President-elect Donald Trump has used the devastating Los Angeles wildfires to revisit a policy disagreement with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, pushing a series of complaints that experts say are false or misleading.
Trump this week blamed Newsom for the fires, which have killed at least 10 people, forced 180,000 to evacuate and burned more than 10,000 structures.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this,” Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The availability of water has been a particular concern over the past few days after some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades temporarily dried up as firefighters attempted to contain a massive blaze there.
But three water policy experts said the problem wasn’t the water supply — the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power filled all available water facility storage tanks ahead of the fires.
Rather, the city’s water infrastructure wasn’t equipped to fight major wildfires, they said.
After the hydrants dried up, the water department attributed the issue to excessive demand on the system. The department couldn’t refill tanks quickly enough, it said, so the pressure dropped and water struggled to reach hydrants in the hills. A reservoir in the Palisades that could have helped with water pressure was also out of commission when the fire started.
Electrical outages further disrupted the flow of water to hydrants....
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