Return of California’s Tulare Lake Could Flood City, State Prison

The ongoing return of California’s Tulare Lake threatens to inundate the city of Corcoran and the state prison nearby, as residents fret that a nearby levee may fail to hold back the rising waters in the spring thaw.

Already, the state’s “Big Melt” has begun, with spring temperatures causing the immense Sierra Nevada snowpack to flow into streams, rivers, and reservoirs that simply cannot hold the results of a record winter.

The result: the emergence of an historic lake, once among the largest freshwater bodies west of the Mississippi, which has inundated farmland and is expected to continue to rise — perhaps, even, to persist for years.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the nearby town of Corcoran is under threat — and desperate for help:

Just west of this normally dusty prison town, a civic nightmare is unfolding: Tulare Lake, a body of water that did not exist just two months ago, now stretches to the horizon — a vast, murky sea in which the tops of telephone poles can be seen stretching eerily into the distance.

Anxious residents in this Central Valley city of 22,000 know all too well that the only thing keeping this growing lake from inundating their homes and businesses — as well as one of the state’s largest and most crowded prison complexes — is a 14.5-mile-long dirt levee that rises up from sodden earth to the west, south and east.

And that levee, according to city officials and local farmers, could be in big trouble.

One levee breach was already made deliberately by local authorities, who chose to flood farmland rather than flooding nearby towns. Such decisions have placed neighbors and communities at odds with one another — as the water keeps coming.

While the media tends to blame climate change for natural disasters, this event has roots in the 19th- and 20th-century decision to drain the lake and farm in an area historically prone to floods.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.