President-elect Donald Trump has used the devastating Los Angeles wildfires to revisit a political disagreement with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, fueling a series of complaints that experts say are false or misleading.
This week, Trump blamed Newsom for the fires, which killed at least 10 people, forced 180,000 to evacuate and burned more than 10,000 structures.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allows beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is to blame for this,” Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Water availability has been a particular concern in recent days after some fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades temporarily ran dry as firefighters attempted to contain a massive fire there.
But three water policy experts said the problem wasn’t the water supply: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power filled all available water storage tanks before the fires.
Rather, they said the city’s water infrastructure was not equipped to combat large wildfires.
After the hydrants ran dry, the water department attributed the problem to excessive demand on the system. The department couldn’t refill the tanks fast enough, he said, so pressure dropped and water had a hard time reaching hydrants in the hills. a reservoir in Palisades that could have helped with water pressure was also out of service when the fire started.
Power outages further disrupted the flow of water to the hydrants. President Joe Biden said in a public address Thursday that utility companies cut power due to concerns about more fires breaking out, which in turn disrupted water pumps. “Cal Fire is bringing in generators to get these pumps running again,” he said.
Newsha Ajami, director of research development at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said it can be easy to misattribute these problems to water scarcity.
“I can understand that if you’re not a water person, you may not know all the details that go into this system,” he said.
part of Trump’s criticism apparently refers to a plan introduced during his first administration to redirect more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in Northern California to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities. Newsom’s administration opposed it, saying it would endanger fish species in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.
According to experts, the debate has nothing to do with the current fires, which were the product of strong winds and a long period without precipitation in California.
“Basically, bringing those two together is nothing short of irresponsible… It’s just pouring gasoline on the fire, and the fire is bad enough,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the Resources Defense Council. Natural. Gold worked in the Newsom administration in 2020, when the governor clashed with Trump over the Delta plan. Other experts have also said that wildfires are a product of extreme weather conditions and infrastructure that is not designed to handle wildfires.
Gold now sits on the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and noted that the region has abundant accessible water in reservoirs: “I’m not exaggerating when I say we have record storage right now.”
Los Angeles County gets its water from several different sources, including local aquifers and imported water from the Colorado River, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, and the Owens River in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains.
“In any year, there is a pretty rigorous process to allocate water based on availability, looking at what is stored and being able to evaluate how much water can be used this year versus what we need to save in case we have a drought next year. ”said Erik Porse, director of the California Water Resources Institute.
But Trump has accused Newsom of restricting those allocations to Southern California.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration presented to him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and northern snowmelt, to flow daily to many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning. in a practically apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.
Trump added that Newsom “wanted to protect an essentially useless fish called smelt by giving it less water (didn’t work!), but he didn’t care about the people of California.”
The Newsom administration sued the Trump administration in 2020 for failing to protect smelt species. But Newsom’s communications director, Izzy Gardon, said in a statement that “there is no document like the water restoration statement; “That is pure fiction.”
“The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Gardon added.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to NBC News’ question about which statement Trump was referring to.
California officials and the Biden administration agreed to a new water distribution plan in December. The plan increases water exports from the Delta to Southern California, but cuts exports to some farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
In addition to his criticism of Newsom, Trump also blamed Biden for problems with water supplies to the fire zones.
“THERE IS NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, THERE IS NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANK YOU JOSEPH!” Trump said Wednesday on Truth Social.
