According to some politicians and influencers, a small fish called the Delta smelt is responsible for the wildfires that have devastated the Los Angeles area this week.
Prominent figures, including President-elect Donald Trump, said policies regarding the endangered Delta smelt are affecting the amount of water that can be pumped from the fish’s habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They added that this is the cause of water supply problems that firefighters face to stop the fires. Three water tanks and some fire hydrants temporarily lost water Tuesday due to high demand, local officials said.
The little fish is not the only one targeted by the many wildfires that burned across 70 square kilometers of the city on Thursday, forcing more than 180,000 people from their homes. Other people have criticized diversity, equity and inclusion, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s immigration policies, or billionaires’ influence on climate change policies.
It is not clear what initially caused the fires, and in the absence of reliable information, some accusations made online are misinformed or incorrect, experts say. All ignore the complexities that allowed the fires to spread and the nuanced solutions that would be needed to tackle similar urban wildfires in the future, they add.
Trump was one of the most notable leaders to denounce the Delta melt, writing on Truth Social on Wednesday that Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow to parts of California, “including areas that currently burning in an almost apocalyptic manner.”
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called smelt by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but he didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump wrote. “Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor keep nice, clean, fresh water flowing to CALIFORNIA! He is to blame for this. Moreover, there is no water for fire hydrants and no fire-fighting aircraft. A real disaster!”
In response, Newsom’s communications director Izzy Gardon accused Trump of “playing politics.”
“There is no such document as the water restoration statement — that is pure fiction,” Gardon said Tuesday. “The governor is focused on keeping people safe, not playing politics, and ensuring firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Trump wasn’t the only one to blame the Delta meltdown. Roger Stone, a Republican operative whom Trump pardoned for multiple felony convictions, shared a photo of the smelt on X on Wednesday and wrote: “This is the fish that Gavin Newscum burned California to the ground to save.”
James Woods, the actor, who said his Pacific Palisades home burned down, criticized Fire Chief Kristin Crowley’s mention of DEI in her biography on the department website.
“Refilling the water tanks would also have been a welcome priority, but I think she had too much on her plate to promote diversity,” Woods wrote on X alongside a photo of the final paragraph of Crowley’s biography. The section reads: “Creating, supporting and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion and equity while striving to meet and exceed community expectations are Chief Crowley’s priorities, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve the city of Los Angeles. Angeles.”
Targeting DEI initiatives after or during high-profile news incidents has become a predictable political tactic over the past year for Republicans, who have responded with such attacks to everything from bridge collapses to mid-air accidents.
Others have suggested that Newsom also failed to refill California’s reservoirs or divert water back into the ocean.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, owner of “bring about a total collapse.”
Experts say most recordings are inaccurate or miss the point and leave no room for conversations about real solutions to worsening natural disasters.
“I don’t think the blame game is helpful,” said Faith Kearns, director of research communications at Arizona State University’s Arizona Water Initiative and co-author of a 2021 report published by UCLA on wildfires and water supplies in California.
“This is a very complex, complicated and emerging issue that has not been on virtually anyone’s radar, and so I don’t think there is any individual culpability at all,” she said. “Those were exceptional fire conditions that we’re seeing in LA, drought, climate change and then these high winds.”
Kearns said one of the conclusions from the 2021 report she co-authored was that it is unclear who would tackle water management issues related to bushfires. In California, for example, there are thousands of water providers, she said, and some are under-resourced.
‘Is it their problem that we should try to solve? Is it the fire brigade? Is it a province, a city?” she said. “The fact that we don’t even know who is fully responsible for all of these things makes me feel like we certainly don’t know where to place the blame.”
Kearns pointed to a statement from Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who said Wednesday: “We are fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really a challenge.”
Kearns said this statement highlights a serious problem: that experts have only seen wildfires spreading into urban areas in the past 10 to 15 years and that they are still figuring out how to address it.
“The way firefighting has traditionally been, there are wildland firefighters and agencies, and then there are urban firefighters and agencies,” she said. “Do we have forest firefighters fighting fires in urban areas or vice versa? And sometimes the approaches are really different.”
The ‘blame game’ ignores the nuances of tackling urban fires, experts say, but also spreads misinformation.
Caleb Scoville, an assistant professor of sociology at Tufts University who studies the dynamics of environmental controversies, pointed to the California Department of Water Resources website, which shows that most of the state’s major reservoirs are at or above their historic levels for this time of year. . He added that this is especially true for reservoirs in Southern California, refuting the claim that Newsom or Crowley have not refilled them.
Scoville added that the Delta smelt in particular has been repeatedly blamed by politicians, including Trump, for environmental problems in California. Scoville said policies to protect smelt and other species, such as salmon, sometimes affect the amount of water that can be pumped at any given time from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the heart of California’s water distribution system, “ but this is not at all a factor relevant to the wildfire situation or Los Angeles’ ability to address the wildfires.”
“It joins a long-standing trend that liberals or people in cities or people in places like California or environmentalists care more about small, uncharismatic species than they do about their fellow Americans,” Scoville said of Trump’s allegations against the smelt. called it a distraction from the climate crisis and the complexity of California’s water policy.
“It’s a way to turn a series of concrete environmental challenges into a kind of culture war,” he said. “It’s about dividing people so it can bring short-term political victories, but it undermines our ability to respond to really serious environmental problems.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com