Soon after wildfire began incinerating dozens of square miles of Los Angeles, President-elect Donald Trump blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom for keeping policies that limit the amount of freshwater able to flow from northern California to the parched southern part of the state.
"He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt," Trump posted on Truth Social. "Now the ultimate price is being paid."
Trump's claim about California depriving water where it's needed most, all to save a small fish known as Delta smelt, is not new.
"In order to protect a little tiny fish called the smelt they send millions and millions of gallons of water out to the Pacific Ocean, way up north," Trump said at a September 2024 campaign appearance in Los Angeles. "You could revert water up into the hills where you have all the dead forests, where the forests are so brittle."
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Scripps News Truth Be Told checked with the California Department of Water Resources and learned it is true some water from northern California is sent to the Pacific to support wildlife and fish, including the endangered Delta smelt.
But the water flow rules are mostly about preventing saltwater from contaminating water used for drinking and irrigation, said Karrigan Börk, professor of law and co-director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at the University of California-Davis.
"It's really only a very small amount of the water that goes into the ocean that's about protecting the fish," Börk said. "I think it's important to be really clear that there's no tie between the amount of water being released in the ocean and the firefighting efforts in southern California."
When the wildfires broke out, there was briefly a shortage of water in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, where 200 fire hydrants ran dry.
Authorities have said the hydrant system was temporarily overwhelmed, not because the region lacked water, as a firefighter explained to billionaire Elon Musk during a live event on the platform X.
"In the Palisades there was a shortage of water at a certain point, or was that not accurate?" Musk says.
"Well we were just, we were flowing just an amount of water the the system couldn't ... It was overbearing just because of how much water these firefighters were utilizing," the firefighter responds.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said despite the region's drought, there is a record amount of water in reserve to support firefighting efforts.
Newsom has ordered an investigation into why the Santa Ynez Reservoir located near Pacific Palisades was empty and awaiting repairs while homes burned. It's not yet known whether more lives and property could've been saved had the reservoir been filled.
