Reality television stars Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag have filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and the Department of Water and Power (LADWP) after losing their home in the Pacific Palisades fire.
Filed Tuesday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the Laguna Beach and The Hills stars alleged that the city owes them compensation for damages based on inverse condemnation or damage caused by public use. Per the Los Angeles Times:
In this case, the reality TV personalities, along with more than 20 other property owners, tenants and individuals who suffered as a result of the Palisades fire, blamed the city and the utility’s operation of its water supply and related infrastructure for causing damage to their properties.
The complaint cited reports about the Santa Ynez Reservoir — the reservoir meant to service Pacific Palisades — being offline and emptied before the fire erupted Jan. 7. According to Los Angeles Times reporting, the 117-million gallon reservoir was offline for repairs since early 2024. The reservoir remains empty, and DWP’s chief of water operations told The Times that repairs requested ‘ASAP’ in January 2024 would not be done until April or May of 2025.
The Palisades fire burned more than 23,400 acres of land along with over 6,600 structures. Critics of the lawsuit have said that the Santa Ynez Reservoir may have helped increase water pressure during the blaze while arguing it would have made little difference due to the massive winds, which also severely prevented the use of planes and helicopters at the start.
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In the lawsuit, Montag and Pratt said that the DWP had made a “conscious decision to operate the water supply system with the reservoir drained and unusable as a ‘cost-saving’ measure,” further alleging that the department designed the water system so that “it would not have enough water pressure to fight an urban fire.”
“On information and belief, the Palisades Fire was an inescapable and unavoidable consequence of the water supply system servicing areas in and around Pacific Palisades as it was planned and constructed,” said the lawsuit. “The system necessarily failed, and this failure was a substantial factor in causing Plaintiffs to suffer the losses alleged in this Complaint.”
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