Santa Ynez Reservoir was drained in early 2024 after crews spotted a tear in its floating cover. Following discussions with state water officials, city workers emptied the reservoir to complete repairs.

Quiñones did not start as CEO of DWP until May 2024, about three months after the reservoir was emptied. City officials said she did not even know the reservoir was empty and offline until the day of the Palisades fire on Jan. 7, 2025, a fact that has not been previously reported. 

Quiñones was not briefed on the Santa Ynez Reservoir’s status earlier because the cover’s repair was considered routine maintenance and did not jeopardize water quality or compliance with fire codes, DWP officials said.

(Quiñones stepped down in March and now runs an electric utility in Puerto Rico.)

Even though the reservoir was empty, helicopter crews did use the reservoir site to refill in the early hours of the Palisades fire, before severe winds grounded planes around 8 p.m. on Jan. 7. 

The reservoir complex has space for helicopters to land and refill, and the site is designed to function even if the reservoir is empty, because it is linked to the rest of the city’s water system – a lattice of more than 7,000 miles of pipes and water mains, aboveground and subterranean tanks, reservoirs, treatment plants and aqueducts. 

The purpose of the water in the reservoir has also emerged as a point of dispute.

Bass said during the debate that “a million years ago,” the Santa Ynez Reservoir was created to boost fire protection in the Palisades area but that “over the last thirty, forty years, it’s been for drinking water.” 

Pratt called it a “conspiracy” that the Santa Ynez Reservoir was “for drinking water,” adding, “If you research it, they were actually made for wildfire protection,” he said. 

Neither Pratt nor Bass has it quite right. 

The reservoir, which opened in 1970, was built to provide both fire protection and drinking water to the Palisades area; the deadly Bel Air wildfire in 1961 triggered a reconsideration of the city’s fire preparedness. 

The reservoir continues serving that dual purpose, meaning the DWP has tried over the years to time repairs to make sure the reservoir can be a resource during fire season.

For example, in 2022, DWP had to empty the Santa Ynez Reservoir to fix the reservoir’s cover, but officials imposed a tight deadline for bringing it back online. A Jan. 31, 2022, memo obtained by L.A. Material explained the reasoning: “Due to the criticality of Santa Ynez Reservoir to provide water for potable use and fire suppression, the reservoir must be back in service no later than May 31, 2022,” wrote then-water operations manager Andrew Linard.

Why DWP did not adopt the same strict timeframe when they drained it again in 2024 is unclear. 

The utility has repeatedly said they were seeking competitive bids for the repair, which delayed the work in 2024; the reservoir was not fully repaired and returned to service until mid-2025.

Why is there a cover anyway?

The reservoir was built as an open-air reservoir, but federal regulations aimed at safer drinking water in the 1980s led to the reservoir being wrapped by 2012 with a custom, floating cover.

Water stored in the reservoir has already been treated, and the cover was installed to both comply with the law and prevent contamination from birds and animals, as well as algae.

Several reservoirs in L.A. are covered, including Upper Stone Canyon Reservoir in Bel-Air and Elysian Reservoir.

Other reservoirs are “decommissioned” from the drinking water system and remain uncovered – but available for firefighting, including Silver Lake, Ivanhoe, Encino, Hollywood and Lower Stone Canyon reservoirs.

Would having water in the reservoir have made a difference for the Palisades?

The question hanging over the mayoral debate – and one that has dominated discussion of the Palisades fire response – remains: if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been full of water, would it have significantly boosted firefighters’ ability to battle the blaze?

Kevin Boyle, one of the lead attorneys representing scores of Palisades residents who have sued DWP over the fire, insists the answer is yes.

“Had the reservoir been full and the full system been engaged, they would have put this fire out,” Boyle told L.A. Material in an interview. He said that the neighborhood’s water system was designed to function around the reservoir being full and operable. Experts retained by him and other lawyers representing Palisades residents were “appalled” to learn that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been drained, he said. 

But a report issued in November from Cal Fire, the State Water Board and multiple state environmental agencies found otherwise: “Even if the reservoir was full, the flow rate to the system would have been a limiting factor in maintaining pressure and the system would have been quickly overwhelmed.”

As the fire grew, the system saw greater and greater demand. Firefighters drew from multiple hydrants at once. Homeowners ran hoses and sprinklers. As homes and other structures burned, pipes melted and leaked. 

The main source of water to the Palisades is a trunk line running down Sunset Boulevard from Stone Canyon in Bel-Air.

During the fire, DWP was sending water to the Palisades through that pipe at the rate of 37,000 gallons per minute – four times the average, according to the state report. 

State officials concluded that with the reservoir full, that rate would have increased only 15%, to 42,500 gallons per minute. 

“Even if Santa Ynez was full, once the flow rate demanded by use of fire hydrants and leakage from destroyed homes exceeded this maximum flow rate of 42,500 gallons per minute into the system, the hydrants could not have maintained pressure,” the state report found. “Based on experiences with prior fires, the demand on the system would have been so high that it would have quickly exceeded the 42,500 gallons per minute making it unlikely that it could have helped maintain pressure for very long.”

The state’s findings echo what experts have said since the Palisades fire: that the water system in the Palisades was not designed for a wildfire response, but instead, to run three fire hydrants simultaneously at a combined 2,000 gallons per minute – as the building and fire codes specify. 

Palisades is hardly an exception. In other fires, like the Santa Rosa in 2017, the Paradise in 2018, and the blazes on Maui in 2023, the water system also lost pressure, resulting in dry hydrants.

The reservoir today

The reservoir is once again empty. 

When officials finished repairs in the spring of 2025, they found additional damage from fire embers and decided to fully replace the “compromised” floating cover. 

So in February, DWP drained the reservoir. The new cover should be installed by September, said Anselmo Collins, the chief operating officer and senior assistant general manager of DWP, at a recent Board of Water and Power Commissioners meeting.

It will take two months to fill the reservoir, so Collins said the reservoir will return to service by mid-December.

Pratt blasted the DWP for again leaving the reservoir dry. "The Santa Ynez Reservoir is still empty, drained for the second time as a brazen farewell gesture by Janisse Quiñones before she sailed off into the sunset in Puerto Rico with her golden parachute," he said.

Collins, the DWP executive, said the new floating cover is “a short-term solution.”

In the coming years, DWP expects to move away from the fickle and problematic floating-cover system. In its place, engineers will design and build different water storage facilities for the Palisades “to change the way we move the water in that area and store the water,” Collins said. 

Among the possibilities is a combination of underground storage tanks and pipelines. DWP officials have also explored whether to install a permanent cover or roof over the reservoir. 

That could ultimately resemble what DWP did in Silver Lake and Los Feliz. Rather than install covers over the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, DWP built the Headworks complex along the 134 Freeway, creating two underground reservoirs totaling 110 million gallons in storage. 

For the current project, DWP has put in place multiple contingencies, including a 6-mile hosepipe runs through the Palisades, funneling water from the Corbin Tank, in Corbin Canyon, to a storage tank above the Palisades Highlands if service is disrupted.

Pratt has mocked the hose online, posting video and a photo of the hose to X in February and asking: “a kinked rubber hose sitting in grass … What could go wrong?”

Matt Hamilton can be reached at [email protected].