President Trump has repeatedly blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California leaders for the fires that devastated Los Angeles. The president has charged that the state’s Democrats have stubbornly refused to send enough water to Southern California to fight fires, which he attributed to their desire to protect the delta smelt, a threatened species of fish.
But as Mr. Trump prepared a Friday visit to California, water experts in California said that his explanations in many cases were wrong or glossed over complex water dynamics. Southern California reservoirs were generally full of water at the start of the year, they noted, and problems in the fight against the fire had other causes
… The smelt in question are one of seven threatened or endangered species of fish in the Delta harmed by the degraded habitat caused by diverting too much water, according to Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, an advocacy group. They include steelhead trout, green sturgeon and two varieties of Chinook salmon. Other Chinook have fared so badly in recent years that the state’s salmon fishery has had to close for the last two years.
“You’ll never hear Donald Trump or his allies talk about endangered Chinook salmon or the closed salmon fishery. You’ll never hear him talk about green sturgeon,” Dr. Rosenfield said. “Why? Because people know what salmon and sturgeon are.”
Source: New York Times