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.”
Source: Daniel Dale, CNN
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