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As devastating wildfires burn in Southern California, firefighters are managing low water resources and, beyond the blazes themselves, residents deal with the impacts of worsening air quality.
The following experts can discuss water management challenges in the region and wildfire smoke impacts on air quality and human health.
Patrick Reed is a professor of civil and environmental engineering who studies sustainable water management. Reed says the water demand from the L.A. fires goes “beyond the peak demand scenarios.”
Reed says:
“It is important to separate out two related but distinct elements of water management: crisis response and long-term planning. The water tanks running dry in the Palisades are reflective of the extraordinary demands faced by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power managing the wildfires crisis. Long-term planning of city water supplies would not typically assume they are going to be used to fight large-scale wildfires in heavily populated urban areas.
“The current wildfires are surprising shocks causing extraordinary and sustained water demand stresses beyond the peak demand scenarios that would be used for planning.
“Although the wildfires are a short-term crisis event, they will have long lived effects given the loss of life as well as significant damages to property and infrastructure. This is an example where known climate change risks combine (drought and wind extremes) and have manifested into the type of extraordinary extreme event that we are struggling to address in our long-term planning and investment frameworks for water supply infrastructure.”
Alistair Hayden is a professor of practice in public and ecosystem health who studies the impacts of wildfire smoke and a former division chief at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Hayden and colleagues developed an online dashboard that maps out estimated, smoke-attributed mortality statistics in near real-time.