Lost power, low water pressure worsened fires
Hours before devastating fires scorched the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, Kyle Ellison labored to save his rental house in Kula, a rural mountain town 24 miles away, from a different blaze.
As high winds whipped burning trees and grass, Ellison and his landlord struggled with plummeting water pressure. Ellison had to wait for pots to slowly fill in the sink before running them to the fire; his landlord wielded a garden hose with little more than a trickle. Firefighters had to rush away for half-hour stretches to find a working fire hydrant to refill their tanker, and every time they did, the fire gained.
“It’s a very disconcerting feeling when the fire department shows up and they don’t have water,” Ellison said.
The lack of backup power for critical pumps seriously hindered firefighting in Kula, county water director John Stufflebean told The Associated Press. Once the winds knocked out electricity, pumps were unable to push water up into tanks and reservoirs that were key to maintaining pressure.
“If all those (pumps) had had generators, I think there is a pretty good chance we could have kept up,” Stufflebean said.
Kula’s experience exposed a common vulnerability in the U.S., where many water systems don’t have sufficient backup power to guarantee pressure if fires, storms or cold take electricity offline for long periods. Besides hamstringing firefighting, the lack of pressure can make water systems vulnerable to contamination that jeopardizes clean drinking water.
The effect of August’s fires in Kula was far smaller than in Lahaina, where at least 97 people were killed and some 2,200 buildings destroyed in a fire so hot that thousands of water pipes melted. More generators wouldn’t have made a difference there, Stufflebean said. But it might have in Kula, where no one died and a few dozen buildings burned.