As he drove away, he watched as the fire engulfed his garage.
“If we had water pressure, we would have been able to fight it,” Mr. Vilescas said, standing in front of the charred remains of his home.
He recalled seeing firefighters that night — as the community burned — sitting in their trucks, unable to help.
“I remember my rage. It was like ‘do something’, but they can’t – there is no water pressure,” he said. “It’s just outrageous. How could this happen?”
Some experts say the water shortage is caused by unprecedented demand, not mismanagement.
“The problem is that the scale of the disaster is so huge that thousands of firefighters and hundreds of fire engines are working on water,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute of Water Resources, told the BBC.
“Ultimately, only so much water can flow through the pipes at one time.”
