Trump says California’s mismanagement of forests and water is to blame for wildfires. Here’s the reality.

CNN
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As more than 60 square miles Los Angeles violently burned earlier this month, then-President Elect Donald Trump placed blame on a fish.

Trump falsely implied in a Truth Social post that Los Angeles lacked the water to put out the fires because Gov. Gavin Newsom chose to protect an “essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” which is only found in Northern California.

Trump took more shots at California in his inauguration speech, saying falsely the LA fires were still burning “without even a token of defense.” Later that day, he signed an executive action titled “putting people over fish,” ordering a re-routing of the state’s complex water system.

Newsom and California are frequently the target of Trump’s ire. Some of his most memorable criticisms of the state have been over how it manages its wildlands in the face of wildfire risk. In his first term, Trump suggested California should be “raking” their forests to clean up dead brush and trees.

But the jabs are more than sharp political rhetoric — they could have real consequences for disaster aid. As Trump blamed Newsom and smelt for LA fires, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican lawmakers suggested there should be conditions attached to aid with respect to “water resource mismanagement” and “forest management mistakes.”

Here’s the reality of how the state manages water and wilderness.

Crews in California and other western states have been treating forests and other vegetation for years, aiming to prevent wildfire. Armed with billions in federal funding, they have thinned out overgrown forests and shrub-lands and treat them with prescribed burns – using controlled fire to get rid of built-up brush and dried wood that can make wildfires catastrophic.

In 2023 alone, more than 1,500 square miles of state and federal land in California was, in a word, “raked” — underbrush and debris was removed, land was treated with prescribed fire, timber harvest or animal grazing with the goal to reduce wildfire fuel. That number is likely low, experts said, because it doesn’t account for the federal and state grants given to local organizations doing this work.

In 2024, the US Forest Service alone thinned out roughly 500 square miles, and the agency has treated nearly 80 square miles in Southern California since 2023, including some areas that overlapped with the Eaton Fire.

A Forest Service spokesperson told CNN that treatment on Mt. Wilson, northeast of Altadena, “played a significant role in avoiding damages” to critical communication infrastructure.

The scrubby landscape in Southern California is vastly different from Northern California’s forests. The mountains around Los Angeles are dominated by chaparral scrub — low trees and bushes that thrive in hot, dry conditions.

The combination of environmental regulations protecting chaparral, combined with the dense residential areas near it, mean that prescribed fire is very infrequently used in Southern California.

“There’s too much private property mixed in (making any prescribed burns a high liability for litigation if something goes wrong),” said Crystal Kolden, director of the University of California Merced Fire Resilience Center, in an email.

There is “a huge fear of fire” in this area and “too many hikers and other people recreating on public lands,” Kolden said. Instead, crews thin the brush using chainsaws or small tractors called “masticators” to turn brush into wood chips. They also use goat herds to trim the vegetation.

California wildfire expert Lenya Quinn-Davidson and other experts said California has made “major strides” on policies allowing more prescribed fires in the past several years.

Even so, “what we’re getting done in reality is a drop in the bucket with what the problem is,” said Quinn-Davidson a fire advisor and the Director of University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

The extreme, 100 mph winds that drove the LA wildfires to rage out of control is a different kind of event than a fire driven by overgrown brush, Quinn-Davidson said. Extensive brush clearing and other treatments to prevent wildfire almost certainly could not have prevented the LA wildfires given the extreme winds and drought conditions that fed them, she said.

“With any ignition and the fuels being so dry, those wind-driven fires are almost unstoppable when the winds are that high,” said Quinn-Davidson. “For the fires we’re seeing – I think you’d have a hard time arguing those could be prevented with fuels treatments.”

Hydrants ran dry in the hilly neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, fueling speculation that there were larger problems with water availability.

Trump claimed in a social media post that Newsom had “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” – in effect preventing millions of gallons of water to flow from Northern to Southern California. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order directing his agencies to “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”

But experts previously told CNN there is no connection between water battles in Northern California and hydrants running dry during the LA fires.

The Los Angeles metro gets its water from two major sources: the state water project stemming from Lake Oroville and several other major state reservoirs; and the Colorado River, where it draws water from Lake Mead. Oroville still has plenty of water after two wet winters, and the Colorado is currently stable.

The initial lack of fire-fighting planes in the air due to dangerous winds meant municipal water was the primary source firefighters had during the worst of the wildfires. The sheer amount of water needed to battle massive wind-driven fires put a huge strain on the system and caused outages as water levels in massive tanks dropped and firefighters lost pressure to their firehoses, experts and LA officials said.

A small reservoir that could have provided some water to the Palisades neighborhood had also been drained for repair. Newsom has called for an independent investigation into the dry hydrants and the fact that the local reservoir was offline during the blazes.

While working hydrants and extra reservoir capacity could have helped contain some of the damage, multiple experts told CNN the fire was simply too powerful for the tools firefighters had. The sheer magnitude of hurricane-force winds combining with flames made it impossible for even fully functioning hydrants to successfully battle the blazes.