Not long after a series of devastating wildfires began ravaging parts of Los Angeles in early January, people were demanding answers: What caused it? Why couldn’t it be stopped? Who, or what, is responsible for why so many lost so much? Those questions soon found their way into the mirror world that is social media and the internet, where a wave of disinformation and misinformation—some of it propagated directly from President Donald Trump and his surrogates—compounded the crisis. Much of it concerned the state’s most precious resource: water.

Other fire and water management news:

• Public Policy Institute of California: Blog: The challenges of fighting wildfires with urban water systems
• The Art Newspaper: Out of the ashes: how California is learning lessons from the past on controlling wildfires