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 water authorities widely described Trump’s order to release the water from the dams as wasteful, harmful to farmers and poorly planned – and said it could have been catastrophic if the Army Corps of Engineers had released the 5 billion-plus gallons Trump initially made clear he wanted to flow, which experts said could have caused deadly flooding.
CNN asked the White House for comment about why the president keeps telling the false story about the water releases flowing to Los Angeles and why he also falsely claimed Thursday, as he has before, that some of California’s water comes from Canada. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded by denouncing CNN, criticizing Newsom’s fire preparedness efforts, and asserting that Trump released the water to save people from more tragedy.
Gallegos said, “The federal administration appears to have some issues with basic geography.”
Here’s what Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday while sitting beside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte: “I broke into Los Angeles, can you believe it? I had to break in. I invaded Los Angeles, and we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down; they have so much water they don’t know what to do. They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons.”
That story doesn’t make sense even using “invaded” as a figure of speech. Nothing about the water releases actually involved Los Angeles.
The Army Corps of Engineers branch that manages the dams from which the water was released was shocked by the White House release order, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN’s Ella Nilsen. A memo obtained by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times showed that the Army Corps knew the water “could not be delivered to Southern California directly” and “would remain in the Tulare Lake Basin” without special coordination with California’s water department to employ a rarely used connection to the state’s water system. California’s water department made clear it could not get involved on such short notice, the memo said.
The White House noted to CNN that the connection exists and was used in 2023; California’s water department said then that this was the first time it was used since 2006. Regardless, it wasn’t used this time, so Trump’s repeated claims that the water flowed to Los Angeles remain untrue.
Trump had the water released from the dams after complaining, baselessly, that Los Angeles had not been sent enough water for wildfire prevention or firefighting efforts because California’s Democratic leadership wanted water kept in the northern part of the state to help an obscure fish species. The Los Angeles area had more than enough water to fight the January wildfires, though there were some localized water shortages in particular neighborhoods amid the extreme demand of the battle, and experts emphasized the fires and the fish had nothing to do with each other.
When the Army Corps of Engineers began releasing the water on January 30, firefighters happened to be reaching 100% containment on the January wildfires in Los Angeles. Fire officials said that 100% containment was reached on January 31; the unrelated federal water releases continued until February 2.
