Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two dams in California’s Central Valley on Friday in a move that seemed intended to make a political point as President Trump continued to falsely blame the Los Angeles wildfires on water policies in the Democratic-run state.
The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said. Nonetheless, President Trump said on Friday that the same action would have prevented the Los Angeles wildfires on the other side of mountain ranges over which that water has no way of traveling.
“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” President Trump posted on Friday on social media in an apparent reference to the dam releases. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”
Experts expressed dismay on Friday that releasing so much water now served little use for farmers, who typically have higher irrigation needs in the spring and summer months when agricultural fields are abundant.
State and federal officials do release some water from dams before storms to make room for incoming flows, and moderate precipitation is expected in the region over the next 72 hours. But it is a delicately choreographed effort, and water managers usually try to release as little water as possible to ensure there will be enough supplies for farmers and residents later in the year. They also need to ensure that communities below the dams are not overwhelmed by water.
“I’ve never seen them do this, other than in a major flood,” said Robert Thayer, a supervisor in Kings County, which is downstream of the Tulare County dams.
The episode appeared to arise from an abrupt order by the Trump administration to “maximize” water supplies in California after the president made a series of spurious claims about the state’s water policies. The president’s social media post said that 1.6 billion gallons of water was being released in California on the first day; federal data showed on Friday that increased water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success would total roughly that amount by day’s end.
Since the fires began on Jan. 7, the president has charged, falsely, that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California could solve water shortages in Southern California with the turn of a valve if California were less concerned about endangered fish species. He has said incorrectly that California has access to great amounts of water from the Pacific Northwest and Canada, even though there is no pipeline that flows from the state’s northern neighbors.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly said this month that the fires could have been extinguished had the governor released more water from the north.
Water supplies from Northern California played no part in the ability of firefighters to combat the flames in Los Angeles County. Hydrants in Pacific Palisades went dry because the municipal water system was not designed to fight so many fires simultaneously. A reservoir that fed the neighborhood was empty because of maintenance issues, not because of a lack of supply to Southern California.
And water allotments that affect wildlife are determined by longstanding policies that balance the state’s myriad water interests. State and federal officials must balance the needs of farms, cities, ecosystems and the need to keep the Pacific Ocean from destroying freshwater supplies in estuaries, where ocean influences can cause salinity problems.
Nonetheless, during a visit to Los Angeles last week, Mr. Trump vowed to “open up the pumps and valves in the north.” On Sunday, he released an executive order directing the federal authorities to override the state authorities and “maximize” water deliveries in California. And on Monday, he claimed on social media that the U.S. military had “just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER.”
On Thursday, water managers in the Central Valley learned that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been directed to dramatically increase the flow of water from reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada into local rivers, at a rate that officials said would have served no agricultural purpose and would have threatened the stability of local levees.
Mr. Thayer said an unplanned gush of water could fling debris and branches haphazardly and endanger homeless people camping in stream beds.
“We don’t typically just open the hatches and fill the rivers to maximum capacity,” he said. “You start at a trickle and build it up slowly.”
Alarmed, local water managers rushed Thursday to prepare for an abrupt onslaught of water they had not asked for, according to county officials. In an email to the Kings County Board of Supervisors, Jim Henderson, the county’s public works director, said that the water authorities had reached out with “serious concerns” before a flurry of calls to local Republican members of Congress dramatically slowed the flows.
An initial directive to unleash 5,500 cubic feet per second from the reservoir serving Kings County, for example, was slashed to 50 cubic feet per second before it was dialed up Friday to a more manageable 1,500 cubic feet per second to ensure that “the channels would hold,” the email said.
SJV Water, a nonprofit news site based in the Central Valley, was first to report the news.
In a statement, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Gene Pawlik, said that “consistent with the direction in the Executive Order on Emergency Measures to Provide Water Resources in California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Success Lake to ensure California has water available to respond to the wildfires.”
Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said the state has no say in how the Army Corps manages flows from the two reservoirs. But she noted that the release did not seem necessary.
“It’s not the irrigation season, so there isn’t a demand for that,” Nemeth said in a call with reporters Friday.
Laura Ramos, interim director of research and education at the California Water Institute at California State University, Fresno, said that both the Kaweah and Success lakes are used primarily for flood control and irrigation for Central Valley farms. They do not connect to the aqueduct that carries water to Southern California.
“If the purpose was to help with the fires in Southern California, we do not believe that it will, because that’s not where that water goes,” Ms. Ramos said.
Nor, she added, will the releases be of much use now to farmers because their fields are currently dormant. Rather, the water — which was being held for use during the region’s notoriously hot and dry summers — is likely to run through canals and either come to rest in low-lying basins or flow out to the Pacific Ocean. Among the local concerns, she added, was the possibility of flooding and the re-emergence of Tulare Lake, a vast prehistoric lake that was resurrected in 2023 after a series of intense storms.
“That water should’ve been kept behind the reservoirs for reserves,” she said. “Right now there isn’t anywhere they need to put it.”
Sanjay Mohanty, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies water capture, said the release of the water this week could ultimately hurt farmers.
Snowmelt is captured in the lakes to store water that can be delivered to farmers later in the year. Typically, officials release water in the winter only when they fear that incoming storms will overwhelm reservoirs and send water spilling over dams. A California water official said on Friday that the precipitation falling in Central California this weekend was not enough to merit doing so.
Instead, the president’s order is depleting reserves that could help supply farmers with water if it ends up being a dry year, Mr. Mohanty said.
“If we have a drought coming, we are losing this water now and leaving ourselves vulnerable later,” he said.
On Friday evening, Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, sent a letter to Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, about what he called “the troubling unscheduled release of water” from the two dams.
“Based on the urgent concerns I have heard from my constituents, as well as recent reporting, it appears that gravely insufficient notification was given, recklessly endangering residents downstream,” Padilla wrote.
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