The Columbia River could be the answer to California’s water problems, former President Donald Trump hinted at during a news conference in California.
“I’m going to give you more water than almost anyone has,” he said. There would be plenty of water for lawns at big houses in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, for farmers and to dampen the hills where forest fires burn, he said.
He started talking about water when he was asked a question about California wildfires raging nearby, an hour into a press conference at one of his golf courses earlier this month.
“You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the Northwest, the snow caps and Canada,” he said.
All it would take is turning “essentially a very large faucet,” he said.
“It takes one day to turn it, it’s massive,” he said. “It’s as big as a wall, as that building right there behind you.”
Now that water goes “aimlessly into the Pacific,” he said.
He also peppered his remarks on water shortages with complaints about millions of gallons of water flowing into the Pacific Ocean to protect “a little tiny fish called a smelt,” which are actually an endangered fish in the San Francisco Estuary.
That raised some question about whether the “giant faucet” would be for water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers or from the Columbia River in the Northwest.
Canada news media reacts
Either way, Canadian news media were not impressed.
The Columbia River flows from Canada south into Washington, where it is joined by water from the Snake River in Eastern Washington near the Tri-Cities to flow into the Pacific Ocean.
The Toronto Star said Trump’s promise “touches on deep-seated anxieties about our southern neighbours muscling their way into our water supply.”
Canada and the United States currently are finalizing a proposal to modernize the 1964 Columbia River Treaty, which has governed hydropower operations and management of flood risk on both sides of the border.
Under the agreement, the U.S. will benefit from pre-planned water storage at Canadian treaty dams to help manage high flows originating in Canada to control flooding in the U.S.
Predicable flows also help stabilize barging and shipping on the Columbia River, support recreation and protect efforts to support salmon populations.
CTV, a Canadian news outlet, quoted a University of Calgary professor saying that Trump is “uninformed.”
“It’s somebody that doesn’t fully understand how water works and doesn’t understand the intricacies of allocating water not only between two countries but also for the environment,” said Tricia Stadnyk, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Calgary.
“The U.S. does not get to dictate sole-handedly how much water goes to the U.S. versus how much water stays in Canada,” Stadnyk said.
CTV reported that she was perplexed by the “giant faucet” statement, but thought he might be referring to the headwaters of the Columbia River, where a snow dome drains to three oceans.
Water grab
California is not the only entity that would like to get some of the that Columbia River water.
The Kennewick Irrigation District, which has rights for Yakima River water which can be insufficient in drought years, previously tried to get rights to use Columbia River water but was blocked.
Diverting water from the Columbia and Snake rivers to California is not a new idea, said Rocky Barker, an Idaho environmental writer and author of “Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America,” in his blog at rockybarker.com.
In 1990, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn convinced the county board to study a transfer of the water.
The 90 billion gallons of water a day running into the Pacific Ocean from the Columbia Basin is “sinful and wasteful,” Barker quoted him as saying. The proposal went nowhere.
