California water agencies could soon have a powerful new legal shield against lawsuits blaming them when fire hydrants run dry during a wildfire. Senate Bill 1153, which cleared the state Legislature with unanimous votes in both chambers, would make clear in state law that public water systems have no duty to be designed, built, or maintained for wildfire suppression — and now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature.
The measure passed the Senate 40-0 on August 30, following a 77-0 vote in the Assembly, and heads to the governor's desk at a moment when California water utilities are facing enormous financial exposure from fire litigation, according to the Los Angeles Times. Written by Sen. Anna Caballero of Merced and sponsored by the Assn. of California Water Agencies, which represents roughly 470 public agencies, SB 1153 would establish that the inability to maintain water supply or pressure during a wildfire is not a substantial cause of fire damage. Karla Nemeth, whose comments were cited in the Times report, said the bill would strengthen emergency preparedness while clarifying the role of water suppliers.
The Palisades Fire and an Empty Reservoir
The push for statutory clarity traces directly back to the January 2025 Palisades Fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. During the fire, the Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades sat empty and dry while neighborhoods burned; the 117-million-gallon reservoir had been drained for lengthy repairs, and separate mass-tort filings in Los Angeles Superior Court allege that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power delayed those repairs for nearly a year after discovering a cover tear in February 2024, as reported by Smart Cities Dive. Governor Newsom ordered an independent state investigation into LADWP that same month, calling the infrastructure failure “deeply troubling,” per Firehouse Magazine's coverage of the fallout.
Even so, state officials found that the area's pipe system would have quickly lost pressure even if the reservoir had been full, and that draining it had been necessary to protect public health, according to the Times. As the fire spread, the broader water system lost pressure as crews drew heavily on hydrants, residents ran sprinklers and hoses, and pipes melted, while hillside tanks ran out of water entirely. Lawyers for Pacific Palisades residents have argued that the city and LADWP are liable for the losses, and in February the City of Malibu filed a civil complaint seeking $250 billion in damages against the State of California, the City of Los Angeles, LADWP, and other entities over the fire, according to reporting cited from the Daily Journal.
A Legal Doctrine With an Expensive History
The stakes behind SB 1153 rest on California's inverse condemnation doctrine, a strict-liability rule that lets property owners sue public agencies when private property damage is substantially caused by inherent risks of a public improvement's design, construction, or maintenance. Under the California Supreme Court's 2019 decision in City of Oroville v. Superior Court, that standard governs whether a public water system can be held liable — and SB 1153 directly references it by declaring that wildfire spread is not an inherent risk of drinking water system design, according to a summary from Nossaman LLP.
The financial precedent looms large. In 2012, a California court awarded Orange County homeowners more than $69 million in inverse condemnation damages against the Yorba Linda Water District after electrical pumping station failures caused hydrants to run dry during the 2008 Freeway Complex Fire, per Berger Kahn. Similar hydrant pressure loss has occurred during the 2017 Tubbs and Thomas fires, the 2018 Woolsey Fire, and the 2024 Mountain Fire, underscoring how often California water systems buckle under wildfire demand rather than domestic firefighting loads.
What the Bill Would and Would Not Change
Starting January 1, 2028, SB 1153 would require urban retail water suppliers serving 3,300 or more people in high or very high fire hazard severity zones to build incident-specific wildfire response procedures into their emergency preparedness plans — procedures that could include equipment and actions to lessen a fire's impact on a water system. UCLA researcher Greg Pierce called the legislation a step in the right direction, according to the Times. Elisa Rivera, also quoted in that report, said the bill is about preparing water systems for wildfires while recognizing their practical limits.
Importantly, the bill does not change the underlying legal standards for these claims and explicitly does not limit liability for damages resulting from negligence, according to the Times report. That distinction matters for the ongoing Palisades Fire litigation, where the dispute centers on whether LADWP's yearlong delay in repairing the Santa Ynez Reservoir cover amounts to negligence rather than an inherent design limitation — a question SB 1153 leaves for courts to decide even as it could guide judges in future wildfire-related cases.
Why Water Systems Struggle With Wildfires
Research from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation found that hydrants losing pressure during catastrophic urban wildfires is a common occurrence across Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Arizona, and California, rooted in a fundamental mismatch: domestic drinking water systems are designed to provide safe, clean water and handle small structure fires, not multi-neighborhood wildland conflagrations. A separate April 2026 report from the same center found that California's Proposition 218 tax and fee restrictions create major hurdles for water suppliers trying to fund dedicated wildfire-resilience upgrades without triggering legal challenges over rate affordability.
Some agencies have found workarounds within those constraints. Water agencies in the Orange County Water District service area have installed specialized helicopter hydrants capable of filling 2,000-gallon aerial firefighting tanks in 56 seconds in wildland-urban interface zones, according to the district. Ventura County has taken a different approach: state Sen. Steve Bennett said the public wants to know whether water districts have backup generators and how they prepare so they do not run out of water prematurely. His Ventura County bill, approved in 2025, now requires local water agencies to top off tanks after county emergency officials warn of dangerous weather and to maintain backup power capable of keeping pumps running during an outage — after past fires left Ventura County water pumps useless when the power went out.
A broader statewide version of that idea did not survive this year. Assembly Bill 2013 would have required water suppliers in high or very high fire-risk areas to assess how many pumps they need to maintain flow and to publicly report how many of those pumps have emergency backup power, but it died in the Legislature in 2026. SB 1153, meanwhile, is framed by its backers as aiming to strengthen preparedness while protecting water agencies and their ratepayers from unreasonable expectations and costs — leaving the harder question of who pays for hardening these systems against fire largely unresolved.
