Fact check: LA fires drive falsehoods, including by Trump about water use

According to President-elect Donald Trump, some social media users and experts believe that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s deadly fires were caused by the Democrat’s environmental policies, which created the fires’ danger and destruction.

As of January 12, authorities counted at least 16 people 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 of California’s forest management policies, including false statements the then-president posted as firefighters battled previous wildfires.

Trump frequently makes false accusations about his political rivals in the wake of natural disasters. In 2018, he falsely said “Democrats” had inflated Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico. He fabricated a claim that the Democratic governor of North Carolina had prevented the state from receiving federal aid following Hurricane Helene in October 2024.

We fact-checked these popular claims to find out how or if California’s water policy and forest management played a role in the disaster as Los Angeles wildfire victims watched from the debris.

Trump misrepresents California’s water policy.

On January 7 and 8, Los Angeles firefighters scrambled to contain fires in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Some hydrants stopped producing water.

Trump, in a January 8 Truth Social post, blamed Newsom’s management for the water issues and said Newsom had refused to allow “beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California”.

According to Trump, “Governor Gavin]Newsom] refrained from signing the water restoration declaration that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow daily from the North into many areas of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a nearly apocalyptic way,” according to Trump. By giving a smelt less water, he wanted to protect an essentially useless fish called a smelt (it didn’t work)! ), but didn’t care about the people of California. The final price is being paid right now.

Trump’s posts appeared to blame statewide water management plans, which capture rain and snow from Northern California, for the water restrictions. However, experts claimed that the fire response would not have been impacted by those plans.

According to Mark Gold, the director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council and board member of the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, there is plenty of water stored there.

According to experts, the city’s infrastructure wasn’t built to withstand a fire as big as the one that erupted in the Palisades and elsewhere, leading to the local water shortages.

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

Trump’s reference to a “water restoration declaration” that Newsom refused to sign is puzzling, as such a document does not appear to exist. There is no such document as the water restoration declaration, according to Newsom’s press team’s statement on social media.

Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to an email asking for clarification. A Trump spokesman emailed PolitiFact after it was published that referenced a San Joaquin Valley farmer plan from his first term.

The plan, according to Newsom and then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, violated protections for endangered species, including Chinook salmon and Delta smelt, a slender, 2- to 3-inch fish that are both endangered under California’s Endangered Species Act, according to Newsom and former California Attorney General.

But here’s the kink in Trump’s logic: The Central Valley Project provides no water to Los Angeles. The State Water Project, which also collects water from the Delta-Bay area and shares reservoirs and infrastructure with the Central Valley Project, supplies some water to the regional water district. However, the San Joaquin Valley would have received the majority of the extra water from Trump’s plan, and it is incorrect to link the challenges facing California’s firefighting industry further north.

According to experts, the city’s infrastructure was constructed to deal with small, episodic structure fires rather than massive wildfires spread across numerous neighborhoods.

A professor of fire engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Jeffers, said she has no idea what industry standards exist for designing city water supplies to combat the type of fire that erupted in the Palisades.

According to Jeffers, “these fire events would likely be likely to exceed a given design basis, if one even existed,” due to dryness and high winds.

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

Three main water tanks near the Palisades, each holding about 1 million gallons (3.8 million litres), were filled in preparation for a fire because of dangerous weather. During a press conference on January 8, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO and Chief Engineer Janisse Quinones stated that the tanks had all been exhausted by 3 a.m. Water was still flowing to the affected areas, but demand increased more quickly than the system could deliver it.

“There’s water in the trunk line, it just cannot get up the hill, because we cannot fill the tanks fast enough”, Quinones said. Because we balance firefighting with water, we cannot reduce the amount of water we supply to the fire department in order to supply the tanks.

The Los Angeles Times reported on January 10 that a reservoir that is a part of the city’s water supply had been closed for repairs after the fires, which may have slowed the water pressure issues had it been operational.

Other users on social media claimed the California reservoir’s slow construction had 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 these projects ‘ construction timeline.

Californians overwhelmingly voted to spend billions on water storage and reservoirs in 2014, according to the conservative website Libs of TikTok, which was published on January 8. “Gavin Newsom still hasn’t built it. Now no water is coming out of the fire hydrants”.

California voters approved a 2014 ballot measure to spend $2.7bn on water storage projects – and, to date, none have been completed. Only one of those projects is a new reservoir, based in the Sacramento Valley about 724km (450 miles) from Los Angeles. It’s set to begin operating in 2033.

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

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

In a 2019 X post, Trump said Newsom must “clean” forest floors. In another 2019 post, Trump wrote that “billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen”, and threatened to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money.

In a 2018 video of Trump and then-Gov.-elect Newsom at the site of a destroyed mobile home park in Northern California, social media users who re-shared the claim in the context of the Los Angeles disaster used the video. Trump mentioned the need to rake and clean forests to stop wildfires in the video.

In a January 8 Fox News segment about the Los Angeles fires, Jesse Watters said, “Trump warned him about this years ago.”

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

After another California wildfire, Newsom made a statement to Trump in a September 2020 appearance, praising the governor for backing and funding a new “first-type commitment over the next 20 years, to double our vegetation management and forest management.”

Additionally, Newsom noted that California’s forest land is owned by the federal government, which only holds 3 percent of the state’s, and that climate change contributes to wildfires. The ownership statistics for forest land are confirmed by forest researchers.

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

Prescribed fires (a controlled burn used to control wildfires) more than doubled from 2021 to 2023, the governor’s post said. According to Newsom’s press release, his budget allocates $4 billion more in prior and upcoming investments in wildfire resilience over the next few years than the state invests $200 million annually in healthy forest and fire prevention programs.

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

Fuel management in the Sierra mountain range forest is important, but less so near Southern California’s coast, Field said. Fuel management is a task that property owners and fire professionals can perform, primarily by removing flammable materials and vegetation to create a buffer zone. In general, homeowners and homeowner associations would be responsible for that, he said.

Field claimed that areas with multiple owners are covered in the wildland that has burned in Los Angeles. Altadena, a town near the federally owned Angeles National Forest, is where the Eaton wildfire is burning. State and national parkland are a part of the Pacific Palisades fire.

California has a number of stunning natural settings, but the state struggles to manage them, according to Field, noting that all government parties have recently begun “ambitious” fire risk reduction initiatives.

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

Wildfires can start in forests or brush vegetation, according to Robert York, co-director of Berkeley Forests and professor of the Rausser College of Natural Resources.

The Pacific Palisades fire, the largest of the state’s current wildfires, for example, began as a brushfire and spread through the area’s dense chaparral, a shrubland plant community common to the state. Chaparral is more easily overwhelmed by strong winds, limiting pre-fire management’s effectiveness, whereas forest-centred efforts to reduce tree density and underbrush are “well-known to reduce fire intensity”, York said.

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

Source: Aljazeera