Fact check: LA fires manage lies, including Trump’s, on water use | Climate Crisis News

The newly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, and some social media users and experts have blamed it Deadly fires in Los Angeles Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, said that the environmental policy of the Democrats ensured the danger and destruction of the fires.

As of January 12, authorities estimated that at least 16 people had died, more than 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) had been burned and thousands of structures had been damaged or destroyed.

Some social media users retweeted Trump’s 2018 and 2019 criticism California’s forest management policies, including false statements by then-president while firefighters battled previous wildfires.

It is not unusual for Trump to make false claims about his political opponents during natural disasters. In 2018, he falsely said the “Democrats” were overblown The death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico has increased. In October 2024, he fabricated a claim that North Carolina’s Democratic governor blocked federal aid from the state after Hurricane Helene.

As victims of the Los Angeles wildfires recover from the devastation, we examined these viral claims to see how California’s water policy and forest management have affected or are affecting the disaster.

Trump is misrepresenting California’s water policy

As Los Angeles firefighters raced to contain fires in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on January 7 and 8, hydrant water pressure in the area dropped and some hydrants stopped producing water.

In a Jan. 8 Truth Social post, Trump blamed the Newsom administration for the water problems, saying Newsom refused to allow “beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California.”

“Governor Gavin (Newsom) refused to sign a water restoration proclamation put before him, which would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow daily into many parts of California, including protected areas, from excessive rain and snowmelt from the North. It’s literally burning apocalyptically right now,” Trump said. “He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called smelt by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but he didn’t care about the people of California. Now the final price is being paid.”

Trump’s posts blamed water restrictions on statewide water management plans that trap rain and snow runoff from Northern California. But experts said the plans would not affect firefighting.

Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council and board member of the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, said Southern California has plenty of water.

Local water shortages were caused by the city’s infrastructure not being designed to respond to a fire as large as the Palisades and elsewhere, experts said.

“Right now it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the Bay-Delta or the Colorado (River) or the Eastern Sierra,” Gold said. “Now we have all this water in our reservoir. The problem is that when you’re looking at something like firefighting, it’s a much more localized issue of where your water is. Do you have enough local storage?’

Trump’s reference to the “water restoration declaration” that Newsom refused to sign is surprising because no such document exists. “There is no such thing as a water recovery declaration – it’s pure fiction,” Newsom’s press team said on social media.

Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to an email seeking clarification. After publication, a Trump spokesperson emailed PolitiFact citing a plan during Trump’s first term to divert more water from the federal Central Valley Project to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Newsom and then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra sued the Trump administration over the plan, which they said undermined protections for endangered species, including Chinook salmon and Delta smelt — slender, 2- to 3-inch fish — considered endangered under California’s Endangered Fish List. . The Law of Species.

But Trump’s logic is flawed: the Central Valley Project does not provide water to Los Angeles. The regional water district receives a portion of its water from the State Water Project, which collects water from the Delta-Gulf area and shares some reservoirs and infrastructure with the Central Valley Project. But Trump’s plan would send most of the extra water to the San Joaquin Valley, and it’s not fair to link water management further north to firefighting problems in Los Angeles.

The local water system failed because the city’s infrastructure was built to respond to routine structure fires rather than large wildfires in many neighborhoods, experts said.

Ann Jeffers, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan who studies fire engineering, said she knew of no industry standards for designing urban water supplies to fight the Palisades fire.

The dryness and high winds meant that “these fire events, if present, would exceed the given design baseline.”

Stanford University professor and climate scientist Chris Field said climate change is exacerbating these conditions.

Near the Palisades, three main water tanks of about 1 million gallons (3.8 million liters) each were filled in preparation for the fire due to hazardous weather. Janisse Quinones, director general and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said at a press conference on January 8 that the tanks were all depleted by 3 a.m. on January 8. Although water continued to flow to the affected areas, the demand for water increased faster than the system could deliver it.

“There’s water in the main line, it just can’t get up the hill because we can’t fill the tanks fast enough,” Quinones said. “And we can’t reduce the amount of water we give to the fire department to supply the tanks because we’re balancing firefighting with water.”

The Los Angeles Times reported on Jan. 10 that a reservoir near Pacific Palisades, part of the city’s water supply, was closed for maintenance when the fires started, which, if operational, could have slowed water pressure problems.

Other social media users claimed that California’s slow reservoir construction is causing the hydrants to run dry. But local infrastructure failure, not the regional reservoir, caused the hydrant problems, so it’s not fair to blame them for the construction time of these projects.

“In 2014, Californians overwhelmingly voted to spend billions of dollars on reservoirs and reservoirs,” the Libs’ conservative TikTok account posted on Jan. 8. “Gavin Newsom still hasn’t built it. Now there is no water coming out of the fire hydrants.”

California voters approved a 2014 ballot measure to spend $2.7 billion on reservoir projects, none of which have been completed to date. Just one of these projects is a new reservoir located in the Sacramento Valley, about 724 km (450 mi) from Los Angeles. It is planned to start operation in 2033.

A closer project, the Chino Basin Program, will increase storage capacity in the system, located about 100 km (60 mi) west of Los Angeles.

Trump has blamed the California Forest Service for the deadly wildfires in 2018 and 2019.

In a 2019 X post, Trump said Newsom should “clean up” the forest floor. In another post in 2019, Trump wrote that “Billions of dollars are being sent to the state of California for wildfires that would never happen with proper Forest Management” and threatened to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money.

Retweeting the claim in the context of the Los Angeles disaster, social media users used a 2018 video of Trump with then-governor-elect Newsom at the scene of a destroyed mobile home park in Northern California. In the video, Trump talked about the importance of raking and cleaning the forest floor to prevent forest fires.

“Trump warned him about it years ago,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said in a Jan. 8 segment about the Los Angeles fires.

“Is Trump ever wrong?” asked one social media user.

In a September 2020 meeting with Trump after another California wildfire, Newsom said the state had in the past “not been fair in our forest management” and thanked Trump for supporting and funding a new “first-of-its-kind commitment” to plant management and forest management over the next 20 years. double it”.

Newsom also noted that the federal government owns 57 percent of California’s forest land and the state owns 3 percent, and that climate change plays a role in wildfires. Forest surveyors verify forest land ownership statistics.

In a Jan. 8 post on Newsom’s website, California treated more than 283,000 hectares (700,000 acres) for wildfire resiliency by 2023, saying it “has dramatically accelerated the state’s work to increase the resilience of wildlands and forests. in 2021, according to a state dashboard that tracks fire prevention.

Prescribed fires (controlled burning used to control wildfires) more than doubled from 2021 to 2023, the governor’s post said. Newsom’s press office said the state invests $200 million annually in healthy forest and fire prevention programs, and his budget provides $4 billion more over the next few years for upfront and future investments in wildfire resilience.

Stanford University’s Field said the factors governing California’s wildfire risk and spread vary from place to place.

Fuel management is important in the Sierra range forest, Field said, but less important in areas near the Southern California coast. Property owners and fire professionals can help manage fuels, primarily by clearing combustible materials and vegetation around homes to create a buffer zone. In general, homeowners and homeowner associations will be held responsible, he said.

Field said the wildland burning in Los Angeles includes areas with many different owners. The federally owned Angeles National Forest neighbors Altadena, where the Eaton wildfire burned. The Pacific Palisades fire covers state and national park land.

“California is fortunate to have a wide range of great natural landscapes, but the state is struggling with how to manage those landscapes to manage fire risk,” Field said, adding that all parties in government have launched “ambitious” fire risk reduction programs in recent years. years.

Field said it’s important for property owners to create buffer zones against wildfires, but added that he doesn’t see evidence that “fuel management (or lack of fuel management) played a role in the LA fires.”

Robert York, director of Berkeley Forests and a professor in the Rausser College of Natural Resources, said wildfires behave differently depending on whether they start in forests or brush.

For example, the Pacific Palisades fire, the largest of the state’s current wildfires, started as a brush fire and spread through the area’s dense chaparral, a shrub community common to the state. Chaparral is more easily blown by strong winds, limiting the effectiveness of pre-fire management, while forest-focused efforts to reduce tree density and underbrush “are well known to reduce fire intensity,” York said.

He said public and private landowners have worked to improve forest management, but more needs to be done.

PolitiFact senior reporter Amy Sherman contributed to this report.