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Washington CNN —
President Donald Trump keeps telling a story about how he sent fire-plagued Los Angeles the critical water he says California’s leaders foolishly refused to provide.
But the story, which Trump delivered in an especially colorful form at the White House on Thursday, is not true.
The 2 billion-plus gallons of water Trump had released from two dams in California’s Central Valley agricultural hub in late January and early February did not actually go to Los Angeles. In reality, the water was directed to a dry lake basin elsewhere in the Central Valley – more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles.
“Not one drop of the water released into the Tulare Basin by the Army Corps of Engineers at the direction of the White House made it to Southern California,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank.
“The only way that water got to LA is if an Angeleno driving by got mud on their tires,” said Brent Haddad, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
That’s because the dams Trump had opened by the US Army Corps of Engineers have no automatic link to the California-run State Water Project that serves Southern California. The federally run Central Valley Project “doesn’t reach Los Angeles” and “ends around Bakersfield,” Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, noted on Thursday.
Water policy experts and local...
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