A plan to provide firefighters in Los Angeles and Orange counties almost limitless seawater to fight fires has been stalled for more than a decade, despite the ever-looming threat of mass fires fueled by quakes and high winds.
“I think the fire service just didn’t see the need for it in Southern California,” recalled Charles Scawthorn, a UC Berkeley researcher and engineer who first developed the emergency water supply concept back in 2011.
Scawthorn, who studies the behavior of mass fires that often follow earthquakes, developed his proposal at the time on behalf of the state’s Seismic Safety Commission…