This article explores the potential connection between water mismanagement and the devastating wildfires in California, focusing on President Trump's claims and their validity. It analyzes Trump's proposed solutions, such as diverting water from the Pacific Northwest, and highlights the flaws in his reasoning.
A firefighter tries to switch off a fire hydrant in front of a home along Pacific Coast Highway in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Jan. 12, 2025. Photo by Apu Gomes, Getty Images\Welcome to CalMatters, the only nonprofit newsroom devoted solely to covering statewide issues that affect all Californians. Sign up for a commentary forum aiming to broaden our understanding of the state and spotlight Californians directly impacted by policy or its absence.
Learn more\What if a massive infrastructure project, like a pipeline from the Canadian Rocky Mountains or a channel diverting the Sacramento River around the Delta, could prevent the burning of California coastal sage scrub and the destruction of Altadena and Pacific Palisades?\Trump is both a master of strategic misdirection and a man who tends to believe what he finds advantageous to believe, facts notwithstanding. Either way, that crystallized his alliance with large and thirsty San Joaquin Valley agricultural interests and his contempt for the state’s fishing industry, inland Delta cities, Indigenous tribes, and natural resources. The order calls for overriding state environmental laws and reinterpreting federal laws like the Endangered Species Act that stand in the way of water transfers in times of drought to growers of crops like almonds and alfalfa. To his credit, it includes support for displaced families in Southern California and North Carolina. But none of the clauses dealing with water have even the slightest bearing on the horrid fires, despite his repeated claims during the campaign. Yet Trump’s wild verbal justifications for them are also worth examining, for two reasons. First, he’s the president, and many Americans will accept his claims as true when they are not. That’s a problem because California does have serious water issues, including a decade-long drought interrupted by historic and deadly flooding. And we’re on the verge of driving iconic species like migratory Chinook salmon into extinction and choking Stockton and other Delta cities with stagnant, saline, toxic water as snowmelt that historically runs through and replenishes their region is diverted for other uses. \Misidentifying the problem is like arresting the wrong person for serial murder or administering the wrong medication to treat a contagious disease. It provides the illusion that problems are being solved when, in fact, they are festering. So let’s consider the nonexistent valve, which he discussed during his campaign, and the needlessly empty half-pipe, a newer imponderable that he brought up at the rally before issuing his order. In Trump’s view, this imagined infrastructure lets “hundreds of millions of gallons of water flow down into Southern California” from the north, if only we’d let it. How far north? Trump earlier spoke of Northern California, but by Friday he said the source was “the Pacific Northwest.” By the end of the day he claimed the water flowed down — “naturally” — from Canada. It flows so steadily from north to south, he said — and has been doing so for millions of years — that we don’t even need reservoirs. If only we would turn the spigot, it would just keep coming. That may be an almost accurate description of other river systems, like the Mississippi, which flows south from Minnesota near the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico (which Farmland is irrigated near Mendota in the San Joaquin Valley on March 3, 2023. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local\But the West isn’t shaped like the central U.S., which slopes gently southward. In California, the low point is not at the bottom but in the middle — the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Inland rivers north of there flow south, but those to the south flow north. They don’t cross the Tehachapis, which separate Southern California from the rest of the state. The State Water Project, built in the 1960s, uses more electrical power than any other single project in the state to pump water over the mountains. The transfer is anything but natural and requires dams to hold Sierra snowmelt and aqueducts to bring it to places it otherwise could never go. Even if all that water did flow to Southern California, there would be nowhere to put it, at least not right now. The region currently has more water in storage than at any time in human history. \There have been grander, more fantastical schemes to move water around California. For example, is the long-debated plan proposed by the late engineer Ralph Parsons to drain western Canada for the benefit of the western U.S. was actually built? Or the late Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn’s proposal to bring Sacramento River around, rather than through, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and to the California aqueduct. But after decades of debate, that comparatively small project hasn’t been built either, at least not yet. \The president of Finland once told him his country does (although the Finnish leader recalled no such conversation): raking the forest floor to keep things safe and tidy., which Trump also touted as fire-free) is far different from arid Southern California, and that conifers suck up water while chaparral and coastal scrub is dry and brittle much of the year.
CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES WATER MANAGEMENT TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY CLIMATE CHANGE
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