Trump says California’s mismanagement of forests and water is to blame for wildfires. Here is the reality.



CNN

When more than 60 square kilometers of Los Angeles burned violently earlier this month, then-President-elect Donald Trump blamed a fish.

Trump falsely suggested in a Truth Social post that Los Angeles lacked water to put out the fires because Gov. Gavin Newsom chose to protect an “essentially worthless fish called a smelt” found only in Northern California.

Trump took several shots at California in his inauguration speech, falsely saying the LA fires were still burning “without even a sign of defense.” Later that day, he signed an executive action titled “putting people over fish,” ordering a reengineering of the state’s complex water system.

Newsom and California are often the target of Trump’s ire. Some of his most memorable criticisms of the state have been over how it manages its wildlands in light of the risk of wildfires. In his first term, Trump suggested that California should “tear down” their forests to clear up dead brush and trees.

But the shocks are more than sharp political rhetoric – they can have real consequences for disaster relief. As Trump blamed Newsom and smelled LA fires, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican lawmakers suggested there should be conditions attached to the aid regarding “water resource failures” and “forest management failures.”

Here’s the reality of how the state manages water and wilderness.

Crews in California and other western states have been treating forests and other vegetation for years with the goal of preventing wildfires. Armed with billions in federal funding, they’ve thinned overgrown forests and brush areas and treated them to prescribed burns — using controlled fire to get rid of built-up brush and dried wood that can make wildfires catastrophic.

In 2023 alone, more than 1,500 square miles of state and federal land in California were, in short, “teared”—brush and debris were removed, land was treated with prescribed fire, timber harvesting, or animal grazing with the goal of reducing wildfire fuel. That number is likely low, experts said, because it doesn’t take into account the federal and state grants given to local organizations that do this work.

In 2024, the US Forest Service alone thinned about 500 square kilometers, and the agency has treated nearly 80 square kilometers in Southern California since 2023, including some areas that overlapped with the Eaton fire.

A Forest Service spokesman told CNN that treatment at Mt. Wilson, northeast of Altadena, “played a significant role in avoiding damage” to critical communications infrastructure.

The scrubby landscape of Southern California is very different from the forests of Northern California. The mountains surrounding Los Angeles are dominated by chaparral scrub – low trees and shrubs that thrive in hot, dry conditions.

The combination of environmental regulations protecting chaparral, coupled with the dense residential areas nearby, means that prescribed fire is very rarely used in Southern California.

Goats and sheep from Shepherdess Land and Livestock Company eat brush and dried grass as part of an effort to prevent wildfires above homes in the Santa Monica Mountains in Topanga, California, on August 20.
Marin County firefighters use a drip torch during a controlled burn exercise June 21 in San Rafael, California.

“There is too much private property involved (making any prescribed burn a huge liability for lawsuits if something goes wrong),” Crystal Kolden, director of the University of California Merced Fire Resilience Center, said in an email.

There is “a tremendous fear of fire” in that area and “too many hikers and other people recreating on public lands,” Kolden said. Instead, staff thins the brush using chainsaws or small tractors called “chewing machines” to turn brush into wood chips. They also use herds of goats to trim the vegetation.

California wildfire expert Lenya Quinn-Davidson and other experts said California has made “great strides” in policies allowing more prescribed fires in the past several years.

Still, “what we’re getting done is really a drop in the bucket of what the problem is,” said Quinn-Davidson, a fire advisor and director of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

The extreme 100 mph winds that drove the LA wildfires to rage out of control are a different kind of event than a fire fueled by overgrown brush, Quinn-Davidson said. Extensive brush clearing and other treatments to prevent wildfires almost certainly could not have prevented the LA wildfires given the extreme winds and drought conditions that fed them, she said.

“With any ignition and the fuels being so dry, the wind-driven fires are almost unstoppable when the winds are that high,” Quinn-Davidson said. “For the fires we’re seeing — I think you’d have a hard time arguing that they could be prevented with fuel treatments.”

A helicopter drops water on the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades, California, on January 7.

Water hydrants ran dry in the hilly neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, prompting speculation that there were larger problems with water availability.

Trump claimed in a social media post that Newsom had “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” — effectively preventing millions of gallons of water from flowing from northern to southern California. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order orders its agencies “to divert more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”

But experts have previously told CNN there is no connection between water fights in Northern California and fire hydrants running dry during the LA fires.

Metro Los Angeles gets its water from two major sources: the state water project, which draws from Lake Oroville and several other major state reservoirs; and the Colorado River, where it draws water from Lake Mead. Oroville still has plenty of water after two wet winters, and Colorado is currently stable.

The initial lack of firefighting aircraft in the air due to dangerous winds meant that municipal water was the primary source firefighters had during the worst wildfires. The large amount of water needed to fight massive wind-driven fires put a huge strain on the system, causing outages as water levels in massive tanks dropped and firefighters lost pressure on their fire hoses, experts and LA officials said.

A small reservoir that might have provided some water to the Palisades neighborhood had also been drained for repairs. Newsom has called for an independent investigation into the dry hydrants and the fact that the local reservoir was offline during the flames.

While working hydrants and extra reservoir capacity could have helped limit some of the damage, several experts told CNN the fire was simply too powerful for the tools firefighters had. The sheer magnitude of hurricane force winds combined with flames made it impossible for even fully functioning fire hydrants to fight the flames.