Santa Rosa. Paradise. Boulder County. Lahaina. Los Angeles. All are places that have shown that American cities and their water systems weren’t built to withstand wildfire, experts say. Hydrants trickled. Pumps and treatment plants lost power. Chemical contaminants were sucked into pipes, requiring extensive and costly work. In Paradise alone, where the 2018 Camp Fire killed at least 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures, rebuilding the drinking water system is expected to cost $125 million and take three-and-a half more years. As wildfires grow more frequent and intense with climate change, and become a greater threat to cities, water utilities are reckoning with the reality that they must build back better. “People are starting to ask some of these same questions that people asked decades ago for hurricanes and earthquakes,” said Greg Hentschel, vice president of engineering at CST Industries, which makes water storage tanks. He noted the adoption of building regulations and new engineering standards to toughen the urban environment against those risks. Better water infrastructure by itself won’t protect neighborhoods from fire, experts say, and many of the ideas are expensive. But there are things that communities can do. Here are some of them: Remote shutoff valves As buildings burn, so do their pipes, which spill water until a utility worker can safely get in to shut off the supply valve. The delay can be hours or days, all while precious water for firefighting is lost. Since the Marshall Fire burned more than 500 homes in the city of Louisville, Colorado in 2021, the city has worked to install remote shutoff valves at meters at all the homes that have been rebuilt. It can “keep ourselves from death by a thousand cuts,” said Kurt Kowar, Louisville’s public works and utilities director. A standard meter costs around $400, while one with remote shutoff capabilities is about twice that. They require cell signal to operate, making them a possible vulnerability if telecommunications are lost where fire is burning, but Kowar says swift action can reduce that risk. Remote shutoff valves can be installed on main distribution pipes, too, allowing utilities to redirect water more easily to areas that need it. Emergency water sources There’s a simple idea for making water available to firefighting helicopters right in cities so they don’t have to fly to distant reservoirs or the ocean. They’re called “heli-hydrants” — concrete tanks that hold a few thousand gallons of water. Helicopters can fill up in less than a minute, and the heli-hydrant refills quickly from a gravity-fed tank. In November, a 5,000-gallon heli-hydrant in San Diego County was tapped nearly 30 times by aircraft fighting the 48-acre Garden Fire. The Rainbow Municipal Water District, a small utility that serves several unincorporated communities, paid around $200,000 to install its heli-hydrant in 2021 after the 2017 Lilac Fire burned more than 100 buildings nearby. Meanwhile, homes and businesses can take steps to protect themselves by storing water on site for firefighting. Some commercial properties and large residential properties, such as condos or apartment buildings, are already doing this, Hentschel said. Those tanks can range from $100,000 to millions of dollars depending on size. Individual homes and neighborhoods can do the same, but only if they have deep pockets. Hentschel estimated a tank to protect a 2,000-square-foot home could cost […]