As Los Angeles continues to battle deadly and historically destructive wildfires, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has made what experts call “preposterous” and false claims that California could have avoided the disaster by allowing water from Canada to flow through the state.
Trump, who has fixated on California’s water management issues before and has raised them once again amid the fires, reiterated his claim about Canadian water in an interview with Newsmax Monday evening.
“You know, when I was president, I demanded that this guy, the governor (of California), accept the water coming from the north, from way up in Canada,” Trump said.
“It flows down right through Los Angeles. … Massive amounts coming out from the mountains, from the melts. And even without it, even during the summer, it’s a natural flow of water. They would have had so much water they wouldn’t have known what to do with it. You would have never had the fires.”
Water management and environmental experts say Trump was likely referring to the Columbia River that flows from the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia into the U.S. Pacific Northwest. But they point out the river flows out into the Pacific Ocean between Washington state and Oregon, and there’s no infrastructure to send that water further south.
“The idea that we could send Columbia (River) water specifically to California is preposterous,” said John Wagner, an environmental anthropologist and professor at the University of British Columbia.
Los Angeles County has faced issues with water flows during the wildfires, with some fire hydrants running dry in urban areas, impacting the ability for firefighters to battle the flames. Water trucks have since replenished the dry hydrants.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered state officials to investigate the issue, as well as why a 440 million-litre reservoir was out of service.
Trump has seized on the water problems to justify attacks on Newsom and other Democratic politicians in California. Republicans in Congress have also suggested they may tie federal disaster aid to securing commitments from the state to change its water policies.
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Trump has also blamed California’s approach to balancing the distribution of water to farms and cities with the need to protect endangered fish species, including the Delta smelt. That connection is also false, experts say.
“There’s just no basis in reality for tying the Delta smelt to the fires in L.A.,” said Karrigan Bork, interim director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis. “There’s absolutely no relationship at all.”
Bork said assessments have shown ecosystem protections in the California Delta have little impact on water flows into southern California, and that even if the Delta smelt didn’t exist, the situation would be mostly unchanged. He said Trump’s comments feed into complaints from conservative farmers and critics of environmental policies.
Most of the constraints on California’s water flows, Bork explained, stem from requirements that prevent ocean water from coming into the Delta, where freshwater is then distributed south.
About 40 per cent of Los Angeles city water comes from state-controlled projects connected to northern California and the state has limited the water it delivers this year. But the southern California reservoirs these canals help feed are at above-average levels for this time of year.
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the wildfires has made the demand for water four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”
Hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, Quiñones said, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts.
Hurricane-force winds that whipped up the flames grounded firefighting aircraft that should have been making critical water drops early last week, straining the hydrant system, officials said.
Bork said debates about California’s water policies long predate the worsening drought conditions that have also contributed to increasingly destructive wildfires in the state, and should continue separate from the current disaster.
As for getting water from Canada into California, he said engineering such a project would be “extremely unlikely.”
“It would be virtually impossible and way more expensive than just using the water that we have more efficiently,” he said.
At a news conference in September during his presidential campaign, Trump claimed that Canada had “essentially, a very large faucet” that was sending water into the Pacific Ocean, but that it could be turned around to send water “right into Los Angeles” to help with 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 build.
Canada would also have to agree to such an undertaking.
Canada and the U.S. announced last year it had reached an agreement in principle to modernize the Columbia River Treaty, which was originally struck in 1961 to manage the flow of water from the Columbia River. The treaty primarily ensures flood mitigation measures while managing hydro-power from the river on both sides of the border.
The modernized pact seeks to “rebalance” cooperation between the two countries, officials said last year, allowing the United States to keep more hydro while giving Canada opportunities to both import power and export it to the U.S. market. It also improves collaboration with First Nations on management of the river, including salmon populations.
Talks on updating the treaty first began during Trump’s first term before being finalized by the Biden administration. It still needs to be ratified by the U.S. Congress, which is now firmly under Republican control after November’s U.S. elections.
While Bork doesn’t believe Trump could scrap the agreement to try and address his insistence on bringing Columbia River water into California, Wagner said it’s possible — especially given his increasingly hostile rhetoric about annexing Canada.
“The way he’s talking now sounds like he could scuttle the whole thing,” he said.
At the very least, Wagner said Trump could bully his administration or the International Joint Commission, which manages water issues between Canada and the U.S., to conduct further studies into expanding or diverting the Columbia River or other binational water flows, delaying the treaty agreement.
Bork said Trump’s comments are not based in reality and are simply distracting from the current needs of Los Angeles amid the fires.
“There’s something really distasteful about having to combat this misinformation when we’re literally in the middle of the crisis, and people are still dying and losing their homes as we speak,” he said.
—With files from the Associated Press