Is it possible that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass won’t be ousted over the various apocalyptic fires of the last few days? If at least 15 percent of eligible voters sign a recall petition within a proscribed period, she’s toast.

The facts don’t matter — the fire hydrants running dry is her fault and that’s that. Plus she was off making whoopee in Ghana during the first 36 hours of the fire…forget it, she’s done.

Governor Gavin Newsom can’t run for re-election in ’26 (term limits) but if he runs for president in ’28 (which he should do, I think) he’ll have to explain the failure of the Los Angeles water system to combat the inferno.

Like I said, the facts don’t matter. But yesterday morning laist’s Kevin Tidmark explained what went wrong. It boils down to the fact that the water system wasn’t built to handle a catastrophic fire of this size, and after about 15 or 20 hours of constant, massive drainage from fire hoses spraying at full force, water pressure in the uphill regions simply gave out.

Here’s some of what Tidmark wrote:

“LADWP’s explanation for the shortage comes down to three nearby water tanks, each with a storage capacity of about a million gallons. These tanks help maintain enough pressure for water to travel in uphill areas through pipes to homes and fire hydrants — but the pressure had decreased due to heavy water use, and officials knew the tanks couldn’t keep up the drain forever.

“’We pushed the system to the extreme,’ LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference. ‘Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”

“According to LADWP, the tanks’ water supply needed to be replenished in order to provide enough pressure for the water to flow through fire hydrants uphill. But officials said as firefighters drew more and more water from the trunk line, or main supply, they used water that would have refilled the tanks, eventually depleting them.

“That decreased the water pressure, which is needed for fire hydrants to work in higher elevations.

“'[Please] understand there’s water on the trunk line, [but] it just cannot get up the hill because we cannot fill the tanks fast enough,’ Quiñones said.”

“Easterners commonly complain that there is no ‘weather’ at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading.

“In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.

“At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.

“The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in ‘The Day of the Locust’, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.” — Joan Didion essay on the Santa Ana winds from “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”