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President-elect Trump sparked a heated debate over whether Democrats should be blamed for the California wildfires after he accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of caring more about protecting an endangered fish species than protecting the residents of the wildfire state.
The elected president has long criticized Democrats in California for limiting the availability of water to Californians that comes from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in the northern part of the state. He balked at the issue during his 2016 campaign, and during his first term, Trump sought to divert more water away from a delta where the two rivers meet that is home to an endangered species of fish known as to smel
But Newsom and his administration challenged that in court, arguing that views suggesting water diversion would not affect fish were wrong. Newsom also previously opposed efforts to build a pipeline meant to divert water south. He has overseen programs in his state that annually release hundreds of billions of gallons of stormwater runoff into the Sacramento-San Jaoquin River Delta to benefit walleye habitat, rather than redirecting the water to the south for use by people in the central and southern parts of the state.
Images of delta smelt kept alive in a hatchery at the UC Davis Fish Culture and Conservation Laboratory in Byron, California. (Randy Pench/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Trump sparked a firestorm Wednesday when he called out Newsom on his Truth Social platform for wanting to “protect an essentially worthless fish” to protect Californians’ water needs. The comments aren’t new, though. Ahead of the November election, Trump made the claim during an interview in October podcaster Joe Rogan.
“I was in farm country (California) with some of the congressmen,” he told Rogan. “We’re driving down a freeway and I’m like, ‘How come this whole land is so barren?’ It’s farmland and it looked awful. But there’s always this little corner that’s so green. They said, ‘We don’t have any water.’ “No, we don’t have a drought.” I said, “Why don’t you have water?” Because the water can’t flow down and to protect a small fish, the water from the north goes to the ocean. Pacific and millions of gallons of water are spilled.
Dry, cracked soil in a ditch next to a cornfield on a farm in central California. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
Devastating wildfires in California have killed at least five people and displaced hundreds of thousands. The Palisades fire alone has burned over 17,000 acres of land, which is larger than the island of Manhattan. Damages so far have been estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.
The president-elect’s claims have been combined with reports that firefighters are running out of water as they battle the blaze, prompting the state to mobilize resources to replenish depleted supplies.
CAUSE OF LOS ANGELES WILDFIRES STILL UNDETERMINED AS MAYOR KAREN BASS DEFENDS HER LEADERSHIP
“There’s no water in the Palisades. There’s no water coming out of the hydrants. This is absolute mismanagement by the city. It’s not the fire department’s fault, it’s the city’s fault,” said Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer who ran unsuccessful against Karen Bass. for mayor in 2022, he told Fox News.
A California firefighter battles a wildfire. (Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The governor’s press office said in response to Trump’s accusations that he was completely wrong, arguing that the president-elect “is conflating two completely unrelated things: the transportation of water to Southern California and the supply from the ‘local storage’.
“Generally speaking, there is no shortage of water Southern California right now, despite Trump’s claims that he would open some imaginary spigot,” Newsom’s office added. “(The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) said that because of the high demand for water , the pumping stations at lower elevations did not have enough pressure recharge. tanks at higher elevations, and the ongoing fire hampered the crews’ ability to access the bombs. To supplement, they used water tenders to supply water, a common tactic in fighting wildfires.”
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Firefighters in California made progress Thursday to slow the spread of the fire, according to The Associated Press. Crews were reportedly able to extinguish a fire that broke out in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening and had lifted the evacuation order for the area on Thursday. Still, the fires continue to burn and most are only partially contained as of Thursday afternoon, according to reports.
