MTV Reality Stars Sue LA After Hydrants Ran Dry In Palisades Firefight

PACIFIC PALISADES, CA — Reality stars Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, who lost their home in the Palisades Fire, are two of the latest homeowners suing the city of Los Angeles for what they claim is failures in water management that made it hard for firefighters to battle the destructive blaze.

“The Palisades Fire was an inescapable and unavoidable consequence of the egregious failure of the water supply system servicing areas in and around Pacific Palisades, including having an empty water reservoir. This failure was a substantial factor in causing my clients and others to suffer enormous losses,” their attorney, Peter McNulty, said in a statement.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which services Pacific Palisades, was offline before the fire started on Jan. 7, "leaving fire crews little-to-no water to fight the Palisades Fire," according to the suit.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power "made the conscious decision to operate the water supply system with the reservoir drained and unusable as a ‘cost-saving’ measure. With the Santa Ynez Reservoir effectively out of commission, hydrants in Pacific Palisades failed after three tanks each holding one million gallons of water went dry within a span of 12 hours," the suit reads.

LADWP in a statement earlier this month said the utility "was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations. To commission the support and resources to implement repairs to Santa Ynez, LADWP is subject to the city charter's competitive bidding process which requires time.

"The water system serving the Pacific Palisades area and all of Los Angeles meets all federal and state fire codes for urban development and housing. LADWP built the Pacific Palisades water system beyond the requirements to support the community's typical needs."

DWP officials said a drop in water pressure experienced by fire crews was "due to unprecedented and extreme water demand to fight the wildfire without aerial support. This impacted our ability to refill the three water tanks supplying the Palisades causing the loss of suction pressure. This
impacted 20 percent of the hydrants in the area, mostly in the higher elevations."

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Jan. 10 ordered an investigation into Los Angeles' public water infrastructure due to the hydrants running dry and the reservoir being empty, which he wrote was deeply troubling to me and the community," Newsom wrote in a letter to water officials.

"We need answers to how that happened," Newsom wrote.

Others who have lost their homes in the Palisades Fire are suing the Southern California Edison Co.

Pratt, 41, and Montag, 38, are former cast members on "The Hills," the popular MTV reality show that ran from 2006-2010. The couple's Pacific Palisades home was destroyed in the fire.

“It’s a place that you love that you live, it’s a refuge from the world. And to have that be gone, it’s a really difficult concept to continue to daily deal with,” Montag said in an interview with "Good Morning America" in the wake of the fire. "We were 'house poor' as they call it. We have a house and everything else is a hustle, is a grind. So yeah, we’re definitely counting every dollar that we make. We’re working really hard to take one trip a year.”

A representative for the City Attorney's Office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

City News Service contributed to this report.