ALBAWABA- Heavy rainfall caused severe flooding in California's Central Valley, submerging thousands of acres of farmland but resuscitating Tulare Lake—once the biggest freshwater body west of the Mississippi.
The massive snowpack that has accumulated on the Sierra Nevada mountains is expected to triple the size of the flood by summer, threatening surrounding communities and causing billions in losses. The town of Corcoran is particularly vulnerable due to the relentless pumping of groundwater for thirsty crops such as almonds and pistachios, which has led to the land sinking by 10 to 15 feet in places over the past decade. This has changed the topography of the historical lakebed, which is now lower than during previous big flood events.
Longtime residents, like Sidonio Palmerin, remember how the last great flood in 1983 took two years to dry out while the loss of agricultural work hollowed out Corcoran.
“We lost half our school population and about one-third of our city population,” he recalled. “A lot of the people that were relocated lost their homes, their cars. It took a long time to recuperate.”
The town of Corcoran has already started using earth movers to raise the 14.5-mile levee that protects over 20,000 residents and 8,000 inmates in two prisons. The levee is the town's only defense against the rising floodwater. Mary Gonzalez Gomez, standing in front of the only home she has ever known, worries that if the town gets flooded, the disabled and those without transportation will have nowhere to go.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, predicts that climate change will make weather events more extreme, and relentless atmospheric rivers could turn Tulare Lake into a vast inland sea. While the flooding caused by the current rainfall is severe, Swain warns that it is still nowhere near the worst-case scenario. He notes that the weather is on "steroids" due to climate change, and heavy precipitation and severe floods are increasingly likely, even as droughts become more severe. For now, the residents of Corcoran are hoping that the levee will protect them against the rising floodwater, but the town's seniors fear that the current flooding could be much worse than the 1983 event
