As Los Angeles continues to battle deadly and historically devastating wildfires, US President-elect Donald Trump has made what experts have called “preposterous” and false claims that California could have avoided the disaster by allowing water from Canada to flow through the state.
Trump, who has focused on water management issues in California before and raised them again amid the fires, repeated his claim about Canadian waters. In an interview with Newsmax on Monday evening.
“You know, when I was president, I asked this man, the governor of California, to accept water coming from the north, from up in Canada,” Trump said.
“It flows right through Los Angeles. … Enormous amounts coming out of the mountains and from melting. And even without it, even during the summer, it’s a natural flow of water. They had so much water they didn’t know what to do with it. The fires would never have started.”
Water and environmental management experts say Trump was likely referring to the Columbia River, which flows from the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia to the Pacific Northwest in the United States. But they point out that the river flows into the Pacific Ocean between Washington state and Oregon, and there is no infrastructure to send that water south.
“The idea of sending Columbia (River) water specifically to California is preposterous,” said John Wagner, an environmental anthropologist and professor at the University of British Columbia.
Los Angeles County faced water flow problems during the wildfires, as some urban fire hydrants dried up, impacting firefighters’ ability to fight the flames. Water trucks have since replenished the dry taps.
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered state officials to investigate the problem, as well as why a 440 million liter tank was out of service.
Trump exploited the water problems to justify his attacks on Newsom and other Democratic politicians in California. As Republicans in Congress have proposed They may tie federal disaster aid to securing state commitments to change its water policies.
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Trump also blamed California’s approach to balancing water distribution to farms and cities with the need to protect endangered fish species, including delta smelt. Experts say this association is also false.
“There is no basis in fact to link Delta melt to the fires in Los Angeles,” said Carrigan Burke, interim director of the Center for Watershed Science at the University of California, Davis. “There is no relationship at all.”
Burke said assessments have shown that protecting the California Delta ecosystem has little impact on water flows into Southern California, and that even if the smell of the delta wasn’t there, the situation would mostly not change. He said Trump’s comments fuel complaints from conservative farmers and critics of environmental policies.
Burke explained that most of the restrictions on water flows in California stem from requirements that prevent ocean water from reaching the delta, where fresh water is then distributed south.
About 40 percent of Los Angeles’ water comes from state-controlled projects connected to Northern California, and the state has capped how much water it provides this year. But the Southern California reservoirs that these canals help feed are at above-average levels this time of year.
The ferocity of the wildfires has made demand for water four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system,” said Janice Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Hydrants are designed to fight fires in one or two homes at a time, not hundreds, and refilling tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts, Quinones said.
Hurricane-force winds that fueled the fire grounded firefighting planes that were supposed to drop critical water drops early last week, stressing the hydrant system, officials said.
Burke said debates over water policies in California long predate worsening drought conditions that have also contributed to the state’s increasingly destructive wildfires, and should continue separate from the current disaster.
As for delivering water from Canada to California, he said engineering such a project would be “extremely unlikely.”
“It would be practically impossible and much more expensive than just using the water we have more efficiently,” he said.
At a September press conference during his presidential campaign, Trump claimed that Canada had “essentially, a very big faucet” that sent water to the Pacific Ocean, but that could be switched to send water “straight to Los Angeles” to the Pacific Ocean. Assistance in natural disasters.
That would involve diverting water from the Columbia River through ditches or other infrastructure, which would take several years and billions of dollars to build, Wagner said.
Canada would also have to agree to such a pledge.
Canada and the United States announced last year that they had reached an agreement in principle to update the Columbia River Treaty, which was originally reached in 1961 to manage the flow of water from the Columbia River. The treaty primarily includes flood mitigation measures with hydroelectric power management from the river on both sides of the border.
The updated agreement seeks to “rebalance” cooperation between the two countries, allowing the United States to retain more hydropower while giving Canada opportunities to import and export energy to the U.S. market, officials said last year. It is also working to improve cooperation with First Nations in river management, including salmon populations.
Talks about updating the treaty first began during Trump’s first term before the Biden administration finalized it. It still has to be ratified by the US Congress, which is now firmly under Republican control after the US elections in November.
While Burke doesn’t think Trump could cancel the agreement to try to address his insistence on bringing Columbia River water to California, Wagner said it is possible — especially given his increasingly belligerent rhetoric about annexing Canada.
“The way he’s talking now it seems like he can screw up the whole thing,” he said.
At the very least, Wagner said Trump could bully his administration or the International Joint Commission, which manages water issues between Canada and the United States, to conduct further studies to expand or divert the Columbia River or other binational water flows, delaying the treaty agreement.
Burke said Trump’s comments are not based in reality and simply distract from the current needs of Los Angeles amid the fires.
“There’s something really distasteful about having to combat this misinformation when we’re literally in the middle of a crisis, and people are still dying and losing their homes as we speak,” he said.
—With files from The Associated Press
