Getty ImagesThe wildfires raging in Los Angeles have led to claims that officials there have mismanaged the city’s preparation for such events.
President-elect Donald Trump has pointed the finger of blame at California Governor Gavin Newsom, who he says is responsible for LA’s struggling water supply.
Others have blamed LA Mayor Karen Bass for cutting the city’s fire department budget.
BBC Verify looked into the facts behind the political fallout.
What has Trump claimed?
In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said Governor Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water” to put out the fires.
But the specific declaration he mentions doesn’t appear to exist.
The governor’s press office issued a statement in response, saying: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction.”
We’ve also searched for this document and been unable to find it.
Newsom, a Democrat, has previously opposed efforts to redirect more water to southern California.
This includes a 2020 presidential memorandum in which Trump sought to divert water away from Northern California to farmland further south.
Newsom opposed this at the time, saying he wanted to protect “highly imperilled fish species close to extinction”.
That is what Trump is referencing in his post blaming Newsom for the response to the wildfires, where he says the governor “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish”, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has confirmed.
California’s attorney general ultimately blocked the measure, citing potential harm to endangered species and saying that it was not scientifically justified.
Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, said: “The federal government does not deliver water from northern California to southern California.”
“While efforts to save Delta smelt, along with salmon and steelhead trout, do reduce the amount of water that is moved from northern California by the state at certain times, it has no bearing on the current availability of water for fire-fighting.”
Although southern California is currently experiencing a drought, data shows its reservoirs are almost all currently above the historic average for this time of the year. None are at significantly low levels.
One large reservoir in Pacific Palisades, the Santa Ynez Reservoir, was closed for maintenance and empty when the fire broke out, the LA Times reported.
Officials from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) said that if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been operational, it might have increased the supply of water, but that it’s unclear what the ultimate effect might have been.
Getty ImagesIs there no water for fire hydrants’?
On Friday, Governor Newsom confirmed reports that have been swirling this week that a water shortage hit the fire hydrants, hampering the emergency response.
Firefighters in Los Angeles have told the BBC firsthand that they experienced shortages.
Newsom called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and the unavailability of water from the reservoir.
In a letter addressed to the heads of the LA Department of Water and Power and LA County Public Works, Newsom said that reports of inadequate water supplies are “deeply troubling” .
“Losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” he wrote.
“We need answers to how that happened,” he continued, adding that he expects the agencies to “fully and transparently” share information and records for the state’s probe.
Adam Van Gerpen, a captain with the Los Angeles fire department, confirmed to the BBC that his crew, which has been tackling the Pacific Palisades blaze, and other crews battling other wildfires, ran out of water, forcing them to “improvise”.
Did LA Mayor cut fire department budget?
LA Mayor Karen Bass has faced criticism over cuts to the city’s fire department budget.
For the latest financial year, the LA Fire Department (LAFD) budget was reduced by $17.6m (£14.3m).
In a memo to Mayor Bass last month, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned that the cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, such as wildfires”.
Mayor Bass responded to the criticism, saying: “I think if you go back and look at the reductions that were made, there were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days.”
The LAFD has an overall budget of almost $820m, and it isn’t the only department responding to the fires.
For example, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Los Angeles County Fire Department are part of the relief efforts, along with the federal government.
“LA County has some of the most advanced and sophisticated wildfire fighting resources of any location in the world. If you had to chose one place on earth that was best place to tackle this sort of disaster, it would be LA county,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources.
“The disaster isn’t as bad as it is because there’s a lack of resource, the reality is there’s a limit to how effective wildland firefighting can be under extreme conditions like we experienced this week.”
Additional reporting by Joshua Cheetham and Merlyn Thomas
