Until the early 1900s, central California’s Tulare Lake naturally
appeared every winter as the southernmost rivers flowing out of
the Sierra Nevada Mountains filled the dry lakebed with rainfall
and melted snow.
Farmers adjacent to the lake also used the water to irrigate
their lands. But the variable shoreline made growing seasons
unpredictable. In response, Pine Flat Dam was built by the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers to control Kings River flows. The Kings
River is still used extensively for irrigation.
Because the Tulare Lake Basin’s irrigation water does not have an
outlet, agricultural drainage is stored in a series of
evaporation ponds in and near the lakebed, which has been
converted to farm fields. By the 1980s the water drained
into 28 ponds totaling 7,300 acres. Crop production improved in
part due to improved drainage. Today, drainage water from about
44,046 acres of farmland is contained and evaporated from eight
basins encompassing 4,740 acres of evaporation ponds.
A new underground mapping technology
that reveals the best spots for storing surplus water in
California’s Central Valley is providing a big boost to the
state’s most groundwater-dependent communities.
The maps provided by the California Department of Water Resources
for the first time pinpoint paleo valleys and similar prime
underground storage zones traditionally found with some guesswork
by drilling exploratory wells and other more time-consuming
manual methods. The new maps are drawn from data on the
composition of underlying rock and soil gathered by low-flying
helicopters towing giant magnets.
The unique peeks below ground are saving water agencies’
resources and allowing them to accurately devise ways to capture
water from extreme storms and soak or inject the surplus
underground for use during the next drought.
“Understanding where you’re putting and taking water from really
helps, versus trying to make multimillion-dollar decisions based
on a thumb and which way the wind is blowing,” said Aaron Fukuda,
general manager of the Tulare Irrigation District, an early
adopter of the airborne electromagnetic or
AEM technology in California.
In recent years, it is the dry side of California that has
captured headlines: dwindling reservoirs where boat ramps lead
only to sand, almond orchards ripped up for lack of irrigation
water, catastrophic wildfires that rage through desiccated
forests and into towns. In the longer view, though, the state’s
water problems have come just as often from deluge as from
drought. Other parts of the country can count on reasonably
steady precipitation, but California has always been different,
teetering between drenching winters and blazing summers,
between wet years and dry ones — fighting endlessly to exert
control over a flow of water that vacillates, sometimes wildly,
between too much and too little.
After an unexpected wet winter, California’s drought-addled
Central Valley now faces dangerous floods as a historic
snowpack melts — even as the state moves to store the liquid
gold as quickly as possible. Once the largest freshwater
lake west of the Mississippi River at about 650 square miles,
it hosted a diverse ecosystem and many Indigenous people. When
the lake dried as rivers were diverted for cities and farming,
agricultural communities appeared thanks to the rich soil.
Today, the basin spans several counties and produces more than
half of the state’s agricultural output, according to the
Public Policy Institute. Those crops account for 97% of
regional water use, often relying groundwater pumping in dry
years.
The slow-motion rebirth of Tulare Lake has inundated farm
fields and threatened levees, homes and whole towns. On Monday,
the state projected the lake would reach its peak in the next
week or so, but the floodwaters will linger for perhaps two
years. The return of what used to be the largest lake west of
the Mississippi has captured our attention as one of the most
dramatic climatic events of 2023. Yet the flooded crops and
tenuous levees at Tulare Lake represent only a fraction of the
statewide and nationwide landscape now subject to greater
floods of the global warming era. -Written by author Tim Palmer, whose forthcoming
book “Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our
Urgent Flooding Crisis,” will be published in 2024.
California officials believe that tens of thousands of people
living near Tulare Lake are unlikely to experience flooding
this year, thanks to improving weather conditions and swift
planning following a series of powerful storms that refilled
the basin for the first time in decades. The backstory : Tulare
Lake in California’s Central Valley was once the largest
freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, fed by snowmelt
from the Sierra Nevada each spring. However, the lake
eventually went dry as settlers dammed and diverted water for
agriculture.
Dairy operators in Tulare and Kings counties say they are
thankful to return to the normal rhythms of feeding, milking
and calving after historic flooding in March burst levees and
forced dairies to rapidly evacuate their cows. The resumption
of dairy activities is welcome news in two neighboring counties
where milk and milk products are top commodities. Tulare County
is the state’s leading milk and milk products producer. Kings
County ranks fourth. Peter de Jong, owner of Cloverdale Dairy
in Hanford, evacuated 5,000 cattle over two days in pouring
rain in March, a feat he and his staff say they never want to
repeat.
The risk of catastrophic flooding in the Tulare Lake Basin has
diminished as cool temperatures have predominated this spring,
flattening the melt curve of the Sierra’s epic snowpack, state
officials said Monday. We are “not forecasting nearly as severe
of damage as perhaps we were looking at several weeks ago,”
Brian Ferguson, deputy director of crisis communications for
the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said at
a news conference Monday. “However, we want to strongly
emphasize that we are not out of the woods by any stretch of
the imagination.” Just a few weeks ago, officials worried that
floodwaters from the melting Sierra Nevada snowpack would surge
down the Tule, Kings, Kaweah and Kern rivers and topple berms,
breach levees and inundate towns such as Corcoran and
Stratford.
The Kern River is swollen with so much runoff from the epic
Sierra Nevada snowpack that officials have opened a rarely used
relief valve, diverting floodwaters into the California
Aqueduct to be used as drinking water in Southern California.
Opening this flow relief valve, known as the Kern River
Intertie, is intended to prevent floodwaters from reaching
Tulare Lake, a typically dry lake bed that in recent weeks has
experienced a dramatic resurgence, replenished by powerful
winter storms and, now, heavy spring runoff. … Over two
months, state officials said, about 75,000 acre-feet of Kern
River water will pass into the aqueduct, enough to supply
approximately 225,000 homes for a year.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is ramping up his pressure campaign against
Republicans as a slow-moving natural disaster hits a
conservative-leaning region of California. And the Democrat is
using a perennial Republican calling card — water funding — to
drive home his message. Newsom, who has grown increasingly
frustrated over the lack of federal action, is casting
Republicans as unwilling to fund critical flood protection in
the Central Valley, where record snowmelt has already submerged
farms and will continue to threaten communities into the
summer, while California steps up to front the money.
For the first time in 17 years, the Kern River “intertie” will
be opened on Monday to release Kern River flood waters into the
California Aqueduct, according to the Kern River Watermaster.
The move is an attempt to keep more flood water off the already
waterlogged Tulare Lake bed as officials anticipate
significantly increased Kern River flows starting in
mid-June. River flows are expected to increase shortly to
7,500 cfs and could potentially go above 9,000 cfs in mid-June,
according to Department of Water Resources estimates. Lake
Isabella is anticipated to fill beyond its maximum capacity,
to 658,262, sometime in mid-June forcing outflows up to
9,234 cfs, according to a May 8 DWR estimate provided by Kern
County Administrative Officer Ryan Alsop.
California’s Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation’s
food, but a parade of atmospheric rivers this winter caused
severe storms that destroyed thousands of acres of crops. The
storms, which have been linked to climate change, swamped
150,000 acres in the region, according to numbers from Kings
County officials. About 99% of the nation’s pistachio supply is
grown in Central California, per data from the U.S. Department
of Agriculture. Pistachio farmer Nader Malakan estimates that
about 1,200 acres of pistachio crops were destroyed, to the
tune of $15 million.
California’s “big melt” is underway, and if forecasts bear out,
much of the water being held in mountain snow will flow
downhill in May and June. But at the moment, the state’s
snowpack remains huge — about three times its normal size for
this time of year — and depending on coming conditions, the
snow can either dissipate slowly or quickly cause trouble.
Snowmelt often accelerates in May with warmer weather, longer
days and a higher sun angle. … Although it started out at a
higher point, California’s snowpack is already melting faster
than it did in 1983, a year of historic flooding in the San
Joaquin Valley, thanks to a dry April and a heat wave late in
the month. … With the weather driving how quickly snow
will melt, here are four scenarios that could determine flood
severity this spring and summer.
The Kern Water Bank Authority paid $35,000 just to file
an application for a temporary permit to take up to
300,000 acre feet of Kern River flood water. There’s no
guarantee the permit will be approved. Nor that the conditions
in the permit – that rights holders are so full they can’t take
more water and it’s in danger of being lost to the county –
will ever be met. That may seem like a high price for a
slim chance. But if the permit is approved, and the water comes
through it will have been the deal of the
century. Especially considering what water bank
participants currently pay just for the hope of Kern River
flood water.
A year ago, Kirk Gilkey was taking stock of his newly planted
cotton, watching green shoots poke through freshly tilled dirt.
These days, he has a view of nothing but water. Nearly
two-thirds of the Gilkey family’s 8,700 acres in the southern
San Joaquin Valley has been engulfed by Tulare Lake,
the long-dormant body of freshwater that has re-emerged with
the wet winter and grown to half the size of Lake Tahoe.
… The area, between Fresno and Bakersfield, is one of
California’s agricultural hubs hit hardest by this year’s
historic flooding. While the toll on the state’s farming
industry is still being tallied, crop losses are expected to
soar to potentially billions of dollars, on top of billions
more in property damage. It’s a modest but noticeable dent in
California’s roughly $50 billion of total farm production
annually and acute for the affected regions and their mainstay
crops.
Tulare Lake has sprung back to life, its shoreline rapidly
expanding from the runoff of a winter of epic rainstorms and
the melting of the massive southern Sierra snowpack. The lake,
which has been mostly dry for decades, now covers miles of rich
farmland and is threatening to overwhelm nearby communities.
… Tulare Lake is back to claim roads, orchards, farms,
and anything left behind on that land. It is a disaster
unfolding in slow motion, threatening everything around it,
including the city of Corcoran. The lake has wrapped
itself around the southern and western sides of Corcoran, so
the community is now completely dependent on the levees
designed to box in and protect this pocket of land. It probably
will be for some time to come. Corcoran is the largest single
community threatened by the reborn lake, and that includes the
8,000 inmates in the city’s state prison facilities.
A new study published in the journal Environmental Science &
Technology estimates that thousands of private well users in
the Central Valley could be extracting contaminated water. The
study estimates a 0.7 percent chance users of a domestic well
in the Tulare Lake hydrologic region, which includes Hanford,
would draw water above the Environmental Protection Agency’s
secondary maximum contaminant level for manganese.
According to Samantha Ying, principal investigator of the study
and assistant professor of Soil Biochemistry at the University
of California Riverside, manganese, a mineral naturally found
in groundwater, can have serious effects on health. This is
particularly true for babies and children.
Although it’s well into spring, the snowpack in California’s
mountains remains huge, measuring 254% of average in the
state’s May 1 snow survey on Monday. The Sierra Nevada and
southern Cascades together have seen near-record accumulation
this year, with the snowpack peaking on April 8 and then
beginning to decline, state records show, losing just under 20%
of its water mass since. A cold start to April and lots of
cloud cover prompted the snow to melt at slower-than-average
pace, state officials say, leaving the snowpack in May
among the largest in modern times for the month. This amount of
snow presents the potential for catastrophic flooding as it
melts through the rest of spring and into summer. Already, many
areas of the state are on high alert, notably the southern San
Joaquin Valley.
Lois Henry is the engine behind the small but mighty two-person
journalistic operation that is SJV Water, an independent,
nonprofit news site dedicated to covering water in the San
Joaquin Valley. She and reporting partner Jesse Vad have been
at ground zero for much of the spring flooding that’s already
occurred. We asked her what she’s seen—and what might happen as
the weather heats up. The San Joaquin Valley has already
experienced serious flooding this year. What are you seeing on
the ground? First, I know that some people are cheering on
the return of Tulare Lake. The water is coming back to the
former lake bed, but I want to be clear that it’s not
pretty.
Satellite images taken over the past several weeks show a
dramatic resurrection of Tulare Lake in California’s
Central Valley and the flooding that could remain for as long
as two years across previously arid farmland. The satellite
imagery, provided by the Earth imaging company Planet
Labs, show the transition from a dry basin to a wide and deep
lake running about ten miles from bank to bank on land used to
grow almonds, tomatoes, cotton and other crops. Scientists warn
the flooding will worsen as historically huge snowpack from the
Sierra Nevada melts and sends more water into the basin. This
week, a heat wave could prompt widespread snow melt in the
mountains and threaten the small farming communities already
dealing with the resurrected Tulare Lake.
Tulare Lake, the long dormant lake that made a surprise
comeback in California’s San Joaquin Valley this year, has
gotten so big with the wet weather that water experts say it
won’t drain until at least next year, and maybe well after
that. … While landowners as well as local, state and
federal officials are focused on keeping major towns and
infrastructure dry, the broader issue of whether there’s a
better way to manage water in the basin looms. … the
re-emergence of the lake, for some, has sparked a sense of awe
and enthusiasm, if not the desire for a more natural, more
resilient landscape. Nowhere does this sentiment run
deeper than among the ancestors of the native Yokuts whose
creation story was inspired by the historical waters.
This tour ventured through California’s Central Valley, known as the nation’s breadbasket thanks to an imported supply of surface water and local groundwater. Covering about 20,000 square miles through the heart of the state, the valley provides 25 percent of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of all fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed throughout the country.
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
A new era of groundwater management
began in 2014 with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA), which aims for local and regional agencies
to develop and implement sustainable groundwater management
plans with the state as the backstop.
SGMA defines “sustainable groundwater management” as the
“management and use of groundwater in a manner that can be
maintained during the planning and implementation horizon without
causing undesirable results.”
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
Salt. In a small amount, it’s a gift from nature. But any doctor
will tell you, if you take in too much salt, you’ll start to have
health problems. The same negative effect is happening to land in
the Central Valley. The problem scientists call “salinity” poses
a growing threat to our food supply, our drinking water quality
and our way of life. The problem of salt buildup and potential –
but costly – solutions are highlighted in this 2008 public
television documentary narrated by comedian Paul Rodriguez.
A new look for our most popular product! And it’s the perfect
gift for the water wonk in your life.
Our 24×36 inch California Water Map is widely known for being the
definitive poster that shows the integral role water plays in the
state. On this updated version, it is easier to see California’s
natural waterways and man-made reservoirs and aqueducts
– including federally, state and locally funded
projects – the wild and scenic rivers system, and
natural lakes. The map features beautiful photos of
California’s natural environment, rivers, water projects,
wildlife, and urban and agricultural uses and the
text focuses on key issues: water supply, water use, water
projects, the Delta, wild and scenic rivers and the Colorado
River.
Until the early 1900s, Central
California’s Tulare Lake naturally appeared every winter as the
southernmost rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada filled the
dry lakebed with rainfall and melted snow.
In the spring, the shallow lake near Visalia could cover as much
as 790 square miles, or four times the surface area of Lake
Tahoe. By the end of the hot San Joaquin Valley summer, however,
the giant lake – once the largest freshwater body west of the
Mississippi River – could disappear primarily due to evaporation.
