California wildfires: Water supply becomes flashpoint in Trump-Newsom fight

The blazes burning across the Los Angeles region are not only devastating property and lives, but also fueling political argument over how to fight the fires, with President-elect Trump blaming state officials for a dearth of available water supplies.

A social media brawl began on Wednesday after Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADPW) efforts to fill three 1-million-gallon storage tanks left some Pacific Palisades fire hydrants high and dry. Extreme water demand had surpassed the speed with which the higher-elevation tanks could be replenished, according to LADPW.

Trump soon after took to Truth Social, blaming the insufficient supply on Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whom he accused of blocking efforts to pump more water from Northern California to the Los Angeles region.

But experts maintain that moving more water in this manner would be impractical from an infrastructural perspective, as well as wholly unnecessary.

"Would that have made any significant difference in terms of what we're experiencing right now with these forest fires and the damage they're creating?" asked Kurt Schwabe, a professor of environmental economics and policy at University of California Riverside.

"I would say no," he told The Hill, noting that reservoirs statewide are currently in good shape. "There is this level of dryness in Southern California, but you're not going to irrigate all the forests."

Trump on Wednesday night called for Newsom to resign, following up on an earlier post in which he slammed the governor for failing to sign a declaration that would have "allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."

The governor's office quickly decried the accusations as "pure fiction," writing on the social platform X that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration" and that Newsom "is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need."

Trump was likely referring to water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (the "Bay-Delta"), which supplies drinking water to nearly 27 million residents through the State Water Project, according to the California Department of Water Resources.

But the City of Los Angeles actually gets much of its water elsewhere, with about 38 percent of drinking water in 2023 — the most recent year with data available — coming from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, according to LADPW. The Aqueduct shuttles water from the Owens River Valley in the Eastern Sierra Nevada to the city, rather than from the Northern California Bay-Delta.

Another 9 percent of the city's 2023 drinking water came from local groundwater and 2 percent from recycled wastewater, while 51 percent was imported from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Only 30 percent of Metropolitan's water originates in the Northern Sierra, as 20 percent comes from the Colorado River and 50 percent form a mix of other resources.

On Wednesday night, Newsom announced that the state was mobilizing up to 140 water tanker trucks to help fight the Eaton and Palisades fires. The 2,500-gallon vessels were joining about 23 that were already on the ground, according to his office.

In the same announcement, his team noted that "the state started tracking this weather event closely over the weekend and began prepositioning resources on Sunday." The governor, his office added, is in constant touch with local, state and federal leaders, including President Biden.

Earlier in the day, Biden had approved Newsom's request for a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration, which made federal assistance available to bolster emergency response costs.

Daniel Swain, a University of California Los Angeles climate scientist, addressed the issue of preparedness in a webinar the same day, noting that "there was a lot of pre-positioning of resources, which likely saved lives."

"This event scared people as much as a week before it occurred in terms of the weather forecasting world," he said. "In fact, it is possibly only because of those dire prognostications that things weren't even worse."

"I am pretty sure there are people who are alive right now, who would not have been alive, had those pre-positioned resources not been in place," Swain added.

Nonetheless, Trump followed up with additional criticism on Thursday morning by denouncing the "gross incompetence by Gavin Newscum and Karen Bass," referring to the mayor of Los Angeles, while adding that "Biden’s FEMA has no money — all wasted on the Green New Scam!"

The Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) has authorized the use of federal funds to assist California in combating multiple fires in the Los Angeles area, and said it is making assistance available to people impacted by the blazes.

As far as pumping more water from north to south is concerned, Schwabe, from UC Riverside, stressed that doing so "would have had virtually no impact on what we're experiencing right now."

Instead, Schwabe described the ongoing crisis as "a local preparedness issue," in the sense that cities need to account for the "changing climate regime" in the future planning and placement of resources.

For example, he suggested that rather than just relying on three tanks in Pacific Palisades, officials could form partnerships with adjacent communities that might be able to share tanks during times of crisis.

Repositioning and diversifying supply sources, Schwabe explained, would be more strategic than increasing the amount of water flowing to the region.

He likened the situation to a household fire, in which the residents have only one garden hose and ask their neighbors to borrow another one. Similar to that household, Schwabe explained, Southern California will probably need "more garden hoses and bigger garden hoses" in the future.

Patrick Reed, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, echoed these sentiments, identifying a division between two elements of Los Angeles's water management: the "crisis response and long-term planning."

The Pacific Palisades water tank situation was "reflective of the extraordinary demands" that local officials were facing in managing the immediate crisis, Reed said in an emailed statement.

"Long-term planning of city water supplies would not typically assume they are going to be used to fight large-scale wildfires in heavily populated urban areas," he continued.

The "surprising shocks" caused by the ongoing fires and resultant stress on water usage surpass any "peak demand scenarios that would be used for planning," according to Reed.

Nonetheless, he emphasized that such a short-term disaster can bring long-term impacts, in the form of lives lost and property damages.

Los Angeles, Reed explained, is coping with a situation in which known climate change risks "have manifested into the type of extraordinary extreme event that we are struggling to address in our long-term planning.”

Going forward, Schwabe said that he could see the value in pausing to reevaluate crisis management plans under new climate scenarios — not just in Southern California, but in other areas across the U.S. West.

"If you're not, you're assuming that these are just kind of really infrequent events, and you're basing your decisions on past data and evidence about climate," he said.

"Then you're likely going to continue to make these mistakes," Schwabe added.

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