The Flooding in California Isn’t Entirely Bad News
Excess water in the Tulare Lake basin is providing opportunities to put the country’s most productive farming region on a path to sustainability.
The reemergence of Tulare Lake presents a chance to postpone a reckoning.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
The partial return of what was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River has become one of the biggest stories of this crazy California weather year. Tulare Lake once covered around 700 square miles and could grow to as much as 1,000 in extremely wet times. It began shrinking in the late 1800s as irrigated agriculture took hold in surrounding lands, and since the middle of the 20th century it has been completely dry most of the time. But not this spring. The lake has reclaimed more than 100 square miles so far, and with most of the record southern Sierra Nevada snowpack still to melt, it’s likely to keep growing.
The lakebed itself is sparsely populated, although subsidence from groundwater pumping has put several communities along its eastern edge (the biggest by far is Corcoran, population 22,535) at increased risk. Frantic levee work over the past few weeks has reduced the odds of a serious residential inundation, although it’s already too late for some outlying homes and dairy farms near the lake and the rivers that feed it.