As Los Angeles continues to fight deadly and historically destructive wildfirespresident-elect of the United States Donald Trump made what experts call “absurd” and false claims that California could have avoided disaster by allowing water from Canada to flow through the state.
Trump, who has previously focused on water management issues in California and raised them once again amid the fires, reiterated his claims about water in Canada. in an interview with Newsmax Monday evening.
“You know, when I was president, I demanded that this guy, the governor (of California), accept water coming from the north, from Canada,” Trump said.
“He goes through Los Angeles. … Massive quantities coming out of the mountains, out of the melts. And even without it, even in summer, it’s a natural flow of water. They would have had so much water that they wouldn’t have known what to do with it. You would never have had the fires.
Water management and environmental experts say Trump was likely referring to the Columbia River which flows from the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia to the U.S. Pacific Northwest. But they point out that the river flows into the Pacific Ocean, between Washington and Oregon, and there is no infrastructure to carry that water further south.
“The idea that we could send water from the Columbia River specifically to California is absurd,” said John Wagner, an environmental anthropologist and professor at the University of British Columbia.
Los Angeles County has faced water flow issues during wildfires, with some hydrants running dry in urban areas, impacting firefighters’ ability to fight the flames . Since then, water trucks have been replenishing the dry hydrants.
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered state authorities to investigate the problem and why a 440 million liter tank was out of service.
Trump has used water issues to justify his attacks on Newsom and other Democratic politicians in California. Congressional Republicans also suggested they can tie federal disaster aid to securing commitments from the state to change its water policy.
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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 the Delta smelt. This link is also false, experts say.
“Realistically, there is no basis to link the Delta smelt to the fires in Los Angeles,” said Karrigan Bork, interim director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “There is absolutely no relationship.”
Bork said assessments have shown that protecting ecosystems in the California Delta has little impact on water flows to Southern California, and that even if the delta smelt did not exist, the situation would be practically unchanged. He said Trump’s comments fueled complaints from conservative farmers and critics of environmental policies.
Most of the constraints on California’s water flows, Bork explained, come from requirements that prevent ocean water from entering the delta, where fresh water is then distributed south.
About 40 percent of the city of Los Angeles’ water comes from state-controlled projects connected to Northern California, and the state has limited the amount of water it delivers this year. But the Southern California reservoirs that these canals help to feed are at above-average levels for this time of year.
Janisse Quiñones, director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the wildfires has made demand for water four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system “.
Hydrants are designed to fight fires in one or two homes at a time, not hundreds, Quiñones said, and filling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause their firefighting efforts. fire fighting.
Hurricane-force winds that fanned the flames grounded firefighting planes that should have made critical water drops early last week, straining the hydrant system, reports said. those responsible.
Bork said debates over water policies in California long predated the worsening drought conditions that have also contributed to increasingly destructive wildfires in the state, and should continue regardless of the current catastrophe.
As for moving water from Canada to California, he said it would be “extremely unlikely” to conceive of such a project.
“It would be virtually impossible and much more expensive than just using the water we have more efficiently,” he said.
At a press conference in September During his presidential campaign, Trump claimed that Canada had “basically a very large faucet” that sent water into the Pacific Ocean, but that it could be reversed to send water “directly in Los Angeles” to help in the event of natural disasters.
Wagner said that would involve diverting water from the Columbia River through trenches or other infrastructure, which would take several years and billions of dollars to construct.
Canada should also accept such a commitment.
Canada and the United States announced last year that they had reached an agreement in principle to modernize the Columbia River Treaty, originally concluded in 1961 to manage the flow of water from the Columbia River. The treaty primarily guarantees flood mitigation measures while managing the river’s hydroelectric power on both sides of the border.
The modernized agreement aims to “rebalance” cooperation between the two countries, officials said last year, allowing the United States to retain more hydropower while giving Canada the ability to import electricity and export it to the American market. It also improves collaboration with First Nations on river management, including salmon populations.
Discussions about updating the treaty began during Trump’s first term before being finalized by the Biden administration. It still needs to be ratified by the US Congress, now firmly under Republican control after the US elections in November.
Although Bork doesn’t believe Trump could cancel the deal to try to accommodate his insistence on bringing Columbia River water to California, Wagner said it’s possible — especially given his increasingly aggressive rhetoric. hostile to the annexation of Canada.
“The way he talks now makes it sound like he could screw it all up,” he said.
At the very least, Wagner said Trump could intimidate his administration or the International Joint Commission, which handles water issues between Canada and the United States, to conduct more in-depth studies on expanding or diverting the Columbia River or other binational water flows, thereby delaying treaty agreement.
Bork said Trump’s comments are not based in reality and simply distract from the current needs of Los Angeles amid the fires.
“There is something really unpleasant about having to fight this misinformation when we are literally in the middle of the crisis and people continue to die and lose their homes as we speak,” he said. declared.
—With files from the Associated Press