While the rains were a welcome respite from the month of destructive wildfires, they also raised concerns about contaminated runoff and questions on how to rebuild a climate-resilient city.
Heavy rains after a fire can be dangerous, increasing the risk of flash flooding, mudslides and debris flows, as witnessed in Pacific Palisades and Sierra Madre. But, perhaps less obvious, is the serious threat of toxic chemicals in fire-ravaged areas that gets washed into waterways, threatening water quality, public health and the environment, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.
“It’s always somewhat ironic because, in a place that is as dry as Southern California, we always like our rains,” said Bruce Reznick, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Los Angeles Waterkeeper. “But if you’re a water person, when you see the rains you realize the reason the air seems cleaner is it’s washing it all on down through our waterways.”
When fires burn neighborhoods, they also burn all the toxic materials in those homes – metals, plastics, cleaning supplies, paints, batteries and asbestos, to name a few. Those per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and plastics get released into our environment and can create lasting public health effects. Moreover, some of the fire retardants used by firefighters also carry some of these toxic chemicals.
“It’s hard to even enumerate all the different pollutants that are going into our air and into our water from these fires,” said Reznick. “It’s a toxic soup.”
This contaminated runoff typically does not impact drinking water supplies as long as the infrastructure remains intact, according to the Water Board, however, it can pose a threat to the watershed and wildlife, draining into rivers, streams and the ocean.
The LA County Public Health Department issued an ocean water closure and advisories from Surfrider Beach to Dockweiler State Beach due to contamination from the fires.
“I would not be getting in the water for a while,” warned Reznick.
Last month the LA County Board of Supervisors approved a motion to clean fire debris from county beaches and directed local authorities to seek state and federal support to scale up cleanup and testing efforts.
However, mitigation can be a lengthy process. The Water Board states that water systems can take weeks to months to recover depending on the extent of the damage to infrastructure.
Nearly 29% of LA’s water pipes are over 80 years old, leaving them vulnerable to failure during emergencies.
Updating systems and building local resilient water infrastructure could help prevent future failures, restore our watersheds and strengthen LA’s water sovereignty, said Reznick.
Building Water Resilience
“We have to recognize the realities of today, of climate change and worsening disasters, and we are going to need to think about how we rebuild,” said Reznick. “More money spent on wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater cleanup and conservation would prepare us for the future.”
Diversifying the region’s water resources could make the southland more resilient to climate change and unforeseen hazards.
The city of LA is 90% reliant on imported water from the Colorado River and other regions of California, while LA County imports around 60% of its water – a slightly better number due to natural groundwater basins. Importing water is costly, energy inefficient and makes the region more susceptible to natural disasters, including earthquakes, said Reznick.
While President Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom are focused on revamping the extraction water solutions of yesteryear, Reznick encourages taking advantage of the opportunity to build in more local sustainable ways that utilize new technologies.
This means investing in wastewater recycling projects like the Advanced Water Purification Facility (AWPF) at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant (Tillman) in the Sepulveda Basin. When completed the facility will produce 20 million gallons of purified drinking water daily, enough to supply 250,000 people in LA.
The project makes the region less reliant on imported water, while also helping purify water and restore our local groundwater.
“[New wastewater recycling] plants would treat water to a much, much higher level,” said Reznick. “A lot of the emerging contaminants – PFAs and pharmaceuticals and other kinds of chemicals – those don’t all get caught in our current systems, which are older and didn’t have to meet those same standards.”
Combined with stormwater capture, these initiatives could have massive effects on our neighborhoods, creating more green spaces that allow water to percolate into our groundwater basin, recharging our aquifers and reducing urban runoff, pollution and wastewater to the ocean.
“If we created more green space in our communities, we have [positive] health outcomes,” including reduced asthma rates and deaths from the heat island effect, added Reznick.
Investing in local water infrastructure and rebuilding with climate change in mind can create sustainable water solutions that reduce fire risk and increase LA’s resilience to natural disasters.
“We need to be thinking of a new future that recognizes the impacts of climate change,” said Reznick, to create something that is “more sustainable, more resilient and more local.”