Connect with us

Science

L.A. Wildfires Reveal the Limits of Hydrant Systems

Published

on

L.A. Wildfires Reveal the Limits of Hydrant Systems

Firefighters struggled to control the Palisades fire as it tore through neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades earlier this month.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

As firefighters scrambled to extinguish the wildfires consuming neighborhoods across Los Angeles County this month, they often found that the hydrants outside the burning houses were not much help.

It was hardly the first time in recent years that a wildfire had encroached on an American neighborhood, and hardly the first time that hydrants were unable to make a serious dent in stopping an unfolding disaster. In Colorado, Hawaii and other parts of California, hydrants have provided minimal relief as home after home has burned.

Advertisement

A combination of extreme conditions, poor planning and delayed evacuations contributed to the widespread devastation around Los Angeles. There were also specific limitations on the region’s network of fire hydrants, including a large reservoir that was offline for maintenance.

But in most cases, experts say, a working hydrant system would be inadequate for fighting a large-scale wildfire.

While hydrants can provide a valuable first line of defense in the early stages of a wildfire, they can quickly run dry when those fires burn out of control, and especially when wind gusts carry embers across a city.

How Hydrant Systems Work

Fire hydrants have been a staple in American neighborhoods for well over a century, usually fed by city or county water systems.

Advertisement

Many systems use the force of gravity to create water pressure. But they can also rely on electricity, leaving them vulnerable during disasters.

The landscape of a city can determine what its water system looks like.

In the flatlands of the Midwest, that treated water is often stored in water towers.

Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Advertisement

In urban centers like New York City, many buildings have small towers on their roofs.

Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

And in places with hills and mountains, the water is often held in tanks on higher ground and sent to residential areas below.

Jason Finn/Alamy Stock Photo

Advertisement

Hydrants Weren’t Designed for Wildfires

Above-ground fire hydrants have been around since the 1800s. Before fire hydrants became common, firefighters often had to dig into the ground to reach wooden water mains to get water into their hoses.

When the blaze was out, firefighters would then repair the water main with a “fire plug.”

Firefighting around 1908.

Advertisement

George Grantham Bain, via Getty Images

Hydrants make that process far more efficient, though their primary purpose has always been to help extinguish structure fires before they spread across the neighborhood.

But in recent decades, as climate change has made destructive fires more common, and Americans have built more homes in forested areas, hydrants have played a role in controlling brush fires in their early stages.

Still, the systems can be quickly overwhelmed.

Advertisement

After the Woolsey fire in Southern California in 2018, a review found that high demand for water, along with broken pipes in burned structures, led to some neighborhoods having insufficient water pressure, or none at all.

When water ran low during the Marshall fire in Colorado, which ignited in late 2021, officials rushed untreated lake water through the system to keep supplies up, researchers found.

And after the fire on Maui in 2023, officials wrote that it was unclear if the hydrants ran dry because of demand or the loss of electricity.

When Hydrants Aren’t Enough

Dangerous winds spread the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County earlier this month.

Advertisement

Philip Cheung for The New York Times

In large-scale fires, hydrant systems can quickly be pushed beyond what they were engineered to handle. There are multiple ways the systems can fall behind before water even reaches the hydrant.

“Even with water everywhere, what we observed in L.A. I don’t think would have been thwarted in any meaningful way,” said Alan Murray, a geography professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has researched hydrant spacing in fire-prone areas.

Dr. Murray said there were ways to limit neighborhoods’ risk against wildfires, including by creating “defensible space” around homes and limiting fuel sources like wooden fences. Forest management strategies, like prescribed burns, can also help.

Advertisement

But is there a way to build a bigger, better fire hydrant system that can spare neighborhoods from the sorts of wind-driven fires that have burned thousands of homes?

Not likely, experts said.

“The laws of physics and hydraulics are what they are,” said Rob Sowby, an engineering professor at Brigham Young University who studied the aftermath of the Maui wildfire. “We can make bigger reservoirs and bigger pipes and more fire hydrants, but I think it’s going to have to be more of a social and policy decision about where and how we build in the future, and what kind of other protections we make against wildfires.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Science

Trump Said, ‘We Have More Coal Than Anybody.’ See Where We Burn It.

Published

on

Trump Said, ‘We Have More Coal Than Anybody.’ See Where We Burn It.

After declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office, President Trump said Thursday that coal could be a fuel source for new electric generating plants.

He announced a plan to issue emergency declarations to build power plants to meet a projected increase in electricity demand for artificial intelligence.

“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup — good, clean coal,” Mr. Trump said in a virtual appearance at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He added that if gas and oil pipelines get “blown up,” coal could be used as a backup energy source.

“We have more coal than anybody,” Mr. Trump said. “We have more oil and gas than anybody.”

While the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, and while it has more coal reserves than any other country, it’s only the fourth-largest producer of coal, behind China, India and Indonesia.

Advertisement

But reliance on fossil fuels like coal made the United States one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which have irreversibly heated the planet and driven global climate change.

Despite Mr. Trump’s talk about building coal plants, the United States has drastically reduced its coal generating capacity in recent years. Most of the decline came because natural gas, and now renewables like solar and wind, were cheaper sources of energy. A 2023 study showed that 99 percent of U.S. coal plants were more expensive to run than renewable replacements.

By 2023, the 206 coal plants remaining in the United States supplied roughly 16 percent of the nation’s electricity, far below natural gas and less than both renewables and nuclear power.

Almost a quarter of current coal generation is slated for retirement by 2040, according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration in October 2024. Those reductions cross 51 coal plants.

The pace of those retirements slowed last year while energy demand increased. Utilities predict a 20 percent increase in demand for electricity by 2035, according to data compiled by RMI, a nonprofit group focused on energy research.

Advertisement

Experts said that the rise in electricity use was expected under a clean energy transition and that coal generation wouldn’t be required to meet it.

“Utilities are skipping a step and asking everyone to take it as a foregone conclusion that if there’s demand growth from manufacturing, onshoring, and data centers or A.I., then it has to be met with coal, when in fact it’s one of the most expensive resources left for them to operate,” said David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a research and advocacy group.

But industry groups said that under Mr. Trump, it might be possible to increase coal exports and build smaller coal plants.

“There’s a sense of optimism with the new administration,” said Emily Arthun, chief executive of the American Coal Council.

While the coal industry could experience a small bump under Mr. Trump, experts said coal was simply too expensive to make a comeback.

Advertisement

“Coal is fundamentally uneconomic,” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, an energy think tank. “Any need that isn’t met by wind or solar or battery storage will for the most part be met with natural gas, and coal will still be a distant fourth resource in that mix.”

The Trump administration’s unwavering commitment to fossil fuels could hinder the country’s competitiveness in the energy transition.

China dominates the United States in virtually every aspect of clean energy, and fossil fuel generation has reached a historic low in the European Union. Last year, solar overtook coal for the first time, and wind overtook both coal and gas, according to a new report by Ember, an energy think tank.

Continue Reading

Science

The Perfect Cacio e Pepe Recipe, According to Science

Published

on

The Perfect Cacio e Pepe Recipe, According to Science

A group of Italian physicists has dared to tinker with the traditional recipe for cacio e pepe, the challenging Roman dish consisting of pasta, pecorino cheese and black pepper. In a new study, the scientists claim to have “scientifically optimized” the recipe by adding an ingredient: cornstarch.

Cacio e pepe, which means cheese and pepper, is a showcase of Italian cuisine, with fresh ingredients producing bold flavor. The dish was supposedly invented by shepherds “who had to stuff their saddlebags with hypercaloric ingredients,” according to the new paper. Today, it is a staple at Rome’s classic pasta joints, where chefs steeped in tradition may not look kindly at scientific lessons on culinary thermodynamics.

The authors were aware they were treading on sensitive ground. “I hope that eight Italian authors is enough,” said Ivan Di Terlizzi, a statistical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, who is originally from Puglia, Italy.

The recipe may be simple, but getting it right is anything but. The silky sauce comes together when pecorino cheese and ground peppercorns are mixed into the starch-heavy water drained from the cooked pasta. Doing so will ideally create an emulsion — a détente between substances that wouldn’t otherwise mix, as when oil and water form mayonnaise.

But as many cooks have discovered, the mixture of cheese and steaming pasta water can catastrophically result in what the researchers called the “mozzarella phase.”

Advertisement

Hot water causes whey proteins in the cheese to bend out of shape. They then bond with each other or with casein, the other protein in cheese, causing clumps.

The scientists wanted to find a surefire way to avoid that gummy mess.

“It’s very hard to get the right balance,” said Fabrizio Olmeda, a statistical physicist who worked on the new study and is from Rome, where some say the world’s best cacio e pepe is served at the Felice a Testaccio trattoria. “And sometimes when you get it correctly, you don’t understand what you did to make it good.”

The scientists heated variations of the sauce with a sous vide machine, which maintains a consistent water temperature. They also built a wooden platform to hold the saucepan in place to ensure even heating. After heating, the sauce was poured into petri dishes that were then set on a cardboard box, the top of which had been replaced by a transparent film. A lightbulb illuminated the petri dish from below. The resulting arrangement made the cheese clumps stand out as dark blotches in the photographs taken with an iPhone mounted on a tripod.

“None of our samples were wasted,” said Giacomo Bartolucci, a biophysicist at the University of Barcelona and another author of the paper. “Our friends came by to say hi, to see how it was going. And they helped us, eating up all the samples.” Dr. Bartolucci estimated that the team’s research involved the consumption of 11 pounds of pecorino cheese.

Advertisement

The scientists tried the experiment at different temperatures and used different starch concentrations, and found that starch had much more of an influence on the consistency of the sauce. With enough starch, the entire process is “less sensitive to mistakes in temperature,” the paper said.

Starch is made of long strings of molecules, or polymers. As they absorb water and swell, the polymers bond with casein and prevent the whey proteins from clustering.

The traditional method of mixing the cheese in pasta water often comes up short because the water doesn’t hold enough starch. The scientists’ method does away with pasta water entirely; instead, store-bought cornstarch is dissolved in plain water and then heated before the addition of cheese. The researchers calculated that the ideal concentration of starch should be between 2 and 3 percent of the weight of the cheese. (Their optimized recipe, for “two hungry people,” calls for about ⅔ cup of cheese and just shy of one teaspoon of starch.)

Italian gourmands may be skeptical, but experts in food science said the research was sound.

“What these guys did was a very impressive amount of work,” said Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer for Microsoft and culinary enthusiast whose cookbook “Modernist Cuisine” is widely considered a bible of molecular gastronomy.

Advertisement

Even as he praised the Italian researchers for their starchy persistence, Dr. Myhrvold offered a different solution: adding sodium citrate, a widely available anticoagulant. He said that the large polymers of starch that prevent clumping can also blunt the flavor of the cheese.

In some ways, generations of Italian nonnas were scientists themselves, trying out recipes, observing the results and trying again.

“Cooking is chemistry. But most of all, it is experience,” said Lidia Bastianich, a pioneer of Italian cuisine in the United States. Just as the simplest scientific formula can be the most revolutionary, the simplest pasta bursts with the most intense flavors.

“Simplicity,” Ms. Bastianich said, “is the most difficult thing to reach.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Science

Under Trump, we could be flying blind when it comes to bird flu, other infectious diseases

Published

on

Under Trump, we could be flying blind when it comes to bird flu, other infectious diseases

The United States is ground zero for the H5N1 bird flu.

Since March 2024, when the virus was first reported in a Texas dairy herd, the virus has killed one person, sickened scores more, contaminated the nation’s food supply, felled dozens of house pets, infected more than 900 dairy herds across 16 states, and caused the deaths of millions of wild animals and commercially raised chickens, ducks and turkeys.

So how President Trump and his administration will deal with this widespread, potentially deadly virus, which scientists say is just a mutation or two away from becoming a full-blown human pandemic, is a question many health officials and infectious disease experts are now asking.

And so far — say the few who will go on the record about their concerns — things are not looking promising.

On Monday, Trump issued an executive order that will remove the U.S. from the World Health Organization — a 76-year old international agency created, in part, to share data and information about global pandemics.

Advertisement

He has also shuttered the Biden-era White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness, which was directed by Congress to streamline and coordinate the nation’s response to burgeoning pandemics, such as avian flu. Since the office’s formation in 2023, it has initiated multiagency coordinated efforts to “test” the nation’s preparedness for novel disease outbreaks, and has provided advice and coordination regarding vaccine development and availability among various health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. A visit to the office’s website Wednesday morning showed a “404 Page Not Found” error message.

And on Tuesday evening, news broke that the Trump administration delivered instructions to a number of agencies within the department of Health and Human Services to put a “pause” on all health communications. The department did not respond to questions about the issue.

However, a note from a Human Services spokesman to a Times reporter on a different topic noted that the agency “issued a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health.”

The spokesman said the pause was temporary and set up to allow the new administration’s appointees “to set up a process for review and prioritization.”

Experts say while we’re still in just the first week of the new administration, and things could change, these developments don’t bode well for a transparent and timely response to the growing avian flu crisis.

Advertisement

“More cases of H5N1 are occurring in the United States than in any other country,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “Pausing our health communications at a time when states are scrambling to contain this virus is dangerously misguided. This will make America less healthy and will worsen the virus’s economic tolls.”

Experts also say the new administration’s moves could lead to economic and social isolation for many Americans. Other nations may begin to question the health and safety of exported agricultural products, such as dairy, livestock, poultry and meat, as well the health of Americans who want to travel internationally.

“I can foresee countries slapping travel and trade restrictions on the U.S. It’ll affect millions of Americans,” said Lawrence Gostin, a legal scholar at Georgetown University.

Although the WHO does not typically support travel restrictions or trade bans, independent nations can call for such measures. In January 2020, Trump temporarily suspended entry to all non-U.S. citizens coming in from China.

Other nations, said Gostin, could take similar measures if they feel the U.S. is not being transparent or openly communicating information about the H5N1 outbreak. And without a seat at the WHO’s negotiating table, where new pandemic guidelines are currently being drawn, the U.S. may find itself on the outside looking in.

Advertisement

“With our withdrawal, we’d be ceding influence leadership” to China and other U.S. adversaries, said Gostin — the exact opposite of what we should be doing during such a precarious moment for a potentially emerging pandemic. “When the next [WHO] director general is elected, it’ll be China that will be pulling the strings — not the United States,” he said. “Our adversaries will be setting the global rules that we’re going to have to live by.”

Trump’s decision to remove the U.S. from the WHO rests on two of his convictions: First, that the organization mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and second, that it charges the U.S. too much money — “far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments,” Trump said in his executive order.

Between 2015 and 2024, the WHO charged the U.S. between $109 million and $122 million per year. That accounts for 22% of all member contributions, making the U.S. the largest contributor to the organization.

But it’s not just the isolationist moves and the potential loss of diplomatic strength and influence that worries experts and health officials.

Moves to eradicate offices designed to streamline the nation’s response to bird flu, and directives to “pause” communications about it, suggest either ignorance or a willful blindness to the way H5N1 — and all zoonotic diseases — move through the environment and potentially harm people, said Matthew Hayek, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University.

Advertisement

The Trump administration “has a real opportunity to come in and and think about this virus and change the way we manage these kinds issues,” he said — noting the Biden administration’s bungled and flat-footed response, which allowed the virus to spread virtually unchecked across the nation’s dairy herds for months. Instead, “from the looks of it, that’s not going to happen. It seems that these first worrying steps with respect to muzzling public health agencies is moving in the opposite direction. And doubling down on the Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil strategy of the Biden administration” is just going to make it worse.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture intends to continue updating its H5N1 website as samples are tested and confirmed, according to Lyndsay Cole, an agency spokesperson. On Thursday, two new dairy herds in which there were positive tests for bird flu were added to the agency’s “Situational Update” website for H5N1.

John Korslund, a retired USDA scientist, said he wasn’t too worried, yet. He said it usually takes a few days or weeks when a new administration comes online for things to settle.

However, “in the case of H5N1, the new administration has indicated less support for formal pandemic preparedness activities,” he said, as evidenced by Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO and the shuttering of the White House pandemic office. The moves, he added, “may indicate less Trump administration support for extended federal surveillance and response efforts for H5N1 infections in humans and animals.”

He said the virus will likely have to pose a more imminent threat before this new administration decides to provide “significant federal activities or dollars.”

Advertisement

Nuzzo, the Brown University researcher, agreed.

“The Trump administration will have no choice about acting on H5N1 — the virus is continuing to sicken people and livestock and is driving up our grocery bills,” she said. “The question is not whether the Trump administration will act to combat H5N1, but when and how many lives and livelihoods will be harmed before they act.”

Times staff writer Emily Alpert Reyes contributed to this report.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending