Trump’s Absurd Water Release
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 3, 2025
It was news that bordered on the absurd, particularly if you have ever lived in the West.
On Friday, as the Southern California wildfires were being extinguished, Trump administration officials opened the spigots on two Northern California dams. Water gushed to low-lying land in the Central Valley — not Southern California — in volumes that were feared dangerous.
Yet, Donald Trump proclaims proudly that his singular action would have “prevented” the Los Angeles wildfires “on the other side of mountain ranges over which that water has no way of traveling,” as The New York Times noted. Trump, who has picked on Gov. Gavin Newsom over water policy without bothering to understand it, called it a “victory.” Trump had falsely said that Newsom could solve water shortages in Southern California with the turn of a valve if California were less concerned about endangered fish species.
How off-base was this so-called solution? Even farmers in the Central Valley who will benefit said the water rush is coming at the wrong time: They have higher irrigation needs in the spring and summer.
In any case, the water won’t be available to douse Southern California fires that are already out.
Folks in the Central Valley only learned on Thursday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been directed to “maximize” the flow of water from reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada into local rivers at a rate that officials said would have served no agricultural purpose and would have threatened the stability of local levees — on the order of 1.6 billion gallons in the first 72 hours. Because normally such releases of water are carefully controlled, local communities were instantly alarmed and had to appealed to congressmen to intervene and get the volume turned down to avoid flooding.
Somehow, Trump believes the fires could have been extinguished or prevented altogether had the governor released more water from the north, and that water from the Pacific Northwest and Canada was available, though there is no pipeline to deliver it. In any event, the bigger problems for the Los Angeles fires were from hurricane-force desert winds in a drought-dry urban area with a hydrant-delivery system that was never designed for fighting a cluster of huge wildfires.
It was much fuss, much noise, much politics, but from a water point of view, a useless, wasteful move. Check the absurd box.
Even Trump’s Sharpie can’t instantly move water over mountains into city hydrants.
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