A California woman was killed and two people injured in a head-on collision 10 miles south of Toppenish city limits on Sunday.
Sara Bassett, 38, of Chico, California, was southbound in a Ford Fusion on U.S. 97 at 11:53 a.m. when she crossed the centerline and struck a Chevy Silverado pickup that was northbound, according to a news release from the Washington State Patrol. She died at the scene.
Richard Lizotte, 72, the Chevy’s driver, and passenger Cheryl Lizotte, 76, both of Yakima were injured and taken to Multicare Yakima Memorial Hospital, the WSP said.
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As Los Angeles battles multiple fast-moving wildfires, emergency officials have faced a nightmare situation: fire hydrants running out of water.
“How do you fight a fire with no water?” Ryan Babroff, a volunteer firefighter battling the Eaton Fire, told The Washington Post.
At some point this week, up to 20 per cent of the city’s hydrants went dry, according to LA mayor Karen Bass. And on Thursday night, firefighters had stopped tapping into hydrants at all.
“Right now, we’re not utilizing the hydrants,” Kristin M. Crowley, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said Thursday.
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By Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom had called for an independent investigation into the hydrant issue.
“We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires,” he wrote in a statement on X.
Critics have sounded off on the situation from near and far.
High water demand, blackouts, high winds, and aging infrastructure caused hydrants to run dry, according to experts (AP)
Rachel Darvish, a resident of the scorched Pacific Palisades neighborhood, went viral after she confronted Governor Newsom over the tapped-out hydrants, insisting she would “fill up the hydrants myself.”
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Meanwhile, real estate developer and former L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso alleged “absolute mismanagement by the city.”
Some on the right, meanwhile, have used the shocking water shortage to attack California’s Democratic leadership and policies. Donald Trump claimed the governor’s “gross incompetence” and decision not to open up “the water main” in Northern California was to blame, while Elon Musk has argued everything from environmental protections for endangered fish to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s diversity initiatives were behind the issues with the fire response.
According to experts and government officials, the water shortage issue is much more complex.
Why is there a water shortage?
A patchwork of municipal water systems feeds L.A., drawing water from 200 different utilities. They support a system designed to handle lower-level, urban fires, not multiple large-scale wildfires descending from the hills.
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California mother confronts governor Gavin Newsom over raging wildfires in Los Angeles
“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, toldThe New York Times. “If this is going to be a norm, there is going to have to be some new thinking about how systems are designed.”
“It was like a worst-case scenario, but I think we should be planning for those worst-case scenarios,” Faith Kearns, a wildfire and water expert at Arizona State University, added in an interview with National Geographic. “You can’t predict everything, but also, I do think this is where we’re headed.”
Faced with a series of fires moving as fast as five football fields per minute, this system buckled.
When did fire hydrants run out?
By Wednesday, three 1 million gallon, high-elevation water tanks supplying the hard-hit Pacific Palisades went dry. High demand not only drained the tanks, and drew from water that would’ve been used to replenish them, but it also lowered pressure within the overall hydrant system, further straining the ability of firefighters to quickly get water.
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“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”
Some of that demand would’ve been met by a 117 million-gallon reservoir complex in the Pacific Palisades, but it sat out of use for repairs as the fires in the Palisades began. Officials estimate that had the Santa Ynez Reservoir been online, it would’ve cut demand on the area’s water system from four times to three times as high as normal.
“You still would have ended up with serious drops in pressure,” former Department of Water and Power general manager Adams toldThe Los Angeles Times. “Would Santa Ynez [Reservoir] have helped? Yes, to some extent. Would it have saved the day? I don’t think so.”
Making matters worse, the high winds that helped spread the fires also temporarily prevented officials from using aerial drops of water which could’ve been pulled from the ocean or Southern California’s reservoirs, which are currently sitting above historical levels.
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Trump argued Gavin Newsom could’ve opened a water main to allow more water to reach Los Angeles, those experts say the state’s reservoirs weren’t to blame for the shortage (AP)
And, as President Biden noted on Thursday, loss of electricity put up yet another impediment to getting water to hydrants, as blackouts impacted pumping systems.
Why did the water shortage cause electrical issues?
California Rep. Judy Chu told CNNNews Central on Friday that a FEMA administrator informed her that “they had to turn down the electricity in order to make sure that the fire wasn’t aggravated because of the electricity.”
“They need electricity in order to pump water. So, they turned that down,” she explained. “And then, at the same time, there were so many hydrants that were being used all at once. That aggravated the situation. In addition, they said, there are homes that have been devastated where the water wasn’t turned off. So, there actually are homes where the water is just pouring out and they have to go home by home to turn it off.”
Chu added that the situation is “in hand right now.”
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Other fires, like the 2023 Maui fires and the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Northern California, have caused hydrants to go dry in the past, and it seems L.A. will need to go back to the drawing board if these kinds of wildfire-scale urban blazes become the new normal.
“There is a theoretical world, and maybe a world we’re entering into, where we could pay much, much more to have redundant water and power supply — because you need both [to fight fire], especially in terrains like this,” Greg Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, told LAist. “I’m not even sure that would have made a difference when it comes to these types of wildfires, but that’s possible.”
“There’s no reason to think that [the Department of Water and Power] was particularly ill-prepared, no one was talking about them being ill-prepared for wildfires,” he said. “This caught everyone off guard, as far as I know.”
As the city seeks to fight the fires and rebuild, California leaders have sharply condemned outsiders trying to score political points.
“People are literally fleeing. People have lost their lives. Kids lost their schools. Families completely torn asunder. Churches burned down. And this guy wanted to politicize it,” Newsom said in response to Trump on CNN.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass pushed back against questions about any “animosity” between the incoming Trump administration and California that could hamper efforts to battle the multiple wildfires raging in Los Angeles County.
Trump has heavily criticized leaders in Los Angeles and California over the response to the wildfires, saying the city and state were woefully unprepared.
On Sunday, Bass said she’s “not worried” about any supposed animosity between Trump and local officials and said she has been in communication with his team.
DEATH TOLL FROM CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES RISES TO 16: LA MEDICAL EXAMINER
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said there was no animosity between President-elect Trump and the city. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
Trump on Sunday posted on Truth Social that “incompetent polls” have no idea how to put out the L.A. wildfires. He had previously accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of caring more about protecting an endangered fish species than protecting the state’s residents from wildfires.
The incoming president has long railed against Democrats in California for limiting the availability of water for Californians that comes from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in the northern part of the state.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and President-elect Trump have clashed on various issues, including the recent wildfires in Los Angeles County. (Getty/AP)
Newsom and Los Angeles County supervisor Kathryn Barger have both extended separate invitations to Trump for him to visit the region to see the devastation the fires have caused.
“I joined in the invitation to the incoming president to come to Los Angeles,” Bass said during Sunday’s press update on the firefighting efforts. “I joined with the supervisor, and the governor and spoke directly with the incoming administration yesterday. It was a fine call.”
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CALIFORNIANS ‘ANGRY’ AMID DEVASTATING WILDFIRES, ASKING WHERE HIGH TAX DOLLARS WENT: LOCAL RESEARCHER
Burned structures are seen in Malibu as the Palisades fire burns during a windstorm on the west side of Los Angeles, California, on Jan. 8, 2025.(REUTERS/Ringo Chiu)
She added, “There are also, as I mentioned before, a number of my former colleagues who are up for confirmation. I feel like I will have good relations there.”
Bass and Barger said they believe Trump will visit the area.
“I will say, knowing what I know, and I represent Altadena, which is probably the most diverse, community, that in the fifth district, this is the exact constituency that he was talking to,” said Barger. “You got socioeconomics from all walks of life, and they are suffering. So I am confident that this president will come.”
The mayor also took issue with questions about the supposed lack of communication between the city and the incoming Trump administration.
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“There isn’t a lack of communication between the city of Los Angeles and the incoming Trump administration,” she said. “I have spoken with representatives of the incoming administration. I’ll be talking more about that in the coming days.”
LA fires death toll rises to 16 as new evacuation orders are issued
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the Los Angeles wildfires that have destroyed 12,000 structures and killed 16 people.
Five of the deaths were attributed to the Palisades fire and 11 resulted from the Eaton fire, the coroner’s office said on Saturday evening.
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The Los Angeles county sheriff, Robert Luna, said the death toll is expected to rise as authorities deploy search dogs to devastated areas. The sheriff also said 13 people are reported missing.
County supervisor Lindsey Horvath said the LA area “had another night of unimaginable terror and heartbreak, and even more Angelenos evacuated due to the north-east expansion of the Palisades fire”.
The CalFire operations chief, Christian Litz, said the main focus on Saturday would be the Palisades fire burning in the canyon area, not far from the UCLA campus and the J Paul Getty Museum. Over the past 24 hours, the Palisades fire spread over an additional 1,000 acres (400 hectares), consuming more homes.
A fierce battle against the flames was under way in Mandeville Canyon, home to Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities not far from the Pacific coast, where swooping helicopters dumped water as the blaze charged downhill.
The National Weather Service warned of worsening Santa Ana winds that it predicted would pick up on Saturday night into Sunday morning in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, and again on late Monday through Tuesday morning, bringing sustained winds of up to 30mph and wind gusts up to 70mph.
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The fire also was threatening to jump over Interstate 405 and into densely populated areas in the Hollywood Hills and San Fernando Valley.
Fire fighting aircraft drop water and refill to fight the largest blaze, the Palisades Fire. Photograph: Daniel A Anderson/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
In other developments:
In response to criticism over water supply issues, the LA Department of Public Works released a statement “correcting misinformation” about the lack of water to fight the Palisades fire this week. The statement was released one day after the chief of the LA fire department, Kristin Crowley, told Fox LA that her firefighters had been hamstrung when hydrants ran dry in certain parts of the Palisades on Wednesday morning.
Malibu has lost one-third of the eastern edge of the city, mayor Doug Stewart said yesterday evening. He said that Malibu, a community of about 10,000 people on the western edge of Los Angeles, has suffered three fires in three months, with the Palisades fire, which threatens to spread west of interstate 405, being the worst.
Firefighters deployed from Mexico arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon. Canadian and Texan firefighters are also on their way to California.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has doubled the deployment of the state’s national guard to Los Angeles amid the wildfires.
Newsom has also launched a website aimed at addressing misinformation about the Los Angeles area wildfires. CaliforniaFireFacts.com, a branch of Newsom’s own website, includes information about water availability, forest land management and LA’s fire department budget.
The Southern California Edison CEO, Steven Powell, has told reporters there are now about 50,000 customers without power, “down from over half a million just a couple days ago”. Powell said there was no evidence that any of Edison’s equipment caused the Hurst fire but that the investigation was continuing.
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Key events
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Price gouging preventing displaced Californians from finding new places to live
California attorney general Rob Bonta has warned that it is illegal to engage in price gouging, looting or scamming of any kind and those who do in response to the fires will be held accountable by the law.
“We’ve seen businesses and landlords … jack up the price,” he told journalists at a press conference yesterday. “It’s called price gouging. It is illegal. You cannot do it. It is a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and fines.”
Prices should only be increasing 10% or less from before the fire, Bonta was quoted as having said. He said that “this is California law and it’s in place to protect those suffering from a tragedy”.
The comments come amid reports of California residents who have lost their homes to the fire struggling to find new places to live due to price gouging – where companies or an individual excessively raise prices during emergencies.
“We put in an application at a house … that was listed at $17,000 a month, and they told us if we didn’t pay $30,000, we weren’t going to get it. They told me they have people ready to offer more and pay cash. It’s absolutely insane,” Maya Lieberman, a 50-year-old stylist, who is unable to find anywhere to live, told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
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Here are some of the latest images being sent to us over the newswires from California:
A plane drops Phos-Chek flame retardant in Mandeville Canyon during the Palisades fire. Photograph: Mark Edward Harris/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/ShutterstockFlames near a fire road above Mandeville Canyon during the Palisades fire. Photograph: Mark Edward Harris/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/ShutterstockLos Angeles residents gather and sort through donated clothing at a pop-up donation centre for wildfire victims at Santa Anita park, California. Photograph: Clutch Pockets Wambli/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
A preliminary estimate by AccuWeather put the damage and economic losses so far of the LA fires – that have already destroyed at least 12,000 structures – at between $135bn (£111bn) and $150bn (£123bn).
LA fires death toll rises to 16 as new evacuation orders are issued
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the Los Angeles wildfires that have destroyed 12,000 structures and killed 16 people.
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Five of the deaths were attributed to the Palisades fire and 11 resulted from the Eaton fire, the coroner’s office said on Saturday evening.
The Los Angeles county sheriff, Robert Luna, said the death toll is expected to rise as authorities deploy search dogs to devastated areas. The sheriff also said 13 people are reported missing.
County supervisor Lindsey Horvath said the LA area “had another night of unimaginable terror and heartbreak, and even more Angelenos evacuated due to the north-east expansion of the Palisades fire”.
The CalFire operations chief, Christian Litz, said the main focus on Saturday would be the Palisades fire burning in the canyon area, not far from the UCLA campus and the J Paul Getty Museum. Over the past 24 hours, the Palisades fire spread over an additional 1,000 acres (400 hectares), consuming more homes.
A fierce battle against the flames was under way in Mandeville Canyon, home to Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities not far from the Pacific coast, where swooping helicopters dumped water as the blaze charged downhill.
Advertisement
The National Weather Service warned of worsening Santa Ana winds that it predicted would pick up on Saturday night into Sunday morning in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, and again on late Monday through Tuesday morning, bringing sustained winds of up to 30mph and wind gusts up to 70mph.
The fire also was threatening to jump over Interstate 405 and into densely populated areas in the Hollywood Hills and San Fernando Valley.
Fire fighting aircraft drop water and refill to fight the largest blaze, the Palisades Fire. Photograph: Daniel A Anderson/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
In other developments:
In response to criticism over water supply issues, the LA Department of Public Works released a statement “correcting misinformation” about the lack of water to fight the Palisades fire this week. The statement was released one day after the chief of the LA fire department, Kristin Crowley, told Fox LA that her firefighters had been hamstrung when hydrants ran dry in certain parts of the Palisades on Wednesday morning.
Malibu has lost one-third of the eastern edge of the city, mayor Doug Stewart said yesterday evening. He said that Malibu, a community of about 10,000 people on the western edge of Los Angeles, has suffered three fires in three months, with the Palisades fire, which threatens to spread west of interstate 405, being the worst.
Firefighters deployed from Mexico arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon. Canadian and Texan firefighters are also on their way to California.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has doubled the deployment of the state’s national guard to Los Angeles amid the wildfires.
Newsom has also launched a website aimed at addressing misinformation about the Los Angeles area wildfires. CaliforniaFireFacts.com, a branch of Newsom’s own website, includes information about water availability, forest land management and LA’s fire department budget.
The Southern California Edison CEO, Steven Powell, has told reporters there are now about 50,000 customers without power, “down from over half a million just a couple days ago”. Powell said there was no evidence that any of Edison’s equipment caused the Hurst fire but that the investigation was continuing.
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