Following him Mortal forest fires in Los Angeles In January, President Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release billions of gallons of two deposits in the Central Valley of California, more than 100 miles from the areas of fire.
Trump had affirmed that California retained the water supplies that could have made the difference in the fight against the flames. California Gavin Newsom governor and other officials He played those statements.
Now, the water released from the dams in Lake Kaweah and the success of the Lake rushes to a dry lake bed in the central valley, where Experts say that it cannot flow south of California And it will probably be wasted.
“There is absolutely no connection between this water and the water necessary for fire fighting in Los Angeles,” said Peter Gleick, an expert in climate and hydrology. “There is no physical connection. There is no way to move the water from where it is to the Los Angeles basin.”
Gleick, who co -founded the Pacific Institute, a research center in Oakland, says the measure ignores the reality of water management in California.
“Farmers in the basin have water and that water is stored in these dams in the winter, during the rainy season, so that farmers can use it in the very hot, long and dry summer season,” he explained.
From the perspective of farmers, he said, “water is lost.”
California Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat, said water release also presented a risk of floods.
“I think that even the water managers received only a brief warning to say: ‘Please do not do it. You can’t do that. That is too much water,” he said. “And, frankly, if they had not talked about the Army’s body from the shelf, there would have been serious floods. There would have been an even greater problem.”
Schiff criticized Mr. Trump’s order as “stupid, ridiculous, dangerous and wasteful.”
“We will need people to speak publicly about the damage that this is doing,” said Schiff. “This is a waste of precious water. We simply have no water to waste.”
Jonathan Vigliotti
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