California environmental policies misleadingly blamed for LA fires
- Published on January 22, 2025 at 20:40
- 9 min read
- By Manon JACOB, AFP USA
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
California's environmental policies were highlighted in social media posts and amplified by Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk, who singled out several conservation projects as the culprit for the scope of the fires.
At least 27 people perished in the two massive blazes that erupted on January 7, with dozens still missing, and over 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) burned.
During his first presidential term, Trump had vowed to provide California with "unlimited water" (archived here) by reducing or dismantling the state's environmental and conservation efforts (archived here, here, and here).
Just after taking office on January 20, 2025, the US president signed a myriad of executive actions intended to transform the country, including the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and an order for federal and environmental agencies to "route more water" to Southern California.
"My Administration's plan would have allowed enormous amounts of water to flow from the snow melt and rainwater," Trump said in a January 20 memorandum (archived here), referencing the historic wildfires.
AFP examined multiple claims surrounding environmental policies to understand how they impact wildfire risks in the area.
Endangered fish
A conservation mandate for California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (archived here) was the target of multiple claims with, at their center, the smelt (archived here), a small fish found hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles, and often deemed an indicator of the overall health of the Bay-Delta ecosystem.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the population of the Delta smelt as endangered in 2024 "due to significant declines" in population throughout the San Francisco Bay estuary in recent decades (archived here).
Efforts to help the fish were decried in a January 8 post by Trump on his platform, Truth Social, and again in the presidential memorandum tagged as "putting people over fish."
Current regulations protecting endangered fish can impact the rate of pumping rivers into state and federal water storage and conveyance facilities. These rates are adjusted depending on California's climate.
But tying these measures to the fires is "implausible" given "there is no shortage of water in the reservoirs that are filled by Delta water," Scoville said.
Faith Kearns, a water, wildfire, and climate change researcher at Arizona State University (archived here), concurred.
"California's water supply is quite robust right now," she told AFP on January 14.
Demand for water
One factor that hurt efforts to contain the blazes was that some fire hydrants ran dry in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.
On January 10, California's Governor Gavin Newsom opened an independent investigation (archived here) into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said it pumped from aqueducts and groundwater into the system, but the main challenge stemmed from trying to deploy that much water so quickly.
During the early firefighting efforts, water demand peaked at four times normal usage, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power chief executive Janisse Quiñones, said (archived here) at a news conference on January 8.
Trying to send water from other parts of the city was complicated by the size of the supply lines and the fact that water had to be pumped uphill, Quiñones said.
Christine McMorrow, information officer at CAL FIRE (archived here), told AFP on January 16: "Reservoirs were filled and usable before the Palisades incident began. However, when you have that much draw on a water source at once, a reservoir/basin/tank cannot refill quickly enough to keep up."
Officials also said that even if more water had been available, containing the initial blazes would not have been possible.
"I'll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire," Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said (archived here) on January 8.
Water imports
Environmental experts said California's water imports (archived here) did not materially affect the fire response in Los Angeles.
Nann Fangue, chair of the wildlife, fish and conservation biology department at the University of California-Davis (archived here), told AFP on January 16 that "the limitation was in delivery to fire hydrants, not in supply."
State water resource data shows that most of California's major water reservoirs are currently at robust levels for this time of the year, and were when the fires started, as the image below, displaying data for January 7 shows (archived here).
"This is especially true of reservoirs in Southern California," which includes the zone affected by the fires, Caleb Scoville, assistant professor of environmental sociology at Tufts University in Massachusetts (archived here), said on January 14.
Claiming that Newsom blocked the arrival of water from the North is false.
The California governor called such narratives -- repeatedly voiced by Trump -- "wild-eyed fantasies" in a January 14 interview on MSNBC.
Los Angeles's water supplies are mainly fed via aqueducts and canals originating from entirely separate river basins further east.
Halt in prescribed burns
Misleading claims concerning controlled burns in the state also spread online, with some people arguing environmental review requirements delayed necessary action and forest thinning that would have prevented the wildfires.
Land management agencies use prescribed burns to mimic a fire's natural role in the ecosystem by removing vegetation, which can help reduce the intensity and spread of wildfires while also benefiting wildlife habitats.
In recent years, the US Forest Service has halted seasonal prescribed burns due to "unfavorable" conditions and to preserve firefighting staff and equipment (archived here).
While a lack of forest management can contribute to fire intensity in a region, prescribed burns are generally only recommended under specific conditions and in certain areas of California -- not the residential neighborhoods impacted by the fires in Los Angeles.
"California has a lot of vegetation types and ecosystems are very different between northern and southern California. Prescribed fire isn't appropriate everywhere," CAL FIRE's McMorrow said.
Deployments of emergency vehicles
Some posts alleged that fire trucks from Oregon were stopped for carbon emission testing.
California did implement a program for heavy-duty vehicle emissions compliance testing to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but emergency vehicles, including fire trucks, are not subject to the regulation (archived here).
Oregon State Fire Marshal spokesman John Hendricks told AFP on January 16 claims that teams from his state were delayed were false.
"We mobilized 21 strike teams, 370 firefighters, and 105 apparatus. We sent 75 fire engines and 30 water tenders," he said. "There were no blockages or halts due to emissions testing."
The emergency vehicles were given routine safety inspection by California fire officials and offered any necessary repairs before deployment (archived here).
"No engine was turned away," the Oregon State Fire Marshal reiterated in a January 12 statement (archived here).
'Fire year'
The combination of a dry winter and strong Santa Ana winds created the optimal conditions for the fires, meteorologists say.
"It is highly unusual to have fires in January like this -- attributed to the very dry winter that Southern California is experiencing after a very dry summer combined with the Santa Ana winds," Toddi Steelman, wildfire expert at Duke University (archived here), said.
"We don't have a fire season anymore; we have a fire year," she said in a January 8 statement (archived here).
Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe (archived here) also said the situation was worsened by the "exceptionally dry and windy conditions leading to climate change-fueled fires burning faster and much greater area than they used to."
Many structures and public services in Los Angeles were "unprepared" for the magnitude of the disaster, she told AFP on January 9.
Jay Lund, an engineering professor at the University of California-Davis (archived here), said that the recent events "clearly overwhelmed the smaller-scale fire-fighting capacity that urban areas have perfected, and which gave us, in this case, a false sense of security."
As the climate is changing -- and bigger swings between extremely wet and dry weather conditions become frequent -- new building codes and land use regulations for areas vulnerable to wildfire, and designed to face larger wildfires, will need to be deployed, Lund said on January 14.
AFP has debunked other false and misleading claims about the Los Angeles fires, including here, here and here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
