Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire

More water is helpful, but only up to a point:

> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.

> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.

[…]

> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.

> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.

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