California’s natural fires: Small fires break across the region, including a near Mexico border.

Mr. Trump’s view of the situation can have very real consequences. He threatened Wednesday to withhold federal relief funds if California does not send more of his water from the northern part of the state to its southern half. He also issued an order on his first day in office – entitled “Putting People over Fish” – who instructed cabinet members to find ways within 90 days to redirect more water south.

The order questions litigation and disputes as old as California, even about who deserves precious water in the state and how its floating gold can best serve almost 40 million inhabitants along with its agricultural industry, fishing and ecosystems.

The mountains along the back of California – Sierra Nevada and the southern end of the Cascade Range – are an important part of the state’s water supply. The same storms that make Yosemite National Park a winter -waistland and create skiing places near Lake Tahoe leaves a snow pack that melts to streams and rivers in the spring and summer.

While most of the state’s water originated and is stored in northern California, most of the state’s population lives in southern California. And the water -intensive agricultural industry is located in Central Valley, where rain is never enough to maintain every year’s crops.

“Look, Gavin has one thing he can do,” Mr. Trump in an interview Wednesday with Sean Hannity, Fox News host. “He can release the water coming from the north. There are huge amounts of water, rainwater and mountain water, which also comes with the snow, which falls down when it melts, there is so much water that they release it into the Pacific Ocean. “

But the state’s water supply to southern California, experts said, had nothing to do with the fires that raged uncontrolled the night of January 7 and destroyed more than 10,000 structures.

“There are many things you can say that will make California look bad, but this is not one of them if you want to do it factually,” said Jay Lund, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Davis, who has studied water resources and environmental technology.

A complicated water hub

When Mr Trump and other Republicans criticize California for sending water into the Pacific, they refer to agreements to ensure that the state sends enough fresh water downstream to protect crucial ecosystems. Some of that water eventually comes to the sea.

It all comes to the head of northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where salt water from San Francisco Bay is mixed with fresh water from rivers. The delta is the largest estuary on the west coast, one that is incredibly sensitive both environmentally and politically.

Through the delta, the state and the federal governments supply tap water to two -thirds of the state’s population and irrigation water to millions of acres of farms, with a maze of dikes, pumps and islands that control the balance between salt water and fresh water. How much water to be pumped through the delta has been the source of water disputes in the drought -exposed state for decades, and in that fight the most politicized goal has been one of its smallest inhabitants: the delta air.

After the fires began, Mr. Trump it “one essentially worthless fish”, like Mr. Newsom wanted to protect.

Melt was once plentiful in the delta and played an important role in the ecosystem by providing food for countless species of fish and birds. Now they tilt on the verge of extinction and offer another ecosystem advantage, experts say: Helps protect other native fish that also need a certain amount of fresh water flowing into the estuary.

“There are many different kinds of fish out there that need protection and need to be managed,” said Peter Moyle, professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, Center for Watershed Sciences. “The fish will disappear one at a time if we don’t take them into consideration.”

For decades, however, the melt has come to represent one thing for many farmers in Central Valley: a competing demand for their supply of water for irrigation.

This is not the first time a Trump administration is aiming for the deltasm melt, a fish with a humble look found only in California. In 2019, it weakened the protection of the fish, a step announced as a victory for farmers.

“If President Trump somehow manages to find a way to send more water south, his action will cause major problems with agriculture in the delta and the northern half of the state,” Dr. Moyle.

The melt in question is one of the seven endangered or endangered fish species in the delta damaged by the deteriorating habitat caused by redirecting too much water, according to Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, an advocacy group. They include steelhead trout, green sturgeon and two varieties of chinook salmon. Other chinook have done so badly in recent years that the state’s salmon fishing has had to close over the past two years.

“You will never hear Donald Trump or his allied talk of endangered Chinook salmon or the closed salmon fishing. You will never hear him talk about green sturgeon, ”said Dr. Rosenfield. “Why? Because people know what salmon and sturgeon are.”

Even under the more restrictive rules that were in place until 2019, rules that specifically related to delta -melting were responsible for no more than an average of 1.2 percent extra water flowing into San Francisco Bay, According to an analysis He helped perform.

Infrastructure problems in Pacific Palisades

It is well documented that some firefighters in Pacific Palisades ran out of water the night when the fires tore through the neighborhood and their snakes ran dry as they tried to turn off the flames. The water pressure dropped and the fire cocks could not keep up with demand throughout the community to turn off home after home.

At the same time, a reservoir that can supply millions of gallons of water in Pacific Palisades had been emptied of repairs.

Mr. Trump has used these examples to support his argument that California failed to supply southern California with enough water. But none of the problems were the result of water transfers from the north.

Several experts have said that the municipal water system in Pacific Palisades, as in many American communities, was never built to maintain a fire Against a wild land fire that burned thousands of homes. The storage tanks and pumping systems designed to operate the hillside simply could not keep up that night.

Water reservoirs around Los Angeles were at high levels in late December, Dr. Grove. The biggest problem he noted was that hard winds plane and helicopters that typically get natural fires under control.

“There was enough water in stock in southern California to drown the fire -stricken areas in 20 feet of water, but you couldn’t get it to those places,” he said.

The State reservoirs that store water Used by Southern California remains on or over 100 percent of their normal grades for this time of year.

“The state’s reservoirs are on or close to record highs, and the questions about the endangered Species Act have been questions that have been sued, convicted, politicized as long as I’ve been alive,” Mr. Newsom Thursday, prior to 7 p.m. Mr. Trump’s visit. “They are not new to this administration. They go back to George Hw Bush.”

Pacific Northwest?

In recent days, Mr Trump has alluded to a water line that does not exist.

“Los Angeles has huge amounts of water available,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve and that is the valve that comes back from and down from Pacific Northwest, where millions of gallons of water a week and one day, yes, in many cases, flow into California, Going all the way through.

Mr. Trump also said that California’s leaders led it water to the Pacific Ocean through a valve.

But there is no valve that controls flowing amounts of water from Pacific Northwest. The idea of ​​creating a pipeline from Oregon and Washington State has previously been suggested by Californians, but building a system that could transport water over such long distances and across towering mountain ranges has long been considered exorbitant expensive.

And officials in the state of Washington and Oregon would face political problems if they ever agreed to send their water south. However, states export a by -product of their water to California in the form of hydropower over large transmission lines.

“It’s hard to explain what he’s talking about because no one knows what he’s talking about,” said John Buse, Attorney General of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. “The idea of ​​a valve and water will just flow is absurd.”

Sending water to the south benefits the farmers

For decades, farmers have struggled to secure more water through the delta, and they are most likely to take advantage of actions to transfer water to the south.

While Mr. Trump has focused the debate this month on helping firefighters in Pacific Palisades and supplying residents of southern California, farms have historically used several times more water than the state’s inhabitants.

The president has on several occasions described a previous tour of the Central Valley farms with former representative Devin Nunes, the Republican of California and other Republican members of the Congress who appear to have affected his faith. He has made it clear that he wants more water for the benefit of farms in California.

“I looked at these huge areas of land, and it looked like it was just burning,” Mr. Trump to Mr. Hannity Wednesday. “It was dark, it was dry. And then there would be a small stain, a small stain green, beautiful green.

“And I would say, ‘How can it be that this whole country has these little spots?’ They said, ‘That’s all we have to grow because we have no water.’ I said, ‘Do you have a drought?’ ‘None.

Mike Wade is CEO of California Farm Water Coalition, which advocates the export of more water to farmers concentrated in Central Valley. He said the president’s Pacific Northwest valve comments may have just been a metaphor to control the Delta’s water supply and that the group has worked well with both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Mr. Wade said the peasants desperately need more water.

“If you look at the last 25 years or so, we have seen a million hectares of agricultural land taken out of production, mainly due to a lack of water supply,” he said. “We have the land, so if we have the water we can grow more than we do now.”

Adam Nagourney contributed with reporting from Los Angeles.