President Donald Trump has been vocal, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, about the need to bring more water to Southern California. He is not wrong, but the problem is more acute: L.A. was not generally short of water; it mismanaged the water supply it already had.
Dry, densely-populated Southern California obtains much of its water from wet, sparsely-populated Northern California. It does so through a system of federal and state reservoirs and aqueducts. It also gets water from the Colorado River and, to a lesser extent, desalination.
Farmers and municipal water users (household and industry) share the same water sources. In recent decades, the flow has been restricted due to low rainfall, and also due to concerns about the delta smelt, the endangered (but easily cultivated) species that Trump talks about.
The delta smelt is symbolic of a deeper problem, which is the growing salinity of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Successive governors have proposed “solving” this problem by building tunnels to connect large rivers from Northern California directly to Southern California.
Shasta Dam, a federal dam in Northern California. December 19, 2018 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
There is also the idea of increasing the number or size of reservoirs in California. But nothing has happened in 40 years, as the population has doubled, thanks largely to environmental concerns about dams. We have had enough wet winters between droughts to ignore the issue.
Various water authorities in Southern California have tried to find other ways of obtaining water. San Diego and Santa Barbara have invested in desalination (with the help of Israeli experts). L.A. has focused on reclaiming wastewater. These are expensive but useful methods.
There were two water issues in the L.A. fires. One was that the 117-million gallon reservoir atop Palisades was empty, down for maintenance despite massive rainfall in 2023 and 2024, and despite the imminent fire season. There’s no excuse. We had water; we didn’t have it there.
The second issue was the lack of water in the hydrants — due to lack of supply in the reservoir, sudden demand (decreasing pressure), power failure, and bad system design. The threat of wildfire requires more, and more widely distributed, stores of water for emergency use.
In sum: Trump is right that Southern California needs more water, and our state and federal governments have failed to address the issue. It might have helped. But L.A.’s fire failures were smaller and more local. They were failures of planning, preparation, and leadership.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
