In the first days of January 2025, Los Angeles gave the world a familiar spectacle: flames on a ridgeline, helicopters briefly grounded by wind, and, beneath the drama, the quieter story that tends to decide what survives. Fire hydrants in parts of Pacific Palisades lost pressure. Three local storage tanks of roughly a million gallons apiece were drawn down under sustained demand. Officials and engineers did not describe a shortage of water in Southern California; they described a shortage of deliverable flow at the right elevation, at the right moment, in the right quantity. A subsequent state analysis framed the same point more plainly: there was water in the system, but it was not possible to pump enough of it into the fire area fast enough to match simultaneous demand, compounded by leakage from already-destroyed structures and extensive hydrant use. [California Natural Resources Agency, Palisades Fire and Water Supply Analysis Memo, Nov 2025] [CalMatters, Dec 2025]
This is not a Los Angeles eccentricity, nor a partisan morality play about “mismanagement”. It is the predictable collision between fire behaviour that has become more synchronised and infrastructure that remains stubbornly serial. Urban water systems are generally designed to provide reliable domestic supply, cope with ordinary peaks, and maintain quality and pressure under routine contingencies. They are not designed to supply something closer to a mobile industrial process—many blocks drawing fire-flow at once, at height, for hours—while pipes fail, power may be constrained, and the incident footprint expands faster than control lines. [AP, Jan 2025] [Swiss Re Institute, Wildfires: Natural catastrophes in focus]
The temptation, after every large fire, is to retreat to the visible. More appliances. More aircraft. Bigger pumps on the truck. A new procurement line and a ribbon-cutting. Those measures are rarely foolish; they are simply downstream of the governing constraint. Most large-scale fire disasters do not fail because crews lack courage, training, or even nominal budget. They fail because water cannot be moved fast enough, far enough, and reliably enough once the system is stressed.
The consequence is a reframing that many institutions resist because it is unglamorous and, worse, cross-cutting: firefighting at scale is a logistics problem. Water is the time-critical commodity, and the decisive question is not “how quickly did the first appliance arrive?” but “how quickly did sustained flow at the required rate arrive—and how long could it be held?” [NFPA, Jan 2024] [NFPA, Mar 2022]
Water as response time
Fire services speak naturally in minutes: turnout time, travel time, time to first jet. Those metrics remain meaningful for room-and-contents fires and for the kind of compartmentation that modern building regulations assume. Large open-air fires—wildland-urban interface (WUI) events, port incidents, tank farms, major terminals, aircraft fires—are less forgiving. Their behaviour is governed by heat release, wind, fuel continuity and radiant exposure, all of which scale non-linearly. Once a fire outruns its first containment opportunity, suppression becomes a different activity: not extinguishment, but boundary management, triage, and the protection of critical assets.
In that world, water is not merely an extinguishing agent; it is response time made physical. A brigade that can deliver a sustained, high-volume flow early can cool exposures, keep structures below ignition thresholds, and prevent secondary ignitions from becoming a second front. The same brigade, arriving with the same equipment but starved of water, becomes a mobile observer service with occasional moments of effect.
One can express the governing arithmetic without theatrics. Water is heavy—one cubic metre is roughly a tonne—and most vehicles carry only a few tonnes. A pumper is, in practice, a pump and a short-lived water buffer. Its impact is limited by replenishment. The decisive capacity is therefore not the pump on the vehicle; it is the network that feeds it.
That is why standards, where they are explicit, talk in flows. The NFPA’s public guidance notes that hydrants are not required where the supply cannot deliver 500 gallons per minute (gpm) at 20 psi, and that code-based approaches focus on whether hydrants within a defined radius can collectively meet the required fire flow. [NFPA, Jan 2024] [NFPA, Mar 2022]
The detail matters because it shifts attention from kit to capacity. A community can buy more engines and still be unable to deliver water at the edge of its system when elevation, friction losses and simultaneous withdrawals collapse pressure. The physics do not negotiate, and they rarely read the procurement plan.
Fire risk is increasingly a hydraulic problem
The hydraulic view of fire risk can sound clinical until one remembers what it clarifies: where failure truly occurs. A large incident is often the moment when several assumptions, each individually reasonable, collapse together.
The first assumption is that water supply is “static”—a background utility that will be there when called upon. That is occasionally true in dense urban areas with robust grids and multiple feeds. It becomes less true at the periphery, in hillside developments, in industrial zones with long private mains, and in any area where storage and pumping depend on uninterrupted power and intact distribution.
The second assumption is that demand is “local”—one or two hydrants, one building, one block. WUI fire behaviour now tends to defeat that assumption. Ember-driven spotting can create many ignitions across a wide area, effectively multiplying the number of “simultaneous structure fires” a water system must serve. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety has long stressed, in technical work on ember exposure, that wind-blown embers can account for the overwhelming majority of building ignitions in wildfire events—often cited as high as 90 per cent. [IBHS, Ignition Potential of Decks Subjected to an Ember Exposure]
Once ignitions are distributed, the water system is no longer supporting a single, bounded demand. It is supporting a cascade.
The third assumption is that the system remains intact as the incident unfolds. Yet in fast-moving WUI incidents, the destruction of buildings can itself become a hydraulic event: service laterals fail, sprinkler systems rupture, and uncontrolled flows bleed pressure precisely when firefighters are attempting to draw from hydrants. The state’s analysis of the Palisades fire pointed to this interaction between demand created by firefighting and demand created by leakage from already-destroyed structures. [California Natural Resources Agency, Palisades Fire and Water Supply Analysis Memo, Nov 2025] [CalMatters, Dec 2025]
This is not an American curiosity. Canada’s 2023 fire season—17.2 million hectares burned, with national preparedness at its highest level for a record period—showed how rapidly a system can move from “challenging” to “resource-saturated” when fire becomes a continental logistics problem rather than a provincial one. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre’s own seasonal report is explicit about duration, scale, and the degree of international mobilisation required. [CIFFC, Canada Report 2023 Fire Season]
Europe’s 2023 season, too, produced more than half a million hectares burned in the EU alone, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The number is less important than the trend it implies: fires are no longer neatly confined to “fire countries”, and that forces infrastructure—water, power, roads—into the centre of the risk conversation. [European Commission JRC, Apr 2024]
If one accepts this, the argument about firefighting changes. The core question becomes: what is the jurisdiction’s deliverable water architecture under stress? And who, precisely, is responsible for ensuring it?
Why “more trucks” is often a comforting mistake
The vehicle-centric doctrine of municipal firefighting has deep institutional roots. Fire services are operational organisations; they manage what they can train, crew, deploy and maintain. Vehicles are tangible, countable and politically legible. They also fit neatly into annual budgeting cycles: a capital request, a delivery, a photograph.
Water logistics are the opposite. They sit in buried assets, in inter-agency agreements, in pump curves, in plans for drafting and relay, and in the dull but decisive work of maintenance. They are rarely ribbon-cutting material.
The result is a classic capital logic error: institutions invest in visible capability at the edge, while the constraint sits upstream.
This is not to sneer at equipment. It is to note that engines and aircraft express their value only when fed. In the Palisades event, Los Angeles reportedly moved tankers to supplement supply, yet still saw pressure loss in parts of the system as storage depleted and replenishment could not keep pace. [AP, Jan 2025] [The Guardian, Jan 2025]
A pumper with no hydrant pressure is a well-built pump attached to an empty promise.
There is also a behavioural element. Political systems reward what can be announced and counted. It is far easier to defend expenditure on a new appliance than on a pressure zone upgrade, an emergency intertie, or a regional high-volume pumping capability that sits quietly until a bad day arrives. A mature governance model must assume, without offence, that incentives matter as much as intent.
Even in the United States—where wildfire suppression has consumed increasing attention and funding over decades—public-sector reviews have long noted the disruptive pattern of shifting funds to suppression when costs exceed appropriations, with knock-on effects on mitigation, planning and capability. That dynamic is not unique to wildfires, but it illustrates how organisations repeatedly pay for today’s emergency by borrowing from tomorrow’s resilience. [US GAO, GAO‑04‑612, 2004]
Ports, refineries and airports: where the standards already admit the truth
The “water as logistics” thesis becomes easier to accept when one looks at sectors that cannot afford romance.
Airports, for instance, treat firefighting not as a heroic improvisation but as a regulated performance under time and flow constraints. ICAO standards specify response times—typically two to three minutes to reach any point on the operational runway system—and set minimum discharge rates and quantities of water for foam production by aerodrome category. In the ICAO table, large aerodromes are associated with tens of thousands of litres of water and very high minimum discharge rates. [ICAO, Annex 14, Volume I, Table 9‑2]
The point is not the exact number for any one category; it is the institutional posture. Airports do not assume water will “somehow” be there. They treat deliverable agent as a compliance variable and plan accordingly.
The industrial world does something similar, albeit often through a blend of codes, insurer requirements and operator standards. Consider Buncefield, the 2005 oil storage depot fire in Hertfordshire. The Major Incident Investigation Board’s final report describes a response that required extraordinary volumes of firefighting media—water and foam—over a protracted period, with complex implications for mutual aid, environmental management, and supply logistics. [Buncefield Major Incident Investigation Board, Final Report, 2008]
One can argue about lessons from any single incident, but Buncefield demonstrates the core truth: at scale, “firefighting” is inseparable from moving and managing fluids. The assets at stake—fuel storage, terminals, critical supply nodes—are capital-intensive and systemically connected. The suppression problem therefore becomes one of sustained supply under constrained access, not simply one of equipment at the front.
In these settings, the public conversation is not “do we have enough hoses?” It is “do we have enough deliverable flow, redundancy, and trained capability to sustain it without collapsing the rest of the system?” Municipal firefighting is increasingly facing the same reality, but without the same governance architecture to compel the shift.
The infrastructure layer most cities do not talk about
There is a precedent for treating firefighting as a water-systems problem, and it is instructively old-fashioned. San Francisco, shaped by the memory of the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires, built a dedicated emergency firefighting water system—formerly the Auxiliary Water Supply System—separate from the domestic network. The city’s own description emphasises what matters: high pressure, independent supply, and the ability to draw effectively “unlimited” water from the Bay through pump stations, fireboats and suction connections, supported by a wide pipeline network, storage and cisterns. It is used year-round to fight multi-alarm fires, not merely as a museum piece. [San Francisco Public Works, Emergency Firefighting Water System]
San Francisco’s approach will not transplant neatly to every geography, but it makes the principle difficult to deny. Where the mandate is explicit—protect an urban core under compounded failure—cities build water infrastructure for fire. Where the mandate is implicit—“respond with what you have”—cities buy appliances and hope the domestic network behaves under conditions it was never designed to meet.
That gap is where logistics thinking enters, not as a technological boast but as an institutional correction.
Modular water relay: a temporary water main, assembled at speed
Between “a domestic grid that may fail under stress” and “a dedicated high-pressure system built over decades” lies a third category: modular, high-volume water movement that can be deployed rapidly to create a temporary water main from an open source to the incident edge.
The United Kingdom’s National Resilience capability offers a concrete illustration. Government guidance on environmental protection for the fire and rescue service describes high-volume pumps (HVPs) supplied as part of civil contingency arrangements. The specification is quietly revealing: roughly 7,000 litres per minute capacity, 3 kilometres of 150 mm hose per set, and the ability to operate alongside standard pumps to support or replace them at protracted incidents. The same guidance adds the sort of constraint that serious planning must include: abstraction from surface waters carries environmental and drinking-water risks and requires care and risk assessment. [UK Government, Fire and Rescue Manual: Environmental Protection]
The Environment Agency, writing about the same class of equipment, framed it as dual-use: assets introduced for flooding that can also support firefighting, including during moorland and forest fires, with each pump capable of moving roughly 7,000 litres per minute and supported by kilometres of hose. [Environment Agency, Dec 2018]
Parliamentary scrutiny of the “New Dimension” programme made a similar point in plainer terms: in a major incident, the ability to move large volumes of water over distance is itself a national capability, not an optional extra. [UK Parliament Public Accounts Committee, 2009]
This is what it looks like when a state treats water movement as resilience infrastructure. It creates optionality. It allows a fire service to turn a river, a reservoir, a dock basin—or, with appropriate safeguards, a flood retention area—into a supply node, and to connect that node to the incident footprint with a temporary distribution layer.
At this point the conversation ceases to be about “better hoses” and becomes about incident economics. A continuous high-volume relay changes what is possible: sustained exposure protection, more effective use of monitors, better support for foam systems, and the ability to keep multiple appliances working without the dead time of tender shuttles.
It also changes governance, because a modular water-main capability can be regionalised. It does not have to sit in every station; it can be held, maintained and trained as a shared asset, deployed under mutual aid when the incident exceeds local hydraulics. That is precisely what “national resilience” is meant to mean.
Hytrans as a case study in what logistics thinking produces
It is useful, occasionally, to name a manufacturer—not to advertise, but to make the abstraction concrete.
Hytrans, a Dutch specialist in mobile water transport systems, builds high-volume, modular pump units designed to access open water and deliver substantial flow under pressure. Their published specifications for one unit, the HydroSub 150, indicate capacities in the order of 1,000 gpm at 150 psi (with alternative configurations for higher flow at lower pressure), and a design intended to maintain operation in imperfect open-water conditions. [Hytrans, HydroSub 150 product specification]
Hytrans appears, not surprisingly, in public procurement documents where agencies seek precisely this sort of capability. A Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority report on procuring a high-flow flood pump refers to Hytrans as the manufacturer and sets out the logic of a specialist purchase under procurement rules—an institutional signal that, at least in some settings, the capability is treated as critical infrastructure rather than discretionary kit. [Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority, report on HFS14000 Flood Pump procurement]
The important point is not the brand. It is the category. Once an organisation thinks in logistics terms, it stops asking whether a new nozzle is marginally better than the last one and starts asking whether it can build a high-volume water corridor quickly, safely and repeatedly, under stress.
That shift is as much doctrinal as it is technical. It requires training, pre-planned water source mapping, traffic and hose management, environmental safeguards, and command structures that treat water supply as a strategic line of operation rather than a background detail.
Incident economics: water logistics and the price of failure
The question that tends to bring boards and treasuries into the conversation is not whether a pump is impressive, but whether the losses justify the investment.
Here, the insurance data are a useful proxy for the scale of destruction, and they also illuminate the capital consequences. Swiss Re estimates that, globally, wildfires generated roughly USD 106 billion in economic losses and USD 74 billion in insured losses over the decade 2014–2023 (in 2023 dollars), with the United States accounting for nine of the ten most expensive wildfire events since 1970 due to property concentration and high values in exposed areas. It also notes, with the understatement of a reinsurer, that rising wildfire losses have caused some insurers to curtail property coverage in heavily impacted regions. [Swiss Re Institute, Wildfires: Natural catastrophes in focus]
Zoom out further and the macro pattern is clearer. Swiss Re’s sigma research put 2023 global economic losses from natural catastrophes at roughly USD 280 billion, with USD 108 billion insured. It expects insured losses to continue following a long-term growth rate in the mid-single digits, which—compounded—becomes a strategic issue for insurance affordability, public budgets and, ultimately, investment confidence. [Swiss Re Institute, sigma 1/2024]
By late 2025, Swiss Re was estimating total insured losses of USD 107 billion for the year, again above the USD 100 billion mark, explicitly citing record wildfire losses in Los Angeles as a major driver. Munich Re’s own 2025 figures sit in the same order of magnitude. [Swiss Re Institute press release, 16 Dec 2025] [Munich Re, Natural disaster figures 2025, 13 Jan 2026]
This is the financial context in which “water logistics” stops sounding like operational pedantry and starts sounding like asset protection.
A high-volume pumping capability is not free. Nor is it politically frictionless: it sits between agencies, touches environmental regulation, requires training and maintenance, and may be used rarely. Yet the losses it can plausibly avert are not measured in the price of equipment, but in the survival of neighbourhoods, terminals, substations and production capacity. The logic resembles any other resilience investment: relatively modest capital expenditure to avoid low-frequency, high-impact balance-sheet shocks.
OECD work on climate-resilient infrastructure makes the generic point—that resilience protects investment returns and business continuity—without needing to mention fire specifically. Fire is simply one of the hazards that turns that macro principle into a local invoice. [OECD, Infrastructure for a Climate-Resilient Future, 2024]
Why this matters now, without hysteria
It is possible to discuss fire risk without performing panic. The relevant observation is not that “everything is unprecedented”, but that stress is becoming more routine.
The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate report for 2024 documents continued warming and the wider pattern of extremes that shape drought and fire weather. The Copernicus climate service describes 2024 as the warmest year in the instrumental record and frames it in terms of sustained temperature anomalies. [WMO, State of the Global Climate 2024] [Copernicus, Global Climate Highlights 2024]
One does not need to argue that climate is the only driver of fire disasters—land use, vegetation management, ignition sources and building vulnerability matter profoundly. But even if one held all those variables constant, the combination of heat, dryness and wind is sufficient to turn small problems into systemic ones, and systemic problems are precisely where logistics either holds or breaks.
The lesson from Canada’s 2023 season is instructive here: when conditions align, no single jurisdiction has “enough” resources in isolation, and the response becomes a mobilisation problem across personnel, aircraft, hose, pumps and mutual aid. That is not a comment on competence; it is a comment on scale. [CIFFC, Canada Report 2023 Fire Season]
Mandates and governance: why the water problem is orphaned
If the argument stopped at hydraulics, it would remain the property of engineers. The harder issue is institutional.
In most jurisdictions, the water utility’s mandate is safe potable supply and system reliability under defined contingencies. The fire service’s mandate is emergency response and life safety, delivered through staffing, training and deployable assets. Those mandates intersect during a fire, but they do not merge. When the system fails under extreme demand, it is rarely obvious which organisation “owned” the risk—because the risk lived in the seam.
Airports and major industrial sites avoid this ambiguity by turning water and agent delivery into explicit standards, contracts and inspections. Municipalities often do not. They rely on assumptions: that the domestic system will meet fire-flow needs; that storage will be full; that pumps will run; that roads will be passable; that mutual aid will arrive; that the incident will remain bounded.
The Palisades episode illustrates the point without requiring scapegoats. The state memo notes that the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty at ignition because repairs were required to maintain safe drinking water, and it identifies deliverability constraints rather than regional supply scarcity as the core issue. That is exactly how an “orphan risk” looks: the drinking-water imperative is legitimate, yet the fire-water consequence is still real. [California Natural Resources Agency, Palisades Fire and Water Supply Analysis Memo, Nov 2025]
The policy implication is uncomfortable but clear. If societies expect urban water systems to serve as the backbone of megafire response, then those systems must be planned, funded and regulated with that duty in mind. If they are not, then fire services must be given an alternative water logistics layer that can be mobilised rapidly, with clear environmental and operational protocols.
Either path is governance-heavy. Both require a capital plan rather than a shopping list.
The institutional opportunity is that many of the necessary capabilities are dual-use. High-volume pumping systems are valuable for floods, industrial incidents, infrastructure failures and wildfire response. That makes them easier to justify as shared resilience assets—if, and only if, procurement, training and command are aligned across agencies. The UK’s National Resilience model is one way of expressing that alignment: central support, local hosting, common standards, deployable assets. [UK Government, Fire and Rescue Manual: Environmental Protection] [Fire England, National Resilience overview]
What “logistics-first firefighting” looks like in practice
A logistics-first approach does not sneer at frontline skill; it protects it. It also changes what leaders measure.
The first metric is time-to-sustained-flow. “First water” is not enough if it arrives in bursts and dies when storage depletes. The relevant question is whether the incident commander can count on a continuous, high-volume supply for the period in which structure-to-structure spread is most likely.
The second is source optionality. If hydrants fail, where does water come from? Rivers, lakes, docks and reservoirs may be available, but only if access, abstraction, filtration, environmental controls and hose routing have been thought through before the smoke arrives. The UK guidance is explicit that abstraction decisions carry environmental risk and must be assessed. This is not bureaucracy; it is continuity. [UK Government, Fire and Rescue Manual: Environmental Protection]
The third is distribution strategy. High-volume pumps do not magically solve “last mile” problems. They create a backbone. Fire services still need staging, portable tanks, manifolds, pressure control, and the discipline to avoid simply moving the bottleneck from the water system to the incident ground.
The fourth is interdependence planning. Water systems depend on power, communications and transport. A fire that knocks out electricity can turn pumping stations into dead weight. Conversely, a water relay that relies on diesel power packs may be more resilient in the first hours than electrically driven municipal pumping, provided fuel logistics are secure.
The final element is doctrine. None of this works if treated as exotic equipment wheeled out once a decade. It must be trained, exercised and written into operational playbooks, with command structures that understand that water logistics is not a support function but a primary line of effort.
In the end, this is what “execution realism” looks like: acknowledging that outcomes are decided less by the catalogue of assets than by whether the system can deliver the critical input—water—when everything else is going wrong.
A closing thought: give firefighters what they actually fight with
Fire has always been partly a battle of materials and partly a battle of institutions. The materials are obvious: fuel, heat, wind, water. The institutions are quieter: who funds what, who maintains what, who is mandated to plan for compounded failure, and who bears the loss when assumptions collapse.
The political habit is to reward what is seen at the edge—the appliance, the aircraft, the uniform. The strategic habit is to invest where constraints live. Increasingly, the constraint is water movement: the ability to create high-volume, reliable flow under stress, from whatever source remains, to wherever the fire is eating value.
Hytrans and other providers in this space are not the story. They are a proof that the right category of thinking—modular, high-volume, rapidly deployable water transport—exists and is already being institutionalised in some systems through national resilience programmes and public procurement. [Hytrans, HydroSub 150 product specification] [UK Government, Fire and Rescue Manual: Environmental Protection] [Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority procurement report]
The question for leaders is whether their own mandates, governance structures and capital plans have caught up. If they have not, the next “unprecedented” fire will feel uncannily familiar: enough bravery, enough kit, and not enough water where it mattered.
