Fact Check: LA Fires Fuel Falsehoods, Including Trump’s About Water Use | Climate crisis news

They blamed President-elect Donald Trump and some social media users and pundits Deadly fires in Los Angeles on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, saying that Democratic environmental policies have allowed the fire and debris hazard.

By January 12, authorities counted at least 16 dead, more than 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) burned and thousands of structures damaged or destroyed.

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

It is not uncommon for Trump to make false claims about his political opponents during natural disasters. In 2018, he falsely said that the “Democrats” were puffed up The number of victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In October 2024, he fabricated a claim that North Carolina’s Democratic governor had blocked federal aid from the state after Hurricane Helena.

As victims of the Los Angeles wildfires reel from the devastation, we checked out these viral claims to see how, or if, California’s water policy and forest management have affected this disaster.

Trump is misleading about California water policy

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

In a Jan. 8 Truth Social post, Trump blamed Newsom’s administration for the water problems and said Newsom refused to let “nice, clean, fresh water flow into California.”

“Governor Gavin [Newsom] refused to sign a water restoration declaration put before him, which would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excessive rain and snowmelt from the north, to flow daily into many parts of California, including areas currently burning in near-apocalyptic fashion.” said Trump. “He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a turtle by giving it less water (it didn’t work!) but he didn’t care about the people of California. Now he’s paying the price.”

Trump’s posts appear to have blamed the water restrictions on the state’s water management plans, which capture rain and snow as it flows out of Northern California. But experts said those plans would not affect the response to the fire.

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

The local water shortages occurred because the city’s infrastructure was not designed to respond to a wildfire as large as the one that broke out in the Palisades and elsewhere, experts said.

“It doesn’t matter what’s going on right now in the Bay-Delta or the Colorado (River) or the eastern Sierra,” Gold said. “Right now we have all this water in storage. The problem is that when you look at something like firefighting, it’s a more localized question of where your water is. Do you have adequate local storage?”

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

Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to an email seeking clarification. After the announcement, a Trump spokesman emailed PolitiFact referring to a plan from Trump’s first term that would have directed 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 violated protections for endangered species, including Chinook salmon and Delta smelt — a slender 2- to 3-inch fish considered endangered under California’s Endangered Species Act .

But here’s the catch in Trump’s logic: The Central Valley project does not supply water to Los Angeles. The Regional Water District receives some water from the State Water Project, which also collects water from the Delta-Bay area and shares some reservoirs and infrastructure with the Central Valley Project. But most of the extra water from Trump’s plan would be sent to the San Joaquin Valley, and it’s a mistake to link water management further north to the challenges of fighting fires in Los Angeles.

The local water system failed because the city’s infrastructure was built to respond to routine construction fires, not large multi-district wildfires, experts said.

Ann Jeffers, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan who studies fire engineering, said she knows of no industry standard for designing a city’s water supply to fight the kind of fire that broke out in the Palisades.

The dryness and high winds meant that “these fires would likely exceed the design baseline, if there was one at all,” Jeffers said.

Chris Field, Stanford University professor and climatologist, said climate change worsens these conditions.

Three main water tanks near the Palisades, each holding about 1 million gallons (3.8 million liters), have been filled in preparation for the fire because of the dangerous weather. All tanks were empty by 3 a.m. on Jan. 8, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Executive Director and Chief Engineer Janissa Quinones said during a Jan. 8 news conference. Although water continued to flow to the affected areas, demand for water grew faster than the system could deliver.

“There is water in the water main, but it can’t go 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 firefighters to supply tanks, because we’re balancing firefighting with water.”

A reservoir near Pacific Palisades that is part of the city’s water supply was closed for repairs when the fires broke out, which could have slowed water pressure problems if it had been operating, the Los Angeles Times reported on Jan. 10.

Other social media users claimed that the slow construction of the California reservoir caused the hydrants to run dry. But local infrastructure failures, not regional water storage, caused the hydrant problems, so it’s wrong to blame them on the construction timelines of these projects.

“In 2014, Californians overwhelmingly voted to spend billions on water storage and reservoirs,” the conservative account Libs of TikTok reported on January 8. “Gavin Newsom still hasn’t built it. Now the water does not come out of the fire hydrants.”

California voters approved a 2014 ballot measure to spend $2.7 billion on water storage projects — and to date, none have been completed. Just one of those projects is a new reservoir, located in the Sacramento Valley about 724 km (450 miles) from Los Angeles. It should start operating in 2033.

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

Trump blamed forest management in California for deadly wildfires in 2018 and 2019.

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

Social media users who reshared the claim in the context of the Los Angeles disaster used a 2018 video of Trump with then-Governor-elect Newsom at the site of a destroyed mobile home park in Northern California. In the video, Trump talked about the need to rake and clear the forest floor to prevent forest fires.

“Trump warned him about this 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 appearance with Trump after another wildfire in California, Newsom said the state had “not been fair in the management of our forests” in the past and thanked Trump for supporting and funding a new “first-of-its-kind commitment over the next 20 years, to double our vegetation management and forest management”.

Newsom also noted that the federal government owns 57 percent of California’s forested land versus 3 percent state ownership, and that climate change is playing a role in wildfires. Forest researchers confirm forest land ownership statistics.

A Jan. 8 post on Newsom’s website said California “dramatically increased the state’s work to increase wilderness and forest resilience” by treating more than 283,000 acres (700,000 hectares) of land for wildfire resilience in 2023. That’s up from about 231,000 hectares (572,000 hectares) in 2021, according to the state’s prevention dashboard fire.

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

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

Fuel management in the forests of the Sierra mountain range is important, but less so near the Southern California coast, Field said. Property owners and firefighters can help with fuel management, mainly by clearing combustible materials and vegetation around homes to create a buffer zone. Generally, homeowners and homeowners associations would be responsible for that, he said.

Field said the wilderness that burned in Los Angeles covers areas that have many different owners. The federally owned Angeles National Forest is adjacent to Altadena, where the Eaton wildfire is burning. The Pacific Palisades range includes state and national parks.

“California is fortunate to have a wide range of spectacular 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 recently begun “ambitious” fire risk reduction programs. year.

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 the lack of fuel management) played a role in the LA fires.”

Robert York, co-director of Berkeley Forests and a Rausser College of Natural Resources professor, 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 wildfire and spread through dense chaparral, a shrub plant community common to the state. Chaparral is more easily overpowered by high winds, limiting the effectiveness of pre-fire management, while forest-focused efforts to reduce tree and brush density “are well-known for reducing fire intensity,” York said.

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

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this report.