California’s historic snowmelt is refilling the Central Valley’s Tulare Lake Basin and reviving what was once the largest lake west of the Mississippi River, but state officials now expect the flooding will be less devastating than previously feared.
“We’re in significantly better shape with that peak water level than we were a few weeks ago,” said Brian Ferguson, the deputy director of crisis communications for the California Office of Emergency Services, at a press conference last week. “However, we want to strongly emphasize that we are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination.”
Drained over a century ago by powerful agricultural interests, Tulare Lake is now almost the size of Lake Tahoe, fueled by runoff from a near-record snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. California’s Department of Water Resources expects the lake to peak in size Wednesday, at 183 square miles.
As recently as a month ago, state agencies anticipated that the lake would swamp several of the Central Valley’s small cities and farmworker towns, many of which are historically disenfranchised and uniquely vulnerable to floods and other disasters. But according to modeling released last week, the towns of Corcoran, Stratford, Alpaugh and Allensworth are now likely to be spared.
Thanks to some unusually cool weather, the state’s snowpack is melting more slowly than some models projected, and state agencies have taken advantage of these conditions by rapidly mobilizing to protect communities.
Earlier in this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $17 million to raise the levees that surround the small city of Corcoran, which is home to over 20,000 people and the site of a major state prison complex. Newsom also signed an executive order that made it easier for farmers to funnel the floodwater into the region’s badly-depleted groundwater basins.
In the meantime, the Department of Water Resources has diverted some of the floodwater south into the California Aqueduct — a massive system of canals and tunnels that shuttles water from the northern to the southern part of the state. State agencies are also trucking two million sandbags into the Tulare Lake Basin, in the event that flooding gets worse.
While some worst case scenarios may well have been avoided, state officials and water experts warned that the Central Valley’s flood forecast could still shift. An unexpected heatwave or warm, late-season rainstorm could accelerate the snowmelt and fuel severe flooding later this month.
After peaking in size this week, Tulare Lake is now expected to start evaporating away in late July, though some experts project that it could take up to two years for it to dissipate completely.