Examining the truth about fighting fires in California amid water management claims

Read the Full Transcript

• Amna Nawaz:

  Last month's deadly wildfires in California destroyed thousands of homes, killed at least 29 people, and will likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

  President Trump has repeatedly claimed that state officials made this disaster worse by how they manage the state's complex water system.

  William Brangham looks at those allegations and the realities of water management in the nation's most populous state.

• William Brangham:

  While fires were still burning in Southern California and crews were trying to save lives and property, then-president-elect Trump took aim at California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.

  Donald Trump, President of the United States: It's very sad, because I have been trying to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come. You would have tremendous water up there. They sent it out to the Pacific.

• William Brangham:

  And after he took office, he kept coming back to how California officials managed their water, blaming them for making the fires worse.

• Donald Trump:

  We're demanding that they turn the valve back toward Los Angeles. Millions of gallons of water are waiting to be poured down. A fire that could have been put out if they let the water flow.

• William Brangham:

  But is it true that more water from Northern California could have helped Los Angeles?

• Peter Gleick, Co-Founder, Pacific Institute:

  There's no truth to that. Donald Trump has a strange fixation with California water policy. He has for many, many years. He comes out here. He talks about some imaginary valve or some imaginary faucet that he or someone else could turn to increase the amount of water that flows from Northern California to Southern California. It's sort of an odd fixation.

• William Brangham:

  Let's start with some context.

  California has one of the largest and most complex water systems in the world. It's responsible for delivering drinking water to almost 40 million people and irrigating farms that grow three-quarters of the nation's fruits and nuts. That enormous task is complicated by an increasingly hot and dry climate, growing demands for that water and geography.

  So where does the state's water come from? About a third of Southern California's supply comes from the Colorado River. And then there's precipitation. Even though 75 percent of the state's rain and snow falls north of the state capital, Sacramento, 80 percent of the demand comes from areas further south, in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and the vast farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley.

  When rain and snow fall in the north, whatever doesn't evaporate can seep into the ground to be pumped or travel through massive networks of dams, reservoirs, canals and aqueducts across the state. And how all that water is allotted and to whom has been a source of friction in California for decades.

• Narrator:

  Presently, it will be used by thousands of farmers who will transform the arid desert into fields of green crops.

• Peter Gleick:

  The disputes are who gets to use how much water for what purposes. We fight between cities and farms and we fight over how much water belongs to the ecosystems.

• William Brangham:

  But President Trump's accusations have driven renewed attention to this issue. During the blazes, firefighters reported that hydrants had low pressure or rain completely dry.

  Despite the president's claims that water being held up north was to blame, experts say supply wasn't the issue. In fact, most key reservoirs serving Los Angeles County had more water than normal. The problem was infrastructure.

• Peter Gleick:

  Our urban water systems are designed to help us put out a house fire or a couple of house fires. They're not designed to deal with the massive kinds of wildfires that swept through the Los Angeles area.

  If you have a glass of water and you have one straw, you can drink that water and there's no real problem. But when you have 1,000 straws in that same glass of water, the glass gets drained immediately. And no matter how fast you try to refill it, you can't refill it. And that's what happened here.

• William Brangham:

  Trump also keeps coming back to something else, that the fires were made worse by California's protection of an endangered fish known as the delta smelt. Again, analysts say there is no connection.

  Letitia Grenier, Public Policy Institute of California: As far as we can tell, there's no relationship between the fires in Southern California and leaving some water in the rivers for delta smelt and other endangered fish. The reservoirs in Southern California are full, and there's not a limitation water supply there.

• William Brangham:

  Even so, on January 24, Trump signed an executive order to override state policies and maximize water delivery.

  Days later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which controls some water systems in the state, released over two billion gallons of water from two dams in the San Joaquin Valley. The president posted this photo saying: "Beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. I only wish they'd listened to me six years ago. There would have been no fire."

• Peter Gleick:

  There's no ability physically to move the water in those reservoirs to the Los Angeles area. There are mountains in between. There's no aqueduct, no pipelines, no systems of water transfer.

  The loss of that water from those reservoirs, some of it evaporated. Some of it may have gone back into groundwater, but it certainly never reached Los Angeles. The water that was dumped belonged to farmers in Southern California and now will not be available to those farmers who are going to need that water in the hot dry season that's coming.

• William Brangham:

  Now, we should note, we spoke to a farmer in the region who said, while it'd be better to have that water later in the year, the release was relatively small and won't have a huge impact.

  And in the long term, many farmers would be supportive of the president's push to increase water flow there. But, again, that had no bearing on the fires or the devastating toll they took on Southern California.

  For the "PBS News Hour," I'm William Brangham.

Improved audio player available on our mobile page