Responding to concerns circulating online, Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency officials said Monday the supply was not in any danger last week as firefighting efforts nearly surrounded the SCV, despite a local request to cut back on water usage until early Friday morning.  Questions about water pressure in the city of Los Angeles, which brought pointed questions during a recent news conference, made some ask whether SCV residents dodged a bullet last week.  In December, State Water Project maintenance on local pipelines, planned months in advance, prompted SCV Water to ask residents to lessen their outdoor watering for a week starting Jan. 6.  As the winds approached 100 mph Jan. 7 and fires began to burn out of control in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, state officials called off the SCV work and the normal water operations resumed. During this time, portions of the eastern and southern ends of the SCV, not areas in SCV Water’s service area, remained under evacuation warnings, according to Kevin Strauss, spokesman for SCV Water.   SCV Water then asked residents Thursday afternoon to continue the previously requested usage reduction until 5 a.m. Friday as “operations ramp back up.”  Strauss said Monday the request for reduced watering didn’t mean there was a supply concern.  In order for the state to perform pipeline maintenance, water officials would need to temporarily restrict access to their reservoir at Castaic Lake. But there would still be groundwater access and an extensive network of tanks.   “We’re using groundwater to … fill up all of our storage tanks, all of our local reservoirs, so we still had access to the same amount of storage that we would have had at a normal time had that work not been taking place,” Strauss said Monday. “All of our tanks were filled. All the hydrants run off of a connection, just like your house does. They could have tapped into any hydrant and pulled water from there, and we would have had the same amount of water flowing through the system on a regular day. We just had to increase our groundwater production to meet the demand from the residents and from businesses.”  During the maintenance project, for the preservation of life and property, SCV Water keeps a level officials refer to as “fire flow,” which is essentially the level needed per local and state regulators in order to maintain firefighting efforts, according to Strauss. The agency has 99 tanks throughout the SCV, most of which have at least 1 million gallons of capacity.   The supply question also was spurred by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s letter last week calling for an investigation into why the L.A. Department of Water and Power had a 117 million gallon Palisades reservoir offline for months. The empty reservoir was blamed for inadequate hydrant pressure in critical early firefighting efforts.  DWP officials said they were “correcting misinformation” in a response Saturday to questions about the reservoir, which had been offline since February.   “LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations,” according to officials. “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.”   Bill Cooper, a retired longtime leader for the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles and current governing board member for SCV Water, said state officials were very responsive to local officials once the fire danger became apparent.  “It’s one of those, luckily, they were able to stop the work and we got it all back into service,” Cooper said. “That’s the kind of thing that can get you into trouble, if you get to that (work) at the wrong time. I was very happy that the state Department of Water Resources stopped and said, ‘Let’s put the water back on, they’re going to need that,’ so we felt a lot more secure.”  Cooper also said that, in any scenario, it would be difficult for a municipal system to handle the kind of burden an Eaton or Palisades fire would create.  “When you have, say, a large complex, it’s commercial buildings that are on fire. You have no problem. And you have a number of homes that are on fire, you can handle all of that, and you have booster stations and pumps, and you can handle all that,” Cooper said in a phone interview Monday.   “If you have 150 homes in the same four-block area that are all on fire and you’re trying to pull water for all of those from around, that’s very hard,” he added. “Systems aren’t designed for that.”  He also said that, in the SCV, the water agency has done extensive studies on emergency storage, looking at everything from elevation to the impact on pressure zones to constantly monitoring the supply.   “When we start to see weather like this, we make sure those are all full and we’re at capacity, just in case something would happen,” Cooper said. “And when this thing hit and these fires came through, (state officials) stopped the work and said, ‘We will come back next year.’”  There are still a few places where SCV Water is looking to put more towers, he added, due to the SCV’s growth. The supply is supported by two interconnected main water treatment plants at the same elevation, Cooper said, which has helped in emergency scenarios.   While the SCV, particularly within Santa Clarita city limits, mostly was spared from fire damage last week, officials like L.A. Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley repeatedly issued the message Monday, “We’re not out of the woods yet,” as officials braced for more winds.  “We can make sure that we’ve got water supply from whichever area we need it,” Cooper said, “and then with the booster stations all throughout the system that are pulling off of larger pipelines and pumping it up in these tanks, I think we’re in pretty good shape.”  The post SCV Water discusses supply after narrow miss  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.