Professor Börk Talks to New York Times About Trump Blaming L.A. Fires on California Water Policy

Professor Karrigan Börk spoke to the New York Times and several other media outlets about President Donald Trump’s escalating criticism and actions regarding California’s management of its water supplies.

During the catastrophic recent wildfires in Los Angeles, then-President-Elect Trump lamented on Truth Social that Gov. Gavin Newsom kept water from Los Angeles to protect “an essentially worthless fish called a smelt.” Trump was alluding to the Delta smelt, a nearly extinct, small fish species found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Protected by federal and state laws, the Delta smelt has been the subject of conservative criticism of California water policy for decades.

Upon taking office Jan. 20, Trump published a memo directing the Interior and Commerce departments to route more water from the Delta to other parts of the state, then followed with an executive order that federal agencies seek ways to assert more control over California’s water,

Börk, interim director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, told the New York Times that Trump’s order does not “change things very much,” and “certainly doesn’t change California’s hydrology, which imposes the most significant limits on the amount of water that can flow to the Central Valley and Southern California.” In an interview with San Francisco public radio station KQED, Börk said that Trump’s directive, if implemented, almost certainly would be met by a lawsuit from California. And Börk asserted to Inside Climate News that the idea California is “diverting all this water to protect the smelt isn’t accurate.”

“The operation of the pumps in the Delta, and the way we move water across the Delta is really constrained by the hydrology, by the way water flows through that system,” Börk told the website. “It takes a lot of water to keep the water in the Delta fresh.”

Börk noted that “a whole lot of water” must be released from reservoirs throughout the northern part of the state to be able to send fresh water to the Central Valley and Southern California instead of the saltwater that would naturally come into the Delta. “We can’t suddenly change the way we’re operating the Delta and pump a whole lot more water without bringing in saltwater.”

Börk told the Global News that “there is just no basis in reality for tying the Delta smelt to the fires in L.A.,” and expressed similar sentiments to Vox and Sacramento’s ABC10 news.