Richard Garcia knows a thing or two about water in the Central Valley. A dedicated member of Sierra Club’s Kern-Kaweah Chapter and longtime resident of California’s agricultural hub, Garcia has lived around the region’s waterways, seeing them change over time as management practices have shifted.
He grew up around the remnants of the diminished Tulare Lake, exploring the rivers that flowed into it. He witnessed the building of the 1954 Pine Flat Dam, as well as the Terminus and Schafer Dams of the 1960s, altering the natural flows of water. He saw farming flourish under these projects at the cost of the region’s rich wildlife. Throughout his lifetime in the Central Valley; however, he has rarely seen anything as heavy handed and nonsensical as President Trump’s executive order to release water from key regional reservoirs.
In the ending stages of the greater Los Angeles fires, President Trump released the executive order, “Emergency Measures to Provide Water Resources in California and Improve Disaster Response in Certain Areas” on January 24th, 2025. In it, he called for the “overriding [of] disastrous California policies” through greater transfers of water from the Central Valley Project and State Water Project towards Southern California.
Operating under his order, the Army Corps of Engineers released stored water from the already low Lake Kaweah and Success Lake and attempted to transport it down to Los Angeles to extinguish the various wildfires in Los Angeles, much to the shock of the farmers and dairymen, who were given only 1 hour notice. As it was, even before this unplanned release of water, the Tulare Irrigation District (TID) had forecast that they would get only 10% of their allocation this summer unless there was more significant snowfall in the watershed in spring.
There’s a number of issues with this release. For one, there was no lack of water in Southern California to fight the fires. In fact, high levels of precipitation in the previous year had filled reservoirs to record levels, meaning that water imports from the Central Valley would do little in firefighting efforts. However, the main issue is that water from Lake Kaweah and Success Lake simply does not flow to Los Angeles. It rarely even flows out of Kaweah subbasin.
With heavy manipulation and highly favorable conditions, the water could make it. Doing so would require the use of pumps to transfer the water flowing from the two reservoirs into the Central Valley Project, which would then be transferred into the seasonally-dry Kern River. If by some miracle, there was enough momentum for the water, it would reach the California Aqueduct/Kern River Intertie, which has been used just once since being built 17 years ago.
From there, the water would be rerouted past the Grapevine and pumped over the Tehachapi Mountains. Only then, would any water released make it to Los Angeles. The entire process would have been unprecedented and improbable within the given timeframe.
Despite knowing the low feasibility connected with the transport of the released water to Southern California, as revealed in an Army Corps memo accessed by the Washington Post, the Army Corps of Engineers moved ahead with the order, releasing 5,500 cubic feet of water per second on January 30th. It wasn’t until learning that they only owned the dams, not the water, that the Army Corps slowed and ceased their releases, leaving around 2.2 billion gallons wasted without any of it reaching Los Angeles.
“You can’t make this stuff up”, said Garcia.
He wasn’t the only one shocked. Upon hearing news of the releases, water managers and Central Valley farmers scrambled to make sense of what the impacts would be. While happy that dry riparian ecosystems got some needed water, environmental advocates like Garcia are fearful of the results of this ill-conceived pre-summer release. “Valley farmers supported Trump big time and expect payback”, he said, referring to potential actions the President may take to amend the water losses his executive order inflicted on the water supplies of Central Valley farmers.
Increased water diversions to agriculture would be incredibly detrimental to the ecological health of already threatened regions like the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Delta Conveyance Project pushed by the state government already puts these regions’ aquatic and avian species at risk, while also imperiling the area’s water quality.
A chaotic executive, who has no qualms with releasing ill-researched orders, only increases that risk.
Jackson Goulding is a member of the Sierra Club Angeles Chapter Water Committee.