Rick Caruso, a former commissioner of the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power, said there were warning signs before multiple fires broke out across Southern California.

Almost 180,000 Californians have received evacuation notices and at least five people have died as multiple wildfires are spreading across the region. While power has been restored to most areas, the hardest-hit neighborhoods are under a boil water notice and have been asked to conserve water to help fight the fires.

“We’ve got a real leadership issue here,” Caruso said Wednesday on Fox News’s Hannity. “They clearly were not prepared for the kind of fire that was gonna be coming. But in Los Angeles, we got warnings days ahead of time. Catastrophic wind, you got the Santa Monica mountains that had little vegetation removed in decades so you had an enormous amount of fuel. That combination alone should have warned everybody in the city that we’ve got to be overprepared for this, and they weren’t.”

Caruso, who owns the Palisades Village, received reports that there is not enough water. The city has a long-standing problem with supplying the hydrants in the area with water from the nearby reservoirs, he said.

“The reservoirs which feed the hydrants, from what I’ve been told, ran out very quickly, and the city wasn’t replenishing the reservoirs quick enough,” Caruso explained.

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Caruso is a Los Angeles developer of high-end hotels and shopping centers. He left the Republican Party to become a Democrat before he launched his mayoral bid in 2022, which he lost to Mayor Karen Bass.

Meanwhile, Bass cut $17.6 million from the emergency services budget, which directly compromised fire departments.