Amid California fires, Trump accuses Newsom of withholding water. Experts disagree.

President Trump has repeatedly blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California leaders for the fires that devastated Los Angeles. The president accused state Democrats of stubbornly refusing to send enough water to Southern California to fight the fires, which he attributed to their desire to protect Delta smelt, a threatened fish.

But as Trump prepares to visit California on Friday, California water experts say his explanations are in many cases wrong or obscure complex water dynamics. They noted that Southern California’s reservoirs were generally full of water early this year and that there were other reasons for the firefighting problems.

Trump’s take on the situation could have very real consequences. He threatened on Wednesday to withhold federal relief funds if California didn’t move more water from the northern part of the state to the southern part. He also issued an executive order on his first day in office called “People Over Fish,” directing cabinet members to find ways to divert more water southward within 90 days.

The order brings to the fore California’s own long history of lawsuits and controversies over who should get the state’s precious water resources and how the state’s liquid gold can best serve its nearly 40 million residents and its agriculture, fisheries and and ecosystem services.

The mountain ranges along California’s spine—the Sierra Nevada and the southern end of the Cascades—are a critical part of the state’s water supply. The same storms that turn Yosemite National Park into a winter wonderland and create a ski playground near Lake Tahoe leave behind snow that melts into streams and rivers in the spring and summer.

While most of the state’s water is sourced and stored in Northern California, most of the state’s population lives in Southern California. And water-intensive agricultural industries are located in the Central Valley, where rainfall is never enough to sustain annual crops.

“Look, there’s one thing Gavin can do,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday. “He can release water from the north. There’s a lot of water here, rain and mountain water, and they’re also coming down as the snow melts, and there’s so much water, they’re releasing it into the Pacific Ocean.

But experts say the state’s water supply to Southern California had nothing to do with the fires that raged out of control on the night of Jan. 7 and destroyed more than 10,000 structures.

“There are a lot of things you can say that will make California look bad, but if you want to be realistic, this is not one of them,” said Jay Lund, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, who studies water.

complex water center

When Trump and other Republicans criticize California for sending water to the Pacific Ocean, they are referring to agreements that ensure the state sends enough fresh water downstream to protect critical ecosystems. Some of this water ends up in the ocean.

It all culminates in Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where the saltwater of San Francisco Bay mixes with the freshwater of the river. The Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast and is extremely sensitive, both environmentally and politically.

Through the Delta, state and federal governments provide running water to two-thirds of the state’s population and irrigation water for millions of acres of farms, while a labyrinth of levees, pumps and islands controls the balance of salt and fresh water. How much water to pump has been a bone of contention in the drought-prone state for decades, and the most political target in the fight has been one of its smallest residents. One: Delta Smelt.

After the fire, Trump called it “an essentially worthless fish” that Newsom wanted to protect.

The delta region was once teeming with smelt, which played an important role in the ecosystem by providing food for countless fish and birds. Now endangered, experts say they provide a different ecosystem benefit: helping conserve other native fish that also require a certain amount of freshwater flowing into the estuary.

“There are many different species of fish that need protection and management,” said Peter Moyle, professor emeritus at the Center for Watershed Science at the University of California, Davis. “If we don’t take these fish into consideration, they will disappear one at a time.”

For decades, however, smelt have represented one thing to many farmers in the Central Valley: competing demands for irrigation water.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has targeted the delta smelt, an unassuming-looking fish found only in California. In 2019, it weakened protections for fish, a move hailed as a victory for farmers.

“If President Trump manages to find a way to move more water south, his actions will cause serious problems for agriculture in the Delta and the northern half of the state,” Dr Moyle said.

Jon Rosenfield, scientific director of the advocacy group San Francisco Baykeeper, said the smelt is one of seven threatened or endangered fish species in the Delta that have been affected by excessive transfers. of water and causing habitat degradation. These include steelhead trout, green sturgeon and two species of Chinook salmon. Other Chinook have fared so badly in recent years that the state’s salmon fishery had to close in the past two years.

“You will never hear Donald Trump or his allies talk about endangered Chinook salmon or closed salmon fisheries. You will never hear him talk about green sturgeon,” Dr. Rosenfeld said. “Why? Because people know what salmon and sturgeon are.

Even under the stricter rules put in place before 2019, regulations specifically related to Delta smelt would have resulted in an average increase of no more than 1.2% in water flowing into San Francisco Bay, according to an analysis he helped conduct.

Infrastructure issues in Pacific Palisades

It’s well-documented that some Pacific Palisades firefighters ran out of water the night the blaze swept through the community, and their hoses ran dry as they tried to extinguish the flames. Water pressure dropped and fire hydrants were unable to keep up with the demand for house-to-house firefighting throughout the community.

Meanwhile, a reservoir in Pacific Palisades that provides millions of gallons of water has been emptied for repairs.

Mr. Trump used these examples to support his argument that California is failing to provide enough water to Southern California. But neither problem is caused by northern water diversion.

Multiple experts say Pacific Palisades’ municipal water system, like many American communities, was never built to fight wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes. That night, the tank and pump system serving the hillside community simply couldn’t keep up.

In late December, water levels in reservoirs around Los Angeles were high, Dr. Lund said. The biggest problem, he noted, was high winds that grounded the planes and helicopters that normally control wildfires.

“There’s enough water stored in Southern California to submerge fire-affected areas in 20 feet of water, but you can’t transport water to those places,” he said.

State reservoirs that store water for Southern California residents remain at 100 percent or more of normal levels for this time of year.

“Water levels in state reservoirs are at or near record highs, and issues surrounding the Endangered Species Act have been litigated, ruled and politicized for as long as I’ve been alive,” Newsom said Thursday before the meeting. Mr. Trump comes to visit. “They are not new to this administration. They go back to George H.W. Bush.

Pacific Northwest?

In recent days, Mr. Trump has mentioned a water pipeline that doesn’t exist.

“Los Angeles has a lot of available water,” he said at a news conference Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve, which is the valve that comes back up and down from the Pacific Northwest, where millions of gallons of water are pouring in every week and every day, and even in many cases, pouring into California and flowing through everywhere. .and then they shut it down.

Trump also said California leaders are diverting water through valves to the Pacific Ocean.

But there are no valves to control the vast amounts of water pouring out of the Pacific Northwest. Californians have previously floated the idea of ​​building a pipeline in Oregon and Washington, but building a system capable of carrying water over long distances and across towering mountains has long been considered cost-prohibitive.

Officials in Washington and Oregon would face political problems if they agreed to send the water south. However, states do export a byproduct of water to California in the form of hydroelectric power via large transmission lines.

“It’s hard to explain what he’s talking about because no one knows what he’s talking about,” said John Booth, general counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. “The idea that a valve and water will flow is ridiculous.”

Delivering water to the south to benefit farmers

Farmers, who have been fighting for decades to get more water through the delta, are most likely to benefit from moves to divert water south.

While Trump’s debate this month has focused on aiding firefighters in Pacific Palisades and getting water to Southern California residents, farms have historically used many times as much water as the state’s residents.

The president has repeatedly described past visits to Central Valley farms with former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and other congressional Republicans as appearing to influence his faith. He made clear he wants more water to benefit California farms.

“I look at these vast tracts of land and it looks like it’s burning,” Trump told Hannity on Wednesday. “It’s dark and dry. And then there’s a little patch, a little patch of green, beautiful green.

“I would say, ‘Why are there all these little plots of land on this land?’ They said, ‘That’s all we’re allowed to farm because we have no water. “I said: “Have you encountered a drought there? ‘ ‘No. They’ve turned off the water. They’ve turned off the northern spigot to protect the Delta smelt.

Mike Wade is executive director of the California Farm Water Alliance, which advocates for more water exports for farmers concentrated in the Central Valley. He said the president’s comments about Pacific Northwest valves may just be a metaphor for managing the Delta’s water supply, an organization that has worked well with the Biden and Trump administrations.

Mr Wade said farmers desperately needed more water.

“If you look at the last 25 years or so, we’ve seen a million acres of agricultural land go out of production, primarily because of a lack of water supply,” he said. “We have land, so if we had water we could farm more land than we do now.”

Adam Nagouni Reporting from Los Angeles.