According to some politicians and influencers, a small fish called the Delta smelt is to blame for the wildfires that have devastated the Los Angeles area this week.
Prominent figures, including President-elect Donald Trump, said policies related to the endangered Delta smelt affect how much water can be pumped out of the fish’s habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They added that’s the cause of water supply issues faced by firefighters laboring to stop the blazes. Three water tanks and some fire hydrants temporarily lost water because of high demand Tuesday, local officials said.
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The small fish isn’t alone in being the target of blame for the multiple wildfires that had burned across 45 square miles of the city as of Thursday, forcing more than 180,000 people out of their homes. Other people have criticized diversity, equity and inclusion, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s immigration policies or the influence of billionaires on climate change policy.
It’s not clear what initially sparked the fires, and in the absence of reliable information, some of the allegations being made online are misinformed or wrong, experts say. All of them ignore the complexities that caused the fires to spread and the nuanced solutions that would be required to address similar urban wildfires in the future, they add.
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Trump was among the most notable leaders to call out the Delta smelt, writing Wednesday on Truth Social that Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration” that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow into parts of California, “including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump wrote. “Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
In a statement in response, Izzy Gardon, Newsom’s director of communications, accused Trump of “playing politics.”
“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction,” Gardon said Tuesday. “The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Trump wasn’t alone in blaming the Delta smelt. Roger Stone, a Republican operative whom Trump pardoned for multiple felony convictions, shared a photo of the smelt on X on Wednesday, writing, “This is the fish Gavin Newscum burned California down in order to save.”
James Woods, the actor, who said his home in Pacific Palisades burned down, criticized Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley’s mention of DEI in her bio on the department website.
“Refilling the water reservoirs would have been a welcome priority, too, but I guess she had too much on her plate promoting diversity,” Woods wrote on X next to a photo of the last paragraph of Crowley’s bio. The paragraph says: “Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities are Chief Crowley’s priorities, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve the City of Los Angeles.”
Targeting DEI initiatives after or during attention-grabbing news incidents has become a predictable political tactic in the last year for Republicans, who have responded to everything from bridge collapses to midair accidents with such attacks.
Others have suggested that Newsom also didn’t refill California’s reservoirs or that he returned its water to the ocean.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, agreed with a post from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that said the fires are part of a “larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize” the United States before “triggering total collapse.”
Experts say that most of the takes are inaccurate or miss the point and that they don’t make room for conversations about real solutions to worsening natural disasters.
“I think the blame game isn’t useful,” said Faith Kearns, director of research communications at the Arizona Water Initiative at Arizona State University and co-author of a 2021 report published by UCLA on wildfire and water supply in California.
“This is a really complex, complicated and emergent issue that just hasn’t been on the radar for mostly anyone, and so I just don’t think that there is individual blame to go around at all,” she said. “Those were exceptional fire conditions that we’re seeing in L.A., drought, climate change and then these high winds.”
Kearns said one of the takeaways of the 2021 report she co-authored was that it’s unclear who would start to address issues with water management related to wildfires. In California, for example, there are thousands of water providers, she said, and some aren’t well-resourced.
“Is it their issue to try to deal with? Is it the fire service? Is it a county, a city?” she said. “The fact that we don’t even know who’s totally responsible for all these things makes me feel like we certainly don’t know where to put blame, either.”
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 challenging.”
Kearns said that statement highlights a serious issue — that experts have seen wildland fires move into urban areas only in the last 10 to 15 years and that they’re still figuring out how to address it.
“The way that firefighting has traditionally been, there are wildland firefighters and agencies, and then there are urban firefighters and agencies,” she said. “Are we having wildland firefighters fighting fires in urban areas or the reverse? And sometimes the approaches are really different.”
The “blame game” ignores the nuances of addressing urban fires, experts said, but it 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 that is especially true of reservoirs in Southern California, refuting claims that Newsom or Crowley didn’t refill them.
Scoville added that the Delta smelt, in particular, has repeatedly been blamed by politicians, including Trump, for environmental problems in California. Scoville said the policies that protect the smelt and other species, like salmon, sometimes affect the amount of water that can be pumped at a particular time from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is the heart of California’s water distribution system, “but this is not a factor that’s relevant at all to the wildfire situation or the ability of Los Angeles to handle the wildfires.”
“It plays to a long-standing trope that liberals or people in cities or people in places like California or environmentalists care more about small, uncharismatic species than they care about their fellow Americans,” Scoville said of Trump’s allegations against the smelt, which he called a distraction from the climate crisis and the complexities of water policy in California.
“It’s a way of turning a set of concrete environmental challenges into a kind of culture war,” he said. “It’s about dividing people, so it can have sort of short-term political wins, but it’s corrosive to our ability to respond to really serious environmental problems.”
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