The Expert Podcast

Okay, so we've all seen the information on the fires from California, and one of the things that we keep seeing on the news is about how there was that one, um, reservoir that was empty. The question is how much water was in there, or could have been in there, and was that enough to put out the fire? So, I just did some basic math using a calculator, and let's take a look and see what the math says.

First of all, that reservoir held 117 million gallons, and it was empty. The question is, well, what if it was full? Is that enough water? How much water is that compared to the fire? Well, first, we have to know how many houses were there. The math says that roughly 12,000 structures were destroyed. Now, structures include sheds, cars, things like that, but even if we just use 12,000 total structures that were houses (which is probably not the case), if you take 117 million divided by 12,000, what do we come up with?

117 million divided by 12,000 is 9,750 gallons per house. So, if you took that reservoir (117 million gallons) and divided it equally over the 12,000 houses, that would have given you 9,750 gallons per house to fight the fire for each house.

Well, how many gallons do you need to fight a fire? Here's an article from, um, actually, This Old House that says on average firefighters use nearly 3,000 gallons of water on a house fire. Okay, that's a lower number. How do you calculate this? This is from a website called Firehouse. It gets into the scientific math and calculations, such as fire flow length and width. For example, the formula can be applied to a single-family dwelling 60 feet long by 20 feet wide. That would be 400 gallons per minute. Well, if you fought the house fire for 10 minutes, that would be 4,000 gallons. For 20 minutes, that would be 8,000 gallons.

You could probably fight a fire on a single-family house for 20 minutes using that math and still have some left over.

Now, I understand, I get it. There's more factors than just the water. You have to have enough hoses to connect up, you have to have enough firefighters, enough fire trucks, right? It's not just the water you need; you need other stuff. If all 12,000 houses are on fire at the same time, there's not enough people to put them all out, even with the water. But they probably weren't all on fire at the same time, and probably some of them, if you put them out, would have kept the other ones from catching on fire.

The point isn't to determine who did right, who did wrong, or who's at fault. The point is, does the math work? 117 million divided by 12,000 houses gives you 9,750—roughly 10,000 gallons per house. That seems like, on average, four times what an average house fire takes. Now, an average house fire might not be a fully involved house burning to the ground; it might just be one room catching on fire or a kitchen fire. But even if you multiply this by three (right?), that's still 9,000 gallons, which is still less than the total.

So tell me what your thoughts are. I understand this is oversimplifying the problem. There's more to it—the number of firefighters, access to fire trucks—but there's also each one of those factors too. The number of firefighters was lower than it could have been because of budgets. The number of fire trucks was lower because a lot of them were in the shop and weren't getting fixed. So there's a lot of factors at play, but each one of those factors also has another story behind it, not just the water.

Tell me what you think about this math: 117 million divided by 12,000 equals 9,750—that’s three times what an average firefighter uses. It's 20 minutes worth of 100% involvement. This is 100% involvement—400 gallons per minute, 20 minutes at 400 gallons per minute is 8,000 gallons. So you can go more than 20 minutes; you can probably go for half an hour. Is half an hour enough to put out a fire on a single-family house? I'm not sure, but this is just some fun math in a terrible situation to see exactly what we're talking about for numbers.

Let me know in the comments what you think. Or did I do the math wrong?

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