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The Rubio Cañon Land & Water Assn.’s tiny Altadena office building had turned into a command post by early morning Jan. 8. As firefighters scrambled to save homes and lives from the Eaton fire above ground, Rubio Cañon’s staff was fighting to keep its below-ground water system alive.
It was a losing battle.
The small utility, one of the three private customer-owned water providers in Altadena, watched as water hemorrhaged from its system — from residents running garden hoses to try to douse flames licking at their homes to water lines at the base of destroyed homes that melted or snapped in the heat. The water level in the labyrinth of underground pipes began to drop, creating a vacuum in the system. Open hydrants and broken connections higher in the hills began sucking in the toxic smoky air to fill the void left by the water depletion.
Today, most Altadena and Pacific Palisades residents still don’t have clean drinking water, with “do not drink” and “do not boil” notices still in effect. They pick up packages of bottled water from the stoop of the utilities’ offices, and while they’re technically allowed to use the tap water for showers, washing hands and laundry, many still don’t trust it.
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As residents question why it’s taking so long to bring back clean drinking water, the utilities are pushing through a lengthy process of restoring water pressure throughout their sprawling system, then repeatedly testing hundreds of sites for dangerous carcinogens and attempting to flush them out until the water is safe.
But as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wraps up its second round of flushing and testing in the Palisades this week, the Altadena utilities — which have fewer resources, sustained more critical damage to infrastructure and saw a much larger fraction of their customers lose their homes — remained further behind in the process.
“It’s the scale that we’re working with,” said Jennifer Betancourt Torres, general manager of Lincoln Avenue Water Co., one of Altadena’s other small water utilities. “We’re making progress. … It’s just going to take a little bit more time, and we’re hoping that residents can understand that.”
For Rubio Cañon, the little things add salt to the wound. As a private company, it must wait for the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleanups to finish before repairing critical infrastructure. The office didn’t have power until the first week of February. Phone service is still intermittent. And, after Rubio Cañon’s digital mapping company no longer supported its system, the utility has had to map everything by hand.
LADWP said it has identified trace levels of benzene — a carcinogen present in gasoline, paint and consequently wildfire smoke — in its system at several locations. The agency has said it’s identified one spot with significant amounts of the chemical, but has yet to release the full testing data.
For the record:
1:42 p.m. Feb. 14, 2025An earlier version of this article reported that Las Flores Water Co. posted a message Tuesday informing its customers that they could resume drinking their tap water. The message applied to only some of the utility’s customers.
Out of Altadena’s three primary water utilities, Rubio Cañon has identified benzene in six samples, and Lincoln Avenue has found the carcinogen at 20 damaged or destroyed homes. Las Flores Water Co. (which did not have phone or internet services until this week) did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but on Tuesday posted a message to customers that some of them could resume drinking water.
Both the LADWP’s and Altadena’s providers are coordinating with the California State Water Resources Control Board’s Division of Drinking Water to restore service. All told The Times that they are working as fast as possible while ensuring the safety of their residents.
“Do not drink” and “do not boil” orders are regularly issued across the state when contaminants — such as arsenic from industrial activities or dangerous fertilizers — enter water systems, a scientist with the division said. While most are quickly resolved, catastrophic wildfires are a different story.
Eaton and Palisades fires
The devastating fires killed at least 28 people, destroying and damaging more than 18,000 buildings valued at more than $275 billion and leaving a burn zone 2½ times the size of Manhattan.
After a fire, water utilities first have to restore water pressure for the region. That ensures that no more contaminants can enter through the vacuum effect that draws in smoke, and it allows utility workers to begin flushing water systems.
But wildfires often result in thousands of possible water leaks, across a wide geographical area. To restore pressure, workers have to manually plug each one, starting at lower elevations and working upward, street by street.
The LADWP said a team of about 180 workers had to close roughly 4,800 openings to restore water pressure in the Palisades. Lincoln Avenue had to close 3,000.
In the Palisades, the LADWP luckily found no major infrastructure damage that would require extensive repairs before it could begin operating their full water systems — but now with thousands fewer homes connected. Altadena’s water utilities were not as lucky.
As Rubio Cañon’s small crew desperately raced through the active fire to keep as much of its system running as possible, the fire engulfed critical infrastructure. Police drove down the street where Rubio Cañon’s office is located, ordering residents to evacuate, but the utility’s crew stayed.
Just 1½ miles away, homes across the street from Lincoln Avenue Water Co.’s small office building burst into flames, forcing the utility’s team to abandon ship and move their equipment and trucks away from the fire.
After the smoke settled, Lincoln Avenue discovered one of its 10 reservoirs — a seasonal facility responsible for 1 million gallons of capacity out of the company’s 10.5 million total — was critically damaged. Meanwhile, the Rubio Cañon team found that it had lost four reservoirs at two locations, amounting to a loss of about 2.5 million gallons of storage capacity out of the utility’s 8 million total.
Which contaminants may be present and pose a danger is a hotly debated topic in the scientific community, but the state and federal government only requires utilities to test for benzene and bacteria, including E. coli and other pathogens. LADWP, Rubio Cañon and Lincoln Avenue have opted to test for a suite of additional chemicals found in wildfire smoke that are in the same family as benzene, called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.
VOCs are found in plenty of household material, from carpet and vinyl flooring to wood products and plastic. They generally turn into gases right around room temperature, making them quick to enter the air during fires. Some, like benzene, are dangerous to humans; others, like the one responsible for the smell of pine (both in trees and air fresheners), not so much.
Scientists only became aware of wildfire benzene contamination after the 2017 Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, Calif. Researchers subsequently identified benzene and other VOCs in the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., and fires in Colorado and Hawaii.
While some researchers, including scientists and officials from the Division of Drinking Water, say the presence — or lack thereof — of benzene indicates whether or not other contaminants are present, others emphatically disagree, arguing no such evidence exists.
Benzene, when ingested or inhaled in significant amounts, increases the risk of blood cancers like leukemia. Boiling or taking hot showers with water that contains the chemical can cause it to enter its gaseous form, creating a risk for inhalation.
In order to lift the “do not drink” and “do not boil” notices, the Division of Drinking Water requires that utilities show their water contains less than 1 part per billion of the carcinogen.
To do this, utilities first flush the water from their entire systems by methodically opening fire hydrants throughout their service zone in an attempt to purge any potential contaminants. Then, they close the hydrants and let the water sit in the system for at least three days before testing for new contaminants. This ensures they don’t miss any dangerous chemicals that take time to creep into the water.
Then, they repeat the process until any contaminants are completely gone. If that still doesn’t work, utilities may resort to more time-intensive techniques, including sending foam or an icy slurry through the pipes to force out unwanted chemicals or replacing the pipes altogether.
The LADWP has its own lab facilities. That means it can usually get results of contamination tests in under 24 hours, according to Jonathan Leung, director of water quality at the LADWP.
The Altadena utilities are relying on independent labs, which can take over a week to deliver results.
Unlike the LADWP, the majority of the Altadena water utilities’ customers lost their homes and are consequently no longer paying for water. Consequently, at a time when they need funds the most, their revenue from utility bills will be significantly reduced. The companies are looking into applying for FEMA disaster relief funds, but said the process has been slow and difficult.
Meanwhile, they are fighting to keep up. Rubio Cañon and Lincoln Avenue, with just nine and 11 employees, respectively, are working with about 10% of the restoration workforce the LADWP has. Combined, the number of water service connections for which Rubio Cañon and Lincoln Avenue are responsible is 90% of those that LADWP has to deal with in Pacific Palisades.
To help bridge the gap in resources, the Altadena utilities are receiving mutual aid from other agencies. The Metropolitan Water District helped restore temporary power for Rubio Cañon, and the Public Water Agencies Group sent crews to help the utility with repressurization.
The teams at the small utilities, with employees often living in the communities they serve, feel the pain Altadena is holding. A Lincoln Avenue worker lost their house. The Rubio Cañon team’s favorite local hardware store burned to the ground.
“It hurts,” said Armando De La Paz, assistant general manager at Rubio Cañon, “what happened to the community — but I want to make sure they understand that we are here for them. Whatever they need, that’s what we have to do.”
