Politics

The start of the Palisades and Eaton fires: 24 hours that changed Los Angeles

Published

1 year ago

January 25, 2025

The start of the Palisades and Eaton fires: 24 hours that changed Los Angeles

As the sun rose on Jan. 8, the sky orange from ash and smoke, Angelenos anxiously waited for news about the extent of the damage from the Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires.

It would take days to learn that the conflagrations had caused an unprecedented level of destruction, killing at least 28 people, destroying and damaging more than 18,000 buildings valued at more than $275 billion, and leaving a burn zone 2½ times the size of Manhattan. That for decades to come, the disaster would divide our history into a “before” and “after.”

Here is how those first 24 hours unfolded.

Tuesday, Jan. 7

10:35 am.

The winds were screaming through the Santa Monica Mountains by the time Sue Kohl and her daughter Courtney wrapped up a morning meeting. It was a clear, sunny day in Palisades Village, and the women weren’t too worried about a small fire burning a few miles to the north.

Courtney left the office to walk to Starbucks but returned almost immediately, telling her mother: Get in the car. We’re going now.

From the sidewalk, their clothes and hair whipped by the wind, the women could see flames and smoke — a lot of smoke — coming from the hills. Kohl realized: If the winds turn, this fire could go anywhere.

At home in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood, Kohl put her dogs and photo albums in the car. She left everything else she owned, thinking she’d be back soon.

A large plume of smoke from the Palisades fire rises over the ridge line.

A mother carries her child as they move down a sidewalk away from a line of firetrucks.

11:13 a.m.

Los Angeles sent its first evacuation alert to cell phones in the northern and western Palisades, warning that a fire was burning along Palisades Drive, and those nearby “should get set for a potential evacuation.”

11:23 a.m.

Erin Kyle, her teenage daughter and her daughter’s best friend, who had spent the night at their town house in the Palisades Highlands, were speeding down the mountain, smoke billowing around them.

The sky was turning orange. Palisades Drive was the only way out of the neighborhood. Traffic slowed, then stopped.

As they got closer to Sunset Boulevard, flames burned on both sides of the road. Embers the size of matchbooks smacked into their windshield. To their right, the Calvary Christian School burned.

Some drivers pulled across the tree-lined median onto the northbound lanes of Palisades Drive, driving the wrong way to avoid the traffic jam. Others just abandoned their cars and ran, hauling bags and pet carriers.

“Mom, are we going to have to run?” her daughter asked.

Kyle told the girls that staying in the car was the best course of action. In truth, she wasn’t so sure, as she contemplated a list of several bad options: Leave the car, get hit by flying embers and struggle to carry everything they’d packed. Stay in the car and get burned alive if the fire moved closer.

If we don’t start to move in the next four minutes, she decided, we’ll get out of the car.

Miraculously, cars started to inch forward, but it would take Kyle and the girls more than an hour and a half to move 2.5 miles.

11:52 a.m.

Los Angeles County sent the first evacuation orders to a swath of the Palisades: “LEAVE NOW.”

Around noon

More than 7,500 miles away in Accra, Ghana, where it was around 8 p.m., Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass smiled for photos at a cocktail party at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. Bass had flown to the West African nation Jan. 4 as part of a Biden Administration delegation to the inauguration of the Ghanaian president.

She’d left Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson as the acting mayor. Her staff said she spent most of the cocktail party on the phone dealing with the fire, and shortly after the photos were taken was hustled to a military base to board a flight back to the U.S.

12:45 p.m.

The Los Angeles City Council wrapped its first meeting of the year, which included more than an hour of wrangling over the $1-billion Television City project in the Fairfax district.

At the meeting’s end, Westside Councilmember Traci Park made a brief, urgent announcement: The Palisades fire was threatening homes and lives, she said. Mandatory evacuation orders were going out out soon.

“Pack your bags, be ready to go,” Park said. “This is an emergency.”

12:54 p.m.

In Malibu, the Getty Villa’s emergency preparedness coordinator, Les Borsay, was nervous. The edge of the Villa property was on fire, and embers were whipping through the air like they’d been shot from a gun.

A man strides across burned landscaping toward a structure with numerous archways.

The museum’s prized collection of Greek and Roman antiquities was sealed inside the galleries, the HVAC shut off and the doors taped to keep out smoke and ash. But flames were coming closer to the building that was once the home of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty and now housed labs and offices. The wood-shingled property didn’t have fire sprinklers.

Fortunately, the museum was closed to guests on Tuesdays and the evacuation of non-emergency staff went smoothly. What’s more, Borsay and several operations workers who didn’t normally work at the Villa had been on site that morning to test the fire systems.

In another bit of good luck, a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter swept by to drop water on the flames, six feet from the edge of the building.

12:59 p.m.

Through an N95 mask, a good Samaritan in the Palisades told a television reporter that he was trying to move cars that were abandoned in the road so firetrucks could get through but that some people had fled holding their car keys.

In a surreal moment, the reporter realized halfway through the interview that he was talking to actor Steve Guttenberg, who said he was trying to move every car he could — except for the Teslas, which he couldn’t figure out how to start.

1:38 p.m.

Evacuation orders expanded to the rest of the Palisades and north into the mountains to Mandeville Canyon Road: “Gather people and pets and leave immediately.”

2:20 p.m.

In the hills of the Palisades, near the Temescal Ridge Trail, Alex Emerick, 34, his younger sister, Rainier, and their parents grabbed garden hoses at their home of 33 years. The family had tried to evacuate when flames were visible from their driveway, but with traffic at a standstill in the neighborhood, they turned around.

They donned goggles and N95 masks and divided up, wetting down their shrubs and quashing small fires erupting in the front, side and back yards. The house across the street went up in flames. Because their bushes and trees bordered another property, putting out the spot fires in their yard may have helped prevent a “chain reaction of embers,” Emerick said, adding: “It’s like we were saving everyone’s properties at once.”

A woman sprays water from a garden hose near a car in a driveway as flames approach.

2:30 p.m.

Fire hoses snaked like spaghetti around the wheels of dozens of abandoned cars on Palisades Drive. Los Angeles County Fire Department bulldozer No. 5 pulled in and started shoving the vehicles aside to clear the road for firetrucks.

3:11 p.m.

In Dallas, at the end of a news conference before a game against the Mavericks, Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and told reporters that his family and his wife’s family had evacuated from the Palisades.

“A lot of people are freaking out right now, including my family,” Redick said. “From the sound of things, with the winds coming tonight, I know a lot of people are scared.”

4 p.m.

At a hastily assembled news conference on Will Rogers State Beach, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristen Crowley told reporters that the fire had grown from 10 acres to 1,261 acres in less than six hours and was threatening more than 13,000 buildings. The winds would “pick up and get worse” between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone warned.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in Southern California for a morning event with President Biden that had been canceled, said it “didn’t take more than a text message” for Biden to approve full federal reimbursement for the state’s wildfire response. But, Newsom warned, the night would be worse: “By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods.”

Firefighters on a hillside patio monitor an approaching fire.

5 p.m.

As the sun set, the last water drained out of a 1-million gallon tank tucked away in a cul-de-sac north of Palisades Village. That tank, and two others, help maintain water pressure in the highest hills of the Palisades. Gravity draws the water down into faucets, pools and hydrants below, and then the tanks are refilled with water pumped up from the city’s pipelines. Already, the firefight was straining that system.

5:35 p.m.

In Topanga Canyon, Zoe Nisman’s phone was blowing up with repeated notifications telling her to evacuate. She was also seeing a steady stream of messages from friends with news about beloved spots in Malibu — Reel Inn, Cholata Thai — that were gone.

“Everything I grew up with is burning,” Nisman said. “I guess it’s just time to pack.”

5:57 p.m.

As the power began to blink out in various neighborhoods, Angelenos unfolded sleeper sofas and made up guest beds for evacuees, listened to the wind rattling the windows, and wondered if they should pack a go bag.

6:11 p.m.

A man stands at a wrought iron fence in a yard.

Matthew Logelin, 47, was making buttered pasta with parmesan for his daughters, ages 3 and 5, when he heard a loud bang behind his home on Canyon Close Road in Pasadena.

He ran outside to check on two towering pine trees in his back yard. They hadn’t ignited, but then he saw flames — no bigger than a camp fire — burning beneath a Southern California Edison transmission tower on the mountain in Eaton Canyon behind their home.

The fire, first called the “Close fire,” after Logelin’s street, would soon be renamed the Eaton fire. Logelin, the grandson of a state fire marshal, knew what to do: call 911, warn the neighbors, pack the car.

6:26 p.m.

Stretched thin by the Palisades fire and hurricane-force wind gusts, the Los Angeles Fire Department made a rare request to off-duty firefighters: Call in with your availability to work.

The request, the first of its kind in nearly two decades, was an indication of just how serious the fire had become. Complicating matters, a garbled version began to circulate on X and Instagram, where posts claimed the LAFD was “begging anyone with firefighting experience” to call the department’s downtown operations center. The phone line was soon flooded with calls.

7:26 p.m.

Altadena residents east of Lake Avenue were ordered to evacuate. Gusts of up to 100 mph carried burning embers two miles from the blazes. All helicopters were grounded. As Los Angeles headed into a night of unprecedented wind and fire, firefighters could get no help from the air.

7:55 p.m.

In Altadena, Christian Manoukian, 27, was searching desperately for his grandmother outside the Terraces at Park Marino, a nursing home and memory care facility off Lake Avenue.

A staff member had called his uncle 15 minutes earlier, warning: There’s a lot of smoke inside. The facility is in danger. Please come if you can.

Nurses were evacuating the building at a sprint, pushing patients in hospital beds and wheelchairs down two long blocks to the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. The wind snatched at blankets and face masks. Embers whipped through the air. People yelled in Tagalog, English, Spanish and Armenian over the blaring sirens.

“This word is overused, but it was the height of chaos,” Manoukian said.

Manoukian and his uncle found his grandmother and drove her to a nursing home in Highland Park that agreed to take in Altadena residents. Other patients were loaded into ambulances and Pasadena city buses. The nursing home was ablaze less than an hour later.

Two people with face masks prepare to load a patient on a gurney onto a bus.

9:20 p.m.

Every time Steven Seagle, 59, checked the hillside behind his house north of Altadena Drive, the Eaton fire was closer. The flames were chewing through the mountains at more than 100 yards per minute, or more than three miles an hour.

“I’ve never seen anything move that quickly,” Seagle said. “I knew we weren’t coming back.”

His wife and kids and cat had already departed. But Seagle stayed behind to shut off the gas and collect a few more items: his foster son’s glasses, his foster daughter’s photo album, the rings that had belonged to his wife’s late mother. Seagle, a comic book author and artist, also grabbed his portfolio.

But he left behind his favorite painting, by artist Suzanne Jackson. At 4 feet by 6 feet, the frame was too big to fit in the car. (Hours too late, he realized that he could have cut the canvas from the frame.)

Seagle’s last stop was the towering Moreton Bay fig that had shaded the property for decades. You’re the reason we moved here, he told the tree. I hope you can make it. Then he drove away.

10 p.m.

The level-headed experts who usually told John Harabedian that everything would be fine were instead warning of hurricane-force wind and desperate firefights.

Harabedian, the newly elected representative for Altadena and Pasadena in the state Assembly, was in Sacramento for the first week of his first legislative session. In his room at the Sheraton, texts from family, friends and constituents were pouring in. His wife and kids were evacuating. His friends’ homes were burning.

We could lose Sierra Madre, Pasadena, Altadena, La Cañada — everything along the foothills, Harabedian thought. Nothing will ever be the same.

The orange glow of fire lights the night sky along a suburban street at night.

10:25 p.m.

The power was flickering at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar, and Amy Condit was on edge.

The winds were the strongest she’d ever felt, stronger even than 2008, when the Sayer fire destroyed 480 of the park’s 600 homes. She’d made a mental list of what to pack.

A gust of wind landed like a punch. The sky lit up light blue, a moment of daylight in the night.

“I would have sworn it was a nuclear bomb, except the color was wrong,” Condit said.

She looked up the mountain beyond her back yard and saw flames erupt at the base of a power transmission line. Then they started to race toward her.

Condit screamed to her mother to call 911 and hurried to collect a few belongings: documents, pillows, a cuckoo clock. The wind tore her cat, Precious, from her arms.

When an evacuation alert arrived 15 minutes later, Condit was ready. That blaze would soon be called the Hurst fire.

11:11 p.m.

Live images of flames devouring Palisades Village filled the 11 p.m. broadcast on KTTV.. Developer Rick Caruso called in, and in eight minutes, he gave voice to the shock, grief and anger that had engulfed the neighborhood.

The hurricane-force gusts bearing down on Los Angeles hadn’t been a surprise, Caruso said, but the city still hadn’t been prepared. People who lost their homes and businesses were “paying the ultimate price” for L.A.’s mismanagement, he said, including hydrants in the Palisades that were running dry.

“Why isn’t there water in the fire hydrants?” the anchor asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right — that’s a good question,” Caruso said, and twisted the knife against Bass, who beat him in the 2022 election: “Why don’t you call the mayor, who’s out of the country, and ask her?”

Wednesday, Jan. 8

2:58 a.m.

In Altadena, home health aide Kimberly Barrera, 26, was on the phone with 911, begging for help evacuating a cancer patient from Canyada Avenue. Her patient was weak from radiation treatment, could not stand on his own, and weighed more than 300 pounds.

When Barrera told the dispatcher she would need assistance, the dispatcher sighed, told her to wait, and then hung up. The fire was crawling up the back yard and the house was filled with smoke. Barrera knew they didn’t have time to wait.

Just leave without me, her patient told her. You’re coming with me, or we both stay here, she responded.

Barrera wrapped a gait belt around the man’s waist. On the count of three, she told him, you’ll put your arms around my neck and I’ll lift you by the belt.

“For a moment, I had superhuman strength,” she said.

He slid into the wheelchair and they raced out of the house. The sky was bright red.

3 a.m.

The third and final water tank in the Palisades, a squat steel cylinder in Temescal Canyon, ran dry.

A firefighter pulling a hose is silhouetted by the light of a flaming structure.

3:30 a.m.

Evacuation orders had just gone out to Altadena residents west of Lake Avenue, seven hours later than residents farther east.

Leisa Alexander, her husband and her mother-in-law scrambled into their car on Laurice Avenue, only to find themselves hemmed in on both sides on Marathon Road. In front of them, a tree had fallen into the roadway and caught fire. Behind them, broken power lines whipped in the wind.

Peering through the thick smoke, Alexander’s husband reversed the car under the power lines and drove east. Homes on both sides were on fire. They could feel the heat in the car.

Alexander wondered why an evacuation order hadn’t arrived earlier, and whether people without smartphones would know to leave. Thank goodness she and her husband had been there with her 84-year-old mother-in-law, she thought. If we hadn’t gone up, she wouldn’t be here.

Finally, they spotted an ambulance. Follow it, Alexander told her husband. They fled south.

4:36 a.m.

Phones in Los Angeles buzzed with an alert: FAST MOVING WILDFIRE IN YOUR AREA. AN EVACUATION ORDER HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE YOUR AREA. LEAVE NOW.

The alert, sent in error, marked the end of a long and sleepless night for many, as Angelenos waited for the sun to rise.

5:44 a.m.

The United Airlines flight carrying Bass back to Los Angeles pulled away from the gate at Washington Dulles International Airport.

6:18 a.m.

A fourth fire ignited in the Sepulveda Basin, near the intersection of the 405 and 101 freeways. Strong winds whipped the 30-acre blaze, known as the Woodley fire, south toward Burbank Boulevard.

6:30 a.m.

Eric Danneker and his wife Melissa sat in shock in a grocery store parking lot in Pasadena. The couple had fled La Paz Road in Altadena around midnight. A friend had just told them their home had burned.

The adobe-style home, built in 1925, had housed three generations of Melissa’s family. Eric grew up across the street. Everything they owned was with them in their cars: paperwork, clothes, and their dogs, Dreamer and Dribble.

Melissa thought of all the mementos and family heirlooms they had left behind. “The recipes,” she said. Her voice broke.

6:59 a.m.

At sunrise, miles from the fires, many Southern Californians found eerie remnants drifting down onto their yards and balconies: fragments of newspapers, a charred slip of a signed divorce settlement, a faded photograph of a couple holding a newborn.

Hot spots glow red in the remains of a house, a chimney still standing.

7:50 a.m.

In Malibu, smoke mingled with fog along the coast as television news crews began surveying the damage, broadcasting burned-out stretches of the iconic coastline and husks of beloved restaurants like Gladstones, Moonshadows and Reel Inn.

Celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton learned from watching KABC-TV that her Malibu home, where her son had taken his first steps, had burned. That moment of loss, she said, is something that “no one should ever have to experience.”

8 a.m.

A media briefing initially planned at Zuma Beach was changed to downtown amid threats of high wind and fire. Ferocious winds had stretched firefighters thin overnight, and the fires, which had already destroyed more than 7,000 acres, were burning with no containment.

Firefighters were prepared “for one or two major brush fires, but not four,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said.

A man stands next to a scorched tree, a large building behind him.

9 a.m.

More than a dozen employees had spent the night at the Getty Villa, patrolling in pairs to squash small fires with handheld extinguishers. The sound of the fire, crackling and popping, struck Borsay as weirdly familiar, like the YouTube yule log video he put on at Christmas.

The buildings survived the night. Now, it was time for Borsay to check on the collections.

The Villa was showing a special exhibit about Thrace, an ancient region spanning modern Bulgaria and parts of Greece, Turkey and Romania. Thrace’s tribes were wealthy and sophisticated, cited in “The Iliad” as allies of the Trojans who arrived in gilded chariots. Bulgaria loaned more than 150 objects to the exhibit, which took six years to organize, and the fire had become front-page news in the Balkans.

Gusts of wind had left ash rippled in waves across the terrazzo floors outside. Borsay peeled the blue tape off the double doors to the gallery and stepped inside. He couldn’t smell smoke. He couldn’t see dust. The golden antiquities gleamed gently under their spotlights.

The gallery was immaculate.

11:14 a.m.

At a fire station in Santa Monica, LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley told Biden and Newsom that the Palisades fire had grown to 10,802 acres overnight, an increase of more than 1,000%, in less than 24 hours.

11:16 a.m.

United Airlines Flight 667 pulled into a gate at Los Angeles International Airport. Bass exited to the jet bridge, where she was approached by a reporter for a British television network who had been on her flight.

Bass looked away, saying nothing, as the reporter asked whether Bass had a response to fire officials who said they were “stretched to the limit and running out of water.”

The reporter pressed on: “Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?” And again: “Have you nothing to say today?” No answer.

Times staff writers Nathan Solis, Andrea Chang, Connor Sheets, Dan Woike, Julia Wick, David Zahniser, Matt Hamilton and Ian James contributed to this report.

Politics

Trump takes unusual step, lets bipartisan housing bill become law unsigned amid SAVE pressure campaign

Published

2 hours ago

July 11, 2026

Press Room

Trump takes unusual step, lets bipartisan housing bill become law unsigned amid SAVE pressure campaign

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A bipartisan housing bill became law Saturday at midnight after President Donald Trump declined to sign it, capping a weeks-long saga over whether the president would veto the measure amid frustrations with Congress over his stalled agenda.

Trump refused to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — legislation aimed at expanding the nation’s housing stock and lowering costs — in an attempt to pressure Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, despite the housing bill clearing both chambers with overwhelming majorities.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats,” he declared on Truth Social Friday morning.

The Trump-backed election measure, which would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and impose voter ID requirements, has struggled to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.

Meanwhile, the House has not passed a version of the bill that includes the president’s proposed crackdown on mail-in voting and banning men from women’s sports.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, June 3, 2026, in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP)

HOUSE CONSERVATIVES DERAIL GOP AGENDA IN SAVE AMERICA ACT SHOWDOWN

Under the U.S. Constitution, Trump had 10 days, not including Sundays, to sign or veto the housing measure after the House formally transmitted the legislation to the White House in late June. The president ultimately chose neither option, allowing the measure to become law without his signature.

Though Trump declined to veto the legislation, he sharply criticized elements of the bill and argued it should not have been a legislative priority in recent weeks.

“It’s so unimportant … compared to the SAVE America Act,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in late June. “I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says. It’s saving America from crooked elections.”

Trump went on to call the housing bill “a yawn,” adding, “compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”

It would have taken a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override a veto — a margin the House and Senate exceeded when they passed the legislation. However, it remains unclear whether so many Republicans would have defied the president had he vetoed the bill.

Trump also appeared to criticize the bill over a provision restricting Wall Street investors from purchasing single-family homes — a policy he first proposed during his January State of the Union address and later urged Congress to pass. Trump previously argued the investor ban would give individual homebuyers a leg up against private equity firms in the housing market.

“I don’t want to hurt people that own houses, too,” Trump later told reporters, appearing to reference the provision. “These people, for the first time in their lives, they have valuable houses. They’ve become rich. I don’t want to hurt them either. What you want to do is what’s good for everyone, get the interest rates down.”

The law also aims to boost housing supply by streamlining federal environmental reviews, loosening rules around the construction of factory-built homes, and incentivizing local governments to modify their zoning laws to allow more housing, among roughly 60 provisions.

Trump’s souring on the legislation created headaches for Republicans, who touted the bill as an affordability win as voters grapple with high housing costs.

“It’s irresponsible to postpone signing the Housing bill due to the SAVE Act,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a retiring lawmaker who lost re-election to a Trump-backed challenger, wrote on social media. “We need to start delivering relief to people for the high cost of housing ASAP!!”

Construction workers stand on the roof of homes under construction at a new housing development on June 24, 2026, in Valencia, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

WARREN TELLS TRUMP TO ‘SIGN THE DAMN BILL’ AS BIPARTISAN HOUSING PACKAGE REMAINS STALLED IN WASHINGTON

Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for the legislation at the U.S. Capitol in June with GOP leaders. The stage had already been set, with at least one senior Republican arriving unaware the president had called off the event shortly before it was scheduled to begin.

The president then declared he would not sign the legislation until Congress passed the SAVE America Act, despite Senate GOP leaders insisting the votes do not exist to advance the measure.

Trump has also expressed frustration with the Republican-controlled Senate for declining to weaken the legislative filibuster, which requires 60 votes to advance most legislation in the upper chamber.

“GET SMART REPUBLICANS, IF YOU DON’T, YOU WON’T BE IN OFFICE FOR LONG!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Sunday.

Before Trump came out against the bill, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history” and said it included an array of policies “long championed” by Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15, 2025. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Trump political operative James Blair touted the legislation for including the president’s Wall Street investor ban, which he referred to as a “signature commitment.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has argued that Republicans will still promote the landmark housing bill ahead of November.

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“We’ll still celebrate it, but he’s trying to make a point, and I think he’s making it very effectively,” the speaker recently told reporters, referring to Trump. “And the fact that you all ask me every three steps down the hallway illustrates that he has achieved the desired objective, and that is to make SAVE America the number one thing, because if we don’t get that right, everybody’s concerned about what happens next.”

Politics

Trump administration clears path for controversial Mojave Desert water pipeline

Published

2 hours ago

July 11, 2026

Press Room

Trump administration clears path for controversial Mojave Desert water pipeline

The Trump administration has signed off on a company’s plan to convert an oil and gas pipeline to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert to thirsty California cities for the first time, a lucrative venture that critics say threatens natural springs and wildlife.

The federal Bureau of Land Management released documents Thursday saying that Cadiz Inc.’s plan to repurpose 162 miles of the pipeline to transport water “will not significantly affect” the environment.

“We’re excited to achieve this pivotal milestone. After many years of planning and environmental review, the project has now reached the construction stage,” said Susan Kennedy, chair and chief executive of Cadiz.

Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes, who have been fighting the project, criticized the decision.

“This groundwater mining proposal would drain the desert and rob the Mojave of its rare springs and wildlife habitat,” said Chance Wilcox, California desert associate director of the National Parks Conservation Assn. “It’s indefensible that the Trump administration would once again try to revive the pointless Cadiz project, by defying decades of scientific warnings and refusing to conduct an environmental review of the groundwater mining.”

The application for the federal authorization was filed by the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co. The documents say the company plans to build seven pump stations, three of them located on federal land managed by the agency.

The 30-inch steel pipeline runs underground from Cadiz’s desert property, near the town of Amboy, northward to the town of Mojave.

The BLM said in its authorization that repurposing the pipeline for water “would comply with all applicable statutes and regulations.” The agency said it has “reasonably determined that the impacts of groundwater withdrawal associated with Cadiz’s groundwater extraction project are outside the scope of analysis.”

Cadiz’s attempts to export water from its property 200 miles east of Los Angeles have drawn controversy for decades.

In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that requires the project to undergo scientific study and gain approval from the State Lands Commission before it can take water from the Mojave and sell it to California cities.

Activists opposing the company’s plans include civil rights leader Dolores Huerta.

“Cadiz spells destruction for water, sacred lands, and the desert economy,” Huerta said in a statement. “It is exactly this type of greed and injustice that I have dedicated my life to oppose.”

Leaders of nearby tribes have also objected to Cadiz’s plans to pump from the desert aquifer near the Mojave Trails National Monument and Mojave National Preserve.

“It is the living heart of the desert,” said Daniel Leivas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. “To drain it would be to drain the life out of the entire desert. No profit is worth such desecration.”

Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”

“Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.

For years, while pursuing its plan to sell water far away, the company has been using wells on its property to irrigate nearly 2,000 acres of farmland growing lemons, grapes and other crops. It has drilled more wells in anticipation of being able to export water once the government approved its pipeline.

The company intends to pipe water to communities in San Bernardino County and says it’s “expected to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of new water in the drought-plagued Southwest.” It says the federal permit “marks a key milestone as we finalize project financing with prospective investors.”

Cadiz bought the 220-mile pipeline from El Paso Natural Gas in 2020. Once construction is completed, the company says the pipeline will be able to transport up to 25,000 acre-feet of water per year — about 5% of what Los Angeles uses each year.

The Los Angeles-based corporation is also seeking to build a new pipeline along a railroad right-of-way to transport water to the south.

Environmental groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging the project.

Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the Trump administration’s decision “a green light for environmental destruction.”

She said six of the proposed pumping stations slated to be built are in the habitat of desert tortoises, a species in decline.

“We’ve successfully fended off this project before and we’ll continue to fight to stop this zombie from coming back,” Anderson said.

In 2021, the Biden administration reversed a Trump administration decision that had cleared the way for Cadiz to pipe water across public land. In 2022, a federal judge scrapped the pipeline permit that the Trump administration had issued.

But during President Trump’s second term, the company has again made headway on its plans. In February, Cadiz announced that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had invited it to submit an application for a $194-million low-interest loan for the northern pipeline project.

The company said in May that it reached an agreement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation to provide funding for a review of its potential role in “augmenting water supplies” along the shrinking Colorado River.

The company has also been lobbying the Trump administration. The group Public Citizen said in a recent report that Cadiz, through its nonprofit Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co., enlisted former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s new lobbying firm, the Bernhardt Group, and has spent at least $330,000 on lobbying in 2025 and 2026.

Records show lobbyist Luke Johnson has repeatedly accompanied Kennedy at meetings with Interior Department officials.

“The extensive influence of David Bernhardt’s boutique lobbying firm on the agency he formerly led highlights how insider firms staffed with former Trump officials have grown in recent years,” said Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen. He said Bernhardt and his lobbyists “have learned how to master influence-peddling in the anything-goes era of Trump 2.0.”

Earlier this month, an Arizona water agency announced it signed an initial “memorandum of understanding” agreement to buy up to 10,000 acre-feet of water per year from Cadiz’s Mojave Groundwater Bank. The Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District provides water to farmlands in Pinal County, where growers are dealing with water cutbacks.

The company said that for this to happen, it would need to build pipelines and reach deals to exchange water across state lines.

Members of California’s congressional delegation have raised concerns. In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla called for a thorough environmental review, saying that federal agencies and peer-reviewed scientific analyses have “warned of the significant and irreversible impacts that Cadiz’s project could have on federal lands and surrounding communities.”

Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Indio) said in a letter to Burgum that he is concerned about the company’s long-standing effort to extract and export groundwater.

“The area I represent cannot afford to absorb the long-term costs of a commercially driven groundwater export scheme,” Ruiz said.

Politics

Trump Promotes ‘Freedom Fuel’ Gas Stations as Gas Prices Rise Again

Published

11 hours ago

July 10, 2026

Press Room

President Trump has promoted a chain of newly rebranded gas stations across the Philadelphia area with lower gas prices. The New York Times has not been able to get detailed information about who is behind the stations. The Trump administration says it did not fund or subsidize the company.