Misinformation spreads like wildfire online while LA neighborhoods burn

Fish and wildfires don’t tend to go together. But as a series of blazes driven by 100-mile-per-hour winds burned throughout Los Angeles, the country’s incoming president centered blame on a three-inch fish found in a completely different part of the state.

In a post on incoming President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, he blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for not signing an agreement “that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way” all to “protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt.” 

The post was just one of many flooding social media with misinformation and falsehoods assigning blame for the unprecedented fires that have destroyed thousands of homes, forced over 130,000 people to evacuate and killed at least five people. The Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires are already the most destructive in the history of the nation’s second-largest city, with all three continuing to burn with little if any containment so far and another fire breaking out in the city Thursday evening. Nowhere to be found in Trump’s message was the impact of climate change or how communities have been built in areas prone to fire. Just false mentions of the little-known endangered fish causing fire hydrants to run dry. 

The finger-pointing surrounding the LA fires offer a glimpse of the way political polarization and propaganda can increase the confusion that engulfs natural disasters. And the information ecosystem is expected to be further tested during climate-fueled disasters as social media platforms like Facebook roll back fact-checking programs.

“Several of the statements made by incoming president-elect Trump, as well as Elon Musk, were riddled with both misinformation about our water management system as well as about the fires,” said Ashley Overhouse, a water policy advisor for Defenders of Wildlife whose work has focused on protecting the Delta smelt. “That kind of misinformation is not only incredibly inappropriate here, it’s also dangerous.” 

The real reasons places like California are seeing more natural disasters, from wildfires to droughts to floods, are often swamped in the sea of misinformation. 

How Climate Change Fuels Bigger and Hotter Wildfires

Climate change has driven “weather whiplash” throughout California in recent years, with dramatic shifts in the state’s precipitation, temperature and wind patterns.

A severe drought gripped the region from 2020 to 2022. The next two years returned to the norm, with 2023 seeing 10 inches more rain than the average year. But recent months have brought back record-dry conditions for much of Southern California, drying out the vegetation that boomed during the moist years and leaving the landscape primed to burn.

Then the region’s Santa Ana winds, driven by extreme differences between high pressure in the Great Basin, to the east, and low pressure off the California coast, blasted at over 100 miles per hour. Santa Ana winds have been increasingly blowing in December and January, rather than the fall.

Such conditions have helped to extend California’s fire season year round, making major wildfires possible even in January.

“It’s not so much a problem that a fire happens, which is a very common occurrence in our ecosystems, but it might spread and ignite and grow much more quickly due to climate change,” said Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who studies climate resilience and how communities are impacted by natural disasters. “So for many issues we have this environmental national phenomenon that exists, but it’s made more severe in some way.”

And those natural occurrences become disasters when cities and communities have been built in areas prone for them, she said.

“In a lot of places across the country, we have up until now taken insufficient action to adapt to climate change,” McTarnaghan said.

Mayor Karen Bass warned that Los Angeles could face more of these natural disasters. “Due to climate change, we are going to continue to see very unusual weather events,” she said during a Wednesday press conference in response to the fires. 

Misinformation and disinformation can add even more volatility to climate-driven disasters.

Tim Casperson, the host of the Hotshot Wake Up Podcast, which covers wildfire policy and response, dedicated a large section of his show on Thursday to debunking false claims about the LA fires. Casperson, who worked as a wildland firefighter, referenced people “making quite ridiculous claims about what’s happening out there.”

“There is a low bar when it comes to folks understanding wildfire,” he lamented.

Competing Claims About Fire Department Budget

Bass has been criticized for traveling to Ghana as the high winds mounted. She returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday to growing outrage over her handling of the fires. But some of the criticisms lodged against the mayor on social media were dubious if not outright false. 

Social media lit up with posts accusing Bass of cutting the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department in favor of the Police Department. Los Angeles Times owner Pat Soon-Shiong posted on X that the mayor cut the department’s budget by $23 million. News reports referencing budget documents pointed out that Bass had cut the budget by $17.6 million from the previous year. 

Our hearts go out to those who have lost their homes and are seeking shelter. Fires in LA are sadly no surprise, yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M. And reports of empty fire hydrants raise serious questions. Competence matters… Follow @latimes for live…

— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) January 8, 2025

But the real story is more complicated. The Los Angeles City Council adopted the budget in May, after intense pressure to make cuts. Months later, in November, the city approved a new contract with the union representing firefighters. The new contract included an annual 3 percent increase to their base wages. The city had set aside funding during the budget process in anticipation of the new contract, according to news reports at the time.

While the original allocation for LAFD had decreased $17.6 million—only 2 percent of the department’s budget—the funds dedicated to the new contract offset that amount. City documents show that the budget for operational supplies increased in 2023-2024 and then went back down in 2024-2025 after specific purchases were completed. In a Politico story, Los Angeles Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said that the city’s fire budget actually increased more than $50 million compared to the previous budget cycle. Inside Climate News reached out to Blumenfield’s office and the firefighters’ union, neither of which responded to emailed questions.

In the press conference Wednesday, Bass briefly addressed the uproar over the budget. “Within this fiscal year, LAFD would actually go above what it was allocated on July 1,” she said.

When reporters in attendance brought up a December request from the fire department for more funding, department spokesperson Jacob Raabe responded.

“Of course we can always use more resources, which is why we ask for more resources,” Raabe said. But he highlighted the challenge presented by the unprecedented nature of the fires, not the department’s budget. Officials noted that other fire departments have come to help Los Angeles because of the massive scale of the disaster.

“I’ve never seen winds that made it to the Pacific Ocean, turned around, and went back up the canyon,” the LAFD spokesperson said.

“When you have events like this where emotions are high … it’s easy to get caught up in information that’s not accurate,” Bass said Wednesday.

Tiny Endangered Fish Often Attacked by Trump

As firefighters battled the fire burning in the Pacific Palisades Wednesday morning, some 200 fire hydrants went dry, and rumors spread on social media that California’s lack of action to store more water during the recent wet winters was to blame.

Officials were forced to explain why the fire hydrants went dry and correct other falsehoods during press conferences that would normally be dedicated to providing real-time information on the progress of the fire, the firefighters and evacuations.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive officer and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, explained during the press conference that the water distribution system saw four times the demand than it ever had before. 

“Fire hydrants are not made to fight multiple houses, hundreds of houses at a time,” she said. “They’re made to fight one or two houses.”

The system relies on three nearby water tanks located downhill from the site, which each holds 1 million gallons. With all the pumping to stop the fires, the tanks needed time to be refilled to restore pressure so the water could continue flowing uphill. High winds prevented helicopters from dropping water from the air, which only increased the pressure on the water tanks in the Palisades area.

But that context didn’t stop Trump from continuing his attack on the Delta smelt, the tiny endangered fish native to the San Francisco Estuary, though a truly wild one hasn’t been counted in years.

Listed under both federal and California endangered species acts since 1993, the fish has been a frequent target of Trump since 2016. While courting the votes of farmers facing water shortages at the time, he told a crowd in Fresno, California, that “there is no drought” in California and that the aridity was due to water being sent out to the ocean to help the smelt. 

“Delta smelt are the canary in the coal mine for ecosystem collapse and unfortunately, in this case, they are the red herring then as well.”

Ashley Overhouse, Defenders of Wildlife

The reality, of course, is much more complicated. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is vital to the state’s water supply, providing water to 30 million people and 6 million acres of farmland across the state. Water is sent around the state via two systems with a giant network of reservoirs, pumps and canals that are operated by both the state and the federal government to supply California’s major cities and vital agricultural operations.

A small portion of the water goes to support wildlife, such as ensuring the San Francisco Estuary, where freshwater meets the sea, isn’t too salty, which helps not only the endangered Delta smelt, but the entire ecosystem, including other fish and even humans, said Defenders of Wildlife’s Overhouse. The freshwater sent to the estuary protects the region’s water quality and helps ensure the water that farmers use isn’t too saline for farming, she said.

“Delta smelt are the canary in the coal mine for ecosystem collapse and unfortunately, in this case, they are the red herring then as well, for decision-makers who do not understand the complexity of our water system and blame one species for a lack of flow that’s being pumped artificially down to Southern California,” Overhouse said. “That’s just really not the case.”

If that water wasn’t used for the Delta smelt, California water law would send it to farmers in the Central Valley who have priority water rights, not to fight fires in Los Angeles.

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