Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, one of the most prominent purveyors of lies and misinformation during the devastating California wildfires, had his lies debunked during a recent live-stream with members of a Fire Command Team in Los Angeles.
In the live-stream Musk questioned a senior member of the team about water supply to fight the fires. Several conservatives have been falsely claiming that there was no water available to fight the deadly fires.
“Was water available? I understand that wasn’t an issue in Malibu, is that correct?” Musk asked.
“There was water, we have water reservoirs. Just an example, if we have one building burning we can flow 1000 gallons a minute on that one building,” the firefighter said pointing to a map.
“The amount of water we’re flowing, there really is no water system that’s gonna keep that pace, so we have to bring in water tenders, which are these big water tanks, you know, 2500/3000-gallon trucks, and they’ll come in and that’s what we have to do to compensate,” the firefighter continued.
“DWP [Department of Water and Power] did a great job, they brought in big trucks for us and we used them as, basically, mobile hydrants,” he added.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) posted the clip of the exchange on Musk’s platform X, writing “@ElonMusk exposed by firefighters for his own lies.”
Newsom has launched a website to fact-check the deluge of lies coming from prominent right wing figures, including the ‘Libs of TikTok’ account who claimed that “there’s no water coming out of fire hydrants because the city didn’t fill the reservoirs.”
“Regional water reservoirs in Southern California are at historical highs,” PolitiFact wrote in a fact-check cited by Newsom. “Hydrants ran dry during recent firefighting because the city’s water infrastructure was not built to respond to fires so large.”
“Wildland firefighters don’t use hydrants — they use water tenders,” Newsom added. “And that is what has been used to ensure continued water access. Three million gallons of water were stored in three large tanks for fire hydrants in the area before the Palisades fire, but the supply was exhausted because of the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm.”
