Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer who unsuccessfully ran against Karen Bass for mayor in 2022, said stifled water supply as the Pacific Palisades fire reduces mulit-million-dollar real estate to ashes represents "absolute mismanagement by the city."
"There's no water in the Palisades. There's no water coming out of the fire hydrants. This is an absolute mismanagement by the city. Not the firefighters' fault, but the city's," Caruso, a former mayoral candidate, told Fox11 Los Angeles.
"We have got a mayor that is out of the country, and we have got a city that is burning, and there is no resources to put out fires," Caruso added. "It looks like we're in a third-world country here."
FOX 11 reported that Bass is currently heading back to California. The mayor reportedly is on a pre-planned trip to Africa.
To the mayor, city council and county representatives, Caruso said the public must ask: "Why didn't you work to mitigate this? What was your brush mitigation program?"
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He argued that the problem is not a lack of rain, but that the brush has been left unkept for potentially decades.
"Who's paying the price are all of these people and their homes," Caruso added.
Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), said that by 3 a.m. Wednesday, all fire hydrants in the Palisades "went dry."
"We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme," she said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure."
Caruso, a former DWP commissioner and the owner of the Palisades Village mall in the Westside neighborhood, further argued that firefighters are at the scene but "there’s nothing they can do" without water supply, as businesses and homes burn.
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"This is a window into a systemic problem of the city — not only of mismanagement, but our infrastructure is old," Caruso said.
Caruso said he evacuated his home in Brentwood on Wednesday morning and that his daughter's home was already destroyed by the fire. His family was still waiting for news on how one of his son's homes fared.
Several homes around his shopping center were "fully engulfed" in flames, and the mall itself was damaged, he said.
"The chronic under-investment in the city of Los Angeles in our public infrastructure and our public safety partners was evident and on full display over the last 24 hours," Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park said at Wednesday's press conference alongside Quiñones. "I am extremely concerned about this. I’m already working with my team to take a closer look at this, and I think we’ve got more questions than answers at this point."
