HuffPost reports:

Exactly 10 days after taking the presidential oath of office early this year, Donald Trump nearly drowned dozens, potentially hundreds, of his own citizens in California’s Central Valley.

Trump, unilaterally, decided he would solve Los Angeles’ wildfire problem by “opening up” taps to let billions of gallons of water being stored in two reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills flow into Southern California.

“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons,” he bragged on social media, along with a photo of water flowing in a stream. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!”

Except not a single drop of those billions of gallons could possibly have made it to Los Angeles or anywhere even close. They would have, however, overflowed the banks of rivers leading out of Lake Kaweah and Success Lake, threatening residents in communities on their shores.

“It was clearly nothing but a poor publicity stunt. And it was a dangerous one,” California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said at the time. “An unexpected, non-noticed release threatens lives, threatens the safety of communities if you flood somewhere without the proper coordination.”

Disaster, quite possibly including drowned residents, was averted thanks to quick action by local water management officials who talked the Army Corps of Engineers down from carrying out Trump’s order to open the floodgates on the two dams to maximum capacity and persuaded them to release a lesser amount instead.

That, however, did not stop Trump from continuing to boast about his decision, adding in the hydrologically impossible claim that the water in question had originated in Canada. “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, and ― but the Pacific Northwest and it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day. And I opened it up,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6.

“Thank you very much, Canada, we appreciate it,” he said at an Oval Office photo opportunity two months later. “They had all that water pouring out right into the Pacific. They had a big valve, like a giant valve as big as this room and they turned the valve. Takes one day to turn it.”

University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning, one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for their relative placement on a standard map of North America. [Continue reading…]