While California fiddles with leaving the union, President Donald Trump just turned the water back on during this winter's unseasonal firestorms. You'd think they would have done that themselves already, but alas.
There's an old joke that Californians know all too well. “California doesn’t really have four seasons. We just have: Earthquake, Fire, Flood, and Drought.” There's nothing that can be done about the earthquakes aside from building earthquake-proof structures. To California's credit, they're usually pretty dang good about that.
When your other three "seasons" are Fire, Flood, and Drought, the solution is to keep plenty of water stored and use controlled burns to prevent the inevitable wildfires from becoming ragers.
And Another Thing: The Colorado version of the four seasons joke is "Snow, Mud, Fire, and Construction," and non-residents are shocked by the overlap.
We've previously discussed California's "environmental" concerns that prevent the state from properly managing its forests. I'm not sure what environmental benefits accrue from periodically burning the forests down, but I'm no leftist. Let's not get into that again.
But you might also think that California's bustling 40 million residents would demand (and receive) the kind of water infrastructure necessary for drinking, bathing, and fighting the occasional wildfire, but, alas, once more. Instead, Californians are treated to scenes like this one:
"20,000 cubic feet/second" isn't exactly an easy-to-understand household measurement, so let me do the math for you. There are about 7.5 gallons in a cubic foot of water. So that's 150,000 thousand gallons of freshwater flowing into the ocean every single second. And that's just one culvert.
DURING A DROUGHT EMERGENCY.
If it's such an emergency, why does California release the water into the ocean instead of storing it in reservoirs like the notoriously empty Santa Ynez Reservoir? Santa Ynez — which stores up to 117 million gallons — was drained for repairs to its cover almost a year ago, which was expected to take a year to complete. But, hey, no rush — it's only water. Mañana, inshallah, whatever.
And Another Thing: A typical 10-minute shower uses between 15-50 gallons of water, depending largely on whether you have a low-flow shower head (to Hell with those!) and, I suppose, your household water pressure. At an average of, say, 30 gallons per shower, that one culvert was wasting as much freshwater as three million 10-minute showers — every 10 minutes. I double-checked the math. (I should have triple-checked and forgot the last step. Thanks to the anonymous commenter for the correction. I love our VIPs.)
Droughts in California are a lot like famines in Africa: sure, bad stuff happens, but the worst effects are entirely man-made. Crops fail, locusts swarm, and food certainly becomes more expensive. But to get a genuine famine, with scenes of mass starvation like we became depressingly familiar with in Ethiopia 40 years ago — that requires epic economic mismanagement, usually by local warlords who use food as a weapon to maintain political control.
I've come to believe that Sacramento Democrats use droughts to maintain political control, too. It's impossible to scare a population into giving up their money and their freedoms for the sake of Gaia when cities aren't burning down every now and then and when there's enough water for everyone to flush their toilets whenever the need arises. (I visited friends in the Bay Area in '91 or '92 when toilet flushes were strictly rationed — ugh.)
Enter, stage right: President Donald Trump.
The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water,…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 28, 2025
Enjoy the water, indeed.
Not that Californians necessarily will, mind you. According to Newsweek, the magazine "contacted the White House for comment via email outside of normal working hours" for details but had not received a response. Furthermore, "Newsom's office referred Newsweek to a statement from the California Department of Water Resources denying Trump's claims."
Nevertheless, the state Department of Water Resources said, "The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful."
There seems to be some confusion about what did or did not happen, but one thing is clear: California remains epically mismanaged, and there's probably not much even a determined president like Trump can do to change that.
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