Trump makes erroneous accusations about California water management amid wildfires

President-elect Donald Trump used the devastating fires in Los Angeles to revisit a political disagreement with California Governor Gavin Newsom, pushing a series of complaints that experts say are false or misleading.

Trump this week blamed Newsom for the fires, which killed at least 10 people, forced 180,000 people to evacuate and burned more than 10,000 structures.

I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow to CALIFORNIA! He is responsible for this, Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Water availability has been of particular concern in recent days after some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades temporarily went dry as firefighters tried to contain a massive blaze.

But three water policy experts said the problem was not water supply. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power filled all available water facility storage tanks prior to the fires.

Rather, the city's water infrastructure was not equipped to fight major wildfires, they said.

After the hydrants ran dry, the water department attributed the problem to excessive demand on the system. The department couldn't fill the tanks fast enough, he said, so pressure dropped and water had trouble reaching fire hydrants in the hills. A reservoir in the Palisades that could have contributed to the water pressure was also out of service when the fire broke out.

Power outages further disrupted the flow of water to fire hydrants. President Joe Biden said in a public address Thursday that utilities had cut off power because of concerns about starting new fires, which would have disrupted water pumps. Cal Fire is bringing in generators to get those pumps going and running again, he said.

Newsha Ajami, research development manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said it can be easy to wrongly attribute these problems to water scarcity.

I can understand that if you're not a water enthusiast per se, you may not know all the details of this system, she said.

Part of Trump's criticism apparently refers to a plan presented during his first administration to redirect more water from Northern California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Central Valley farms and cities in southern California. The Newsoms administration opposed it, saying it would endanger fish species in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

Experts say the debate has nothing to do with the current fires, which are the result of high winds and a long period without rain in California.

In fact, tying these two together is simply irresponsible. Just add fuel to the fire, and the fire is bad enough, said Mark Gold, director of water shortage solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gold worked in the Newsoms administration in 2020, when the governor clashed with Trump over the Delta plan. Other experts have also said that wildfires are the product of extreme weather conditions and infrastructure not intended to handle wildfires.

Gold now serves on the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and pointed out that the region has plenty of accessible reservoir water: I'm not exaggerating when I say we have record storage as we speak.

Los Angeles County gets its water from several different sources, including local aquifers and water imported from the Colorado River, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, and the Owens River in the eastern mountains of Los Angeles. the Sierra Nevada.

Each year there is a fairly rigorous process for allocating water based on availability, looking at what is stored and being able to assess how much water can be used this year versus what we need to save for drought next year. said Erik Porse, director of the California Institute for Water Resources.

But Trump accused Newsom of limiting those allocations to Southern California.

Gov. Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration submitted to him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snowmelt from the North, to flow daily in many areas of California, including areas currently on fire. in a virtually apocalyptic manner, Trump wrote Wednesday.

Trump added that Newsom wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called smelt, by giving it less water (didn't work!), but didn't care about the people of California.

The Newsoms administration sued the Trump administration in 2020 for failing to protect the smelt species. But Newsoms communications director Izzy Gardon said in a statement that there is no document such as the water restoration declaration 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.

The Trump transition team did not respond to NBC News' inquiry into the 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 reduces exports to some farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.

In addition to his criticism of Newsom, Trump also blamed Biden for water supply problems in fire zones.

NO WATER IN FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY TO FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN LEFT ME. THANK YOU JOE! Trump said Wednesday on Truth Social.

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