President-elect Donald Trump has used the devastating Los Angeles wildfires to revisit a policy disagreement with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, pushing a series of complaints that experts say are false or misleading.
Trump this week blamed Newsom for the fires, which have killed at least 10 people, forced 180,000 to evacuate and burned more than 10,000 structures.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this,” Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The availability of water has been a particular concern over the past few days after some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades temporarily dried up as firefighters attempted to contain a massive blaze 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 facility storage tanks ahead of the fires.
Rather, the city’s water infrastructure wasn’t equipped to fight major wildfires, they said.
After the hydrants dried up, the water department attributed the issue to excessive demand on the system. The department couldn’t refill tanks quickly enough, it said, so the pressure dropped and water struggled to reach hydrants in the hills. A reservoir in the Palisades that could have helped with water pressure was also out of commission when the fire started.
Electrical outages further disrupted the flow of water to hydrants. President Joe Biden said in a public address on Thursday that utilities shut off power due to concerns about sparking additional fires, which in turn disrupted water pumps. “Cal Fire is bringing in generators to get these pumps up and working again,” he said.
Newsha Ajami, chief development officer for research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said it can be easy to misattribute these issues to water scarcity.
“I can understand, if you are not a water person per se, you might not know all the details that go into this system,” she said.
Part of Trump’s criticism seemingly refers to a plan put forth 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 heavy winds and a long period without rainfall in California.
“To basically tie those two together is nothing short of irresponsible … It’s just throwing gasoline on the fire, and the fire is bad enough,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gold worked in Newsom’s administration in 2020, when the governor clashed with Trump over the Delta plan. Other experts have also said the wildfires are a product of extreme climate conditions and infrastructure not meant to handle wildfires.
Gold now serves on the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and noted that the region has plenty of accessible water in reservoirs: “I am 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 imported water from the Colorado River, Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and Owens River in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.
“At any given year, there’s a fairly rigorous process to allocate water based on availability, looking at what’s in storage 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 Institute for Water Resources.
But Trump has accused Newsom of restricting those allocations to Southern California.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.
Trump added that Newsom “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”
Newsom’s administration sued the Trump administration in 2020 for failing to protect the smelt species. But Newsom’s communications director, Izzy Gardon, said in a statement that “there is no such document 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 about what declaration Trump was referencing.
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.
On top of his criticism of Newsom, Trump also blamed Biden for issues delivering water to fire zones.
“NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” Trump said Wednesday on Truth Social.
