The Mendocino Complex Fire has burned 454 square miles of Northern California as of Aug. 6.
Between tweets about immigration and the economy, President Trump finally weighed in on the devastating forest fires ravaging California this summer.
But Trump did not have a word for the residents who lost their homes or firefighters who lost their lives. Instead, he wanted to talk about water politics in California, launching a series of tweets that baffled water experts and ignored the role climate change has played in exacerbating wildfires in the arid American West.
On Sunday, Trump blamed unnamed laws for worsening the wildfires. He reasoned “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire spreading!”
He followed up with a Twitter message Monday faulting the state’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, for not providing enough water to fight the fires. That tweet came just a day after the president fulfilled the governor’s request to declare the Carr Fire near Redding a “major disaster,” allowing federal disaster dollars for housing and food aid to flow to the region.
The tweets are perplexing in a number of ways. Indeed, years of drought have dried out California’s woodlands, making forests there more susceptible to wildfires. But the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says it has more than enough water to fight the blazes. “We’re having no issues with water supplies,” said Scott McLean, a deputy chief with the agency said.
In fact, some of the largest of the 17 wildfires in the state are burning near some of its largest lakes. Reservoirs like Trinity and Shasta lakes supply water for fighting the Carr Fire. And the Mendocino Complex Fire, now the largest wildfire on record in California, to the south is right on Clear Lake.
And dousing flames with water is only one way state and federal governments extinguish forest fires. Firefighters also deploy chemical fire retardants and clear lines of vegetation to contain blazes.
“I don’t understand it,” McLean added when asked about Trump’s tweets. “I was surprised like everybody else.”
Trump’s tweets demonstrate a misunderstanding about not only how fires are fought but about how rivers flow. California does divert water from its rivers, as Trump suggests — but not into the Pacific. As the state’s population has grown, its residents have redirected water to cities for drinking and to farmlands for irrigating. The water that remains in California’s rivers still does what it had always done — flow from their headwaters at higher elevations down into the ocean.
And Trump does not mention how a change actually occurring in California — high temperatures due to man-made warming worldwide in the atmosphere — are drying out forests and, as the Interior Department put it in a 2016 report, creating “a longer wildfire season with more intense wildfires.”
