Fact Check: Los Angeles fires spark lies, including by Trump about water use | Climate crisis news

He blamed President-elect Donald Trump and some social media users and critics Deadly Los Angeles fires on California Governor Gavin Newsom, saying the Democratic Party’s environmental policies have enabled the danger of fires and debris.

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

Some social media users reposted Trump’s statements from 2018 and 2019 cash of California Department of Forestry policies, including false statements spread by the then-president while firefighters battled previous wildfires.

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 “inflated.” Death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In October 2024, he fabricated a claim that the Democratic governor of North Carolina had blocked federal aid from flowing to the state after Hurricane Helen.

As victims of the Los Angeles wildfires reeled in devastation, we fact-checked these widespread claims to find out how or whether California’s water policy and forest management took this disaster into account.

Trump is misleading about California water policy

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

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

“Governor Gavin (Newsom) refused to sign a water restoration proclamation before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from heavy rain and snowmelt from the north, to flow daily into many parts of California, including areas that are currently burning,” Trump said. “In an almost horrific way.” “He wanted to protect a basically worthless fish called the 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 appear to blame the water restrictions on statewide water management plans that capture rain and snow as it flows from Northern California. But experts said these plans would not have affected the response to the fires.

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

Experts said the local water shortages occurred because the city’s infrastructure was not designed to respond to a large fire like the one that broke out in the Palisades area and elsewhere.

“It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the Bay Delta or the Colorado River or the Eastern Sierra right now,” Gould said. “We have all this water in storage now. The problem is when you look at something like firefighting, it’s a more local issue of where the water is. Do you have enough local storage space?”

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 document like the Water Restoration Declaration — this is pure fiction,” Newsom’s press team said on social media.

Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to an email requesting clarification. After publication, a Trump spokesperson 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 In california. Law of species.

But here’s the flaw in Trump’s logic: The Central Valley project does not provide water to Los Angeles. The regional water district receives some water from the State Water Project, which also collects water from the Gulf Delta region and shares some reservoirs and infrastructure with the Central Valley Project. But most of the additional water from Trump’s plan would have been sent to the San Joaquin Valley, and it would be a mistake to link water management in the north to the challenges of fighting fires in Los Angeles.

Experts said the local water system failed because the city’s infrastructure was built to respond to routine structure fires, not massive wildfires in multiple neighborhoods.

Anne Jeffers, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan who studies fire engineering, said she doesn’t know of any industry standard for designing the city’s water supply to fight the kind of fires that broke out in the Palisades area.

Drought and high winds mean “these fire events are likely to exceed a given design basis, if one exists,” Jeffers said.

Chris Field, a professor at Stanford University and climate scientist, said: Climate change is exacerbating these conditions.

Three main water tanks near Palisades, each holding about 1 million gallons (3.8 million litres), were filled in preparation for the fire due to the dangerous weather. All tanks were exhausted by 3 a.m. on Jan. 8, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO and Chief Engineer Janis Quinones said during a Jan. 8 news conference. Although water continues to flow to affected areas, demand for water has risen faster than the system’s ability to deliver it.

“There is water in the main line, but it can’t go up the hill, because we can’t fill the tanks fast enough,” Quiñones said. “And we can’t reduce the amount of water we provide to the fire department to supply the tanks, because we balance firefighting with water.”

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

Other social media users claimed that slow construction of California’s reservoir led to taps running dry. But it’s local infrastructure failures, not regional water storage, that caused the tap problems, so it’s wrong to blame the construction timeline for these projects.

“In 2014, Californians voted overwhelmingly to spend billions on water storage and tanks,” the conservative account Libs of TikTok posted on January 8. “And Gavin Newsom still hasn’t built them. And now there’s no water coming out of our fire hydrants.”

California voters approved a ballot measure in 2014 that required spending $2.7 billion on water storage projects — and so far, none of them have been completed. Just one of these projects is a new reservoir, located in the Sacramento Valley about 724 kilometers (450 miles) from Los Angeles. It is scheduled to begin operation in 2033.

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

Trump blamed the California Department of Forestry for deadly wildfires in 2018 and 2019.

In a 2019 X post, Trump said Newsom should “clean up” the forest floors. 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 happen,” and threatened to withhold FEMA funds.

Social media users, re-sharing 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 spoke about the necessity of sweeping and cleaning forest floors to prevent forest fires.

“Trump has been warning him about this for years,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said in a Jan. 8 segment about the Los Angeles fires.

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

In an appearance with Trump in September 2020 after another wildfire in California, Newsom said the state in the past “has not done justice in our stewardship of our forests” and thanked Trump for supporting and funding “a new first-class commitment, over the next 20 years, to protect forests.” . “Doubling our vegetation and forest management.”

Newsom also noted that the federal government owns 57 percent of California’s forest land compared to 3 percent owned by the state, and that climate change plays a role in wildfires. Forest researchers confirm forest land ownership statistics.

A Jan. 8 post on Newsom’s website said California “significantly enhanced the state’s work to increase the resilience of wildlands and forests” by treating more than 283,000 hectares (700,000 acres) of land for wildfires in 2023. That’s up from about 231,000 hectares (572,000 acres) in 2021, according to a government dashboard that tracks fire prevention work.

The governor’s post said prescribed fires (controlled burning used to control wildfires) doubled from 2021 to 2023. Newsom’s press office said the state invests $200 million annually in healthy forest and fire prevention programs, and that his budget commits to $4 billion. Additional past and future investments in wildfire resilience over the next several years.

The factors that control fire risk and spread in California vary from place to place, said Field at Stanford University.

Fuel management in the Sierra forests is important, Field said, but less so near the Southern California coast. Property owners and firefighting professionals can help with fuel management, often by removing flammable materials and vegetation around homes to create a buffer zone. Homeowners and homeowners associations will generally be responsible for that, he said.

The wildlands that burned in Los Angeles cover areas with many different owners, Field said. The federally owned Angeles National Forest neighbors Altadena, where the Eaton wildfire is burning. The Pacific Palisades fire includes state and national parks.

“California is fortunate to have a wide range of stunning landscapes, but the state is struggling with how to manage those landscapes to manage fire risk,” Field said, adding that all government parties have initiated “ambitious” fire risk reduction programs recently. Years.

Field said it’s important for property owners to create buffer zones against wildfires, but added that he sees no evidence “that fuel management (or lack of fuel management) played a role in the Los Angeles fires.”

Wildfires behave differently depending on whether they start in forests or in vegetation, said Robert York, associate director of Berkeley Forest and Rauser College of Natural Resources professor.

For example, the Pacific Palisades Fire, the state’s largest current wildfire, began as a wildfire and spread through dense chaparral, a common shrub vegetation community in the state. Strong winds easily overwhelm chaparral, limiting the effectiveness of pre-fire management, while forest-focused efforts to reduce tree and shrub density “have been known to reduce fire intensity,” York said.

He added that 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.