A group of a dozen residents of Pacific Palisades and Malibu are suing Los Angeles, and specifically the L.A. Department of Water and Power (LADWP), for negligence in the recent wildfires that destroyed their homes.
As Breitbart News and others have reported, the Santa Ynez Reservoir atop the Palisades, which is managed by LADWP and which holds up to 117 million gallons, was nearly empty at the start of the wildfire season.
That, the residents say, caused their homes to be lost from a fire that could have been mitigated if hydrants had not lost water pressure and if city authorities had prepared properly in advance of a known fire risk.
The plaintiffs include a Holocaust survivor and a retired Navy pilot, whose stories are part of the complaint.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
The Times previously reported that in the lead-up to the Jan. 7 inferno, the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been empty for months and more than 1,000 hydrants were in need of repair. As the fire spread that night, scores of hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran low on water.
The complaint also claims the DWP ignored urgent wind warnings and kept its electrical equipment in the area energized, which “contributed to the fires or sparked new spot fires” in the Palisades burn zone.
“All of that taken together makes the city, including DWP, culpable for the harms that the clients have suffered – losing their homes and all of their valuable possessions,” said Crystal Nix-Hines, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, the law firm representing the plaintiffs. “This could have been prevented.”
The new lawsuit joins a handful of others already in motion. Two celebrities have already sued LADWP. Los Angeles County is suing Southern California Edison over the Eaton fire, which the county said was caused by faulty power lines. Another lawsuit filed last month claims that LADWP power lines sparked a second blaze in the Palisades.
While LADWP could not fill the reservoir in time, it did hire top legal talent in February to defend lawsuits.
Separately, the county said that it will make $3 million to help victims of the Eaton fire conduct soil testing to determine if chemicals like lead are in the vicinity of their property.
A consultant told residents Tuesday evening that while there were high concentrations of lead in parts of the Pacific Palisades, other elements that had been found, such as arsenic, may be naturally occurring in the soil.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
