of discussion that you hear on water usage - is pure blather.
barstool/barbershop nonsense.
with about the same amount of grounding as, "muh daddy tol' me ... "

The reservoirs were full, are full. We had a lot of rain the previous two years, as well as decent snow packs.

No amount of water was going to stop the wildfire and the destruction of 12000 to 14000 homes and businesses. The problem with the hydrants going empty is simply one of pipes and pressure. Water is an incompressible fluid ( unlike air ). meaning that water delivery at a hydrant is fixed... you can stack 100,000 gallons of water in a tower or 100,000,000 gallons of water in a water tower... it makes almost no difference. The amount at the hydrant will be fixed to X gallons/minute. Open 20 hydrants to that one pipe and you will get about the same amount of water in total, now split between 20 hydrants... but at much less pressure. The only thing a larger reservoir gets you is more time, but not more pressure or more total water per minute.

Once the flames spread to even a few acres of forest, there was no stopping it. Only water drops from air tankers might have made a difference... but the wind was so high that the tankers could not fly. Getting to the fire in the steep rugged forests of the San Gabriel mountains on foot, with the 80mph wind and 100mph gust taking embers and carrying them for miles ahead of the fire... no amount of trucks or fire fighters would stop it. As for "raking the forests"... grab a rake and head into the forest in California... and rake up some dead brush... and try to do something with what you raked ( like carry it to a truck at the nearest forest access road or bury it in a hole you dig). It would take millions of people doing that all over California, maybe 10s of millions. And even then no promises that it would stop a fire that was spreading from tree to tree as well as igniting the brush. You would have to catch it early... like within 30 minutes of ignition... just to have a chance at stopping the fire.

Once the flames carried by the wind spread over the densely populated suburbs, and dozens to hundreds of homes catch fire from the blowing embers to wooden structures and dead grass and shrubs near the homes... oops. No amount of water would have put out the fires. Not that can be carried by the infrastructure of the pipes that feed the hydrants in those suburbs. Larger pipes might have helped keep the pressure to the hydrants up... now you have to scale the number of fire engines and crews needed to fight 100s to 1000s of homes on fire simultaneously. Not to mention that putting in those bigger water pipes and buying the equipment and having the fire fighters on hand,,, would bankrupt the city.

So forget the water.

All this bullshit about the water and the smelt is simply a crock of right wing bullshit from farmers in the southern San Joaquin valley that want to grow almonds and pistachios in their orchards because they drained Tulare lake over a century ago ( it actually reappeared in our recent rainy season, briefly ) and now they think they are entitled to have as much free water as they need to water their water intensive orchards. I believe each and every single almost takes like a gallon of fresh water over a season to grow... and they want to have billions of almonds.

If you ever drive up and down I-5 on the western edge of the "Big Valley" you will see dozens of these right wing signs about "food grows where water flows" and "Fire Pelosi" or "Fire Newsom" and some even more extreme right wing bullshit. They live in an area that is not meant for growing nuts and fruit, or cotton, or rice... and want the rest of us to subsidize their bad decisions on what to grow in a semi-arid desert that is the southern valley.

So even if Newsom was to divert the entire Sacramento River to the canals that run down the state, this isn't to fill the reservoirs near LA... it is to give free water to the farmers to literally soak their trees a foot deep every so often so they can grow almonds. And, if he did, the Bay water ( salt water ) would invade the river system and kill off crop lands in the north valley, kill millions of migrating birds, and damage the bay for all kinds of fish, not just the smelt. People that make their living off of fishing in the Bay and the rivers that feed it ( and the sport fishing industry ) would be outraged.

And such a diversion would not do a damn thing to stop the next major fire in LA or in San Diego or in Riverside or any place else in California. It wasn't the lack of water. Period.

This water is for Trump farmers on the cheap. Large farms are parceled at 959 acres to get low water prices. This is about as crooked as can be!!!

water runs down hill, you know, north to south, so, we simply open the huge Canadian faucet and let the water run into Marika.

Lake Mead almost went dry, as did Lake Powell. Mono Lake is still far below where it should be. I believe we only get a small percentage of our water from the California Aqueduct, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Rec’d

Great amazing