While new blazes fanned by whipping Santa Ana winds have sparked across Southern California this week, firefighters have continued to make significant progress on some of the state’s most destructive wildfires that continue to burn.
Trump’s slew of misinformation about the disaster hasn’t helped.
Los Angeles County’s response to the furious fires — which have resulted in the deaths of 28 people and left thousands without homes in some of the area’s most affluent communities — has been put under a microscope since they started more than two weeks ago, following months without rain and hurricane-force winds.
Officials have faced harsh criticism from politicians and residents alike. Newly sworn-in President Donald Trump and Republicans have traded shots at California’s Democratic leadership, insisting that more could have been done to help prevent the tragedy. But, many of the president’s statements about how the Golden State should have prepared and other related logistical elements have been ignorant of the role of climate change and are rooted in inaccuracy and a contentious relationship with Governor Gavin Newsom.
Trump, who is planning to visit California on Friday following an invitation from the governor, had a lot to say this week about the state’s water resources that Newsom has sought to correct.
“Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn the valve, and that’s the valve coming back from and down from the Pacific Northwest where millions of gallons of water a week and a day even, in many cases, pours into California, goes all through California down to Los Angeles,” Trump said, speaking at a press conference about artificial intelligence investments. “And, they turned it off.”
While this isn’t the first time the president has brought up getting water from Canada, where exactly this “valve” is remains unclear.
Media outlets have suggested that he could be referring to the Columbia River, which flows from Canada into the Northwest and the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. and Canada have been negotiating for years to modernize the 61-year-old Columbia River Treaty, which governs the waters of the river. Notably, the State Department updated its webpage detailing the process on the same day as Trump’s “valve” remarks. But, there is currently no infrastructure to send that water southward.
Roughly two-thirds of Los Angeles County’s water comes from outside sources via aqueducts: a system of pipes, tunnels and canals that transport the water. It flows there from the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Colorado River. The county also gets water from the Los Angeles River, the San Gabriel River and groundwater represents a significant portion of local supplies.
The state says that reservoirs are at historical highs and that a change in water management in Northern California would not have affected the response to the fires. Orange County Water District, which supplies groundwater to the north half of the county, has enough supply to carry its 2.5 million customers through the worst of any potential droughts for up to five years. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has enough water to supply 40 million people for a year.
Trump’s focus on California water isn’t just limited to the “valve” but even targeted one of the areas water supplies in an executive order.
He issued a memo directing his administration to find ways to reroute water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to the rest of the state “for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” In the executive order, Trump blamed California and the protection of the “essentially worthless” and endangered Delta smelt fish for preventing a plan in his previous administration to allow “enormous amounts of water to flow from the snow melt and rainwater in rivers in Northern California to beneficial use in the Central Valley and Southern California.”
“How are you protecting the Delta smelt by not giving it water?” Trump asked. “It’s a fish. It needs water.”
Newsom said any connection between smelt policy and the wildfires is “outlandish” because it’s not about water availability in Southern California.
“The only thing fishy are Trump’s facts. California pumps as much water now as it could under prior Trump-era policies,” his press office noted.
The state had argued that Trump’s previous plan to direct water would harm the ecosystem and fish. The smelt’s population has rapidly declined due to habitat changes, and no smelt were found in the estuary last February. The fish’s protection guidelines limit when and how much water can be pumped from the delta, in order to provide the species with adequate freshwater and prevent them from being trapped against intake valves, according to Vox. There’s another reason California has water flowing to the ocean, according to Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California-Davis.
“The biggest reason that we have water flowing to the ocean is to keep the delta fresh enough so that we can export water to the south,” Lund told KQED. “We need to have some water flowing out to keep the salt out. Otherwise, we’d pump salty water to the farms and the cities.”
A return to the earlier Trump rules “has the potential to harm Central Valley farms and Southern California communities that depend upon water delivered from the Delta, and it will do nothing to improve current water supplies in the Los Angeles basin,” Karla Nemeth, director of the state Department of Water Resources, told CalMatters.
Despite warnings from locals, Trump said that he would cut off wildfire aid in California if Newsom refused to change policies related to water supply and smelt.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let the water run down,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Wednesday night.
