“The reality is the Central Valley has a lot of frontline communities that have borne the impacts of climate and weather extremes, whether it’s drought, smoke, flood,” said John Abatzoglou, climatology professor at the University of California, Merced. “Unfortunately, they have not had the resources to prepare for these extreme events, and that’s why they’re vulnerable.”
Preparing for snowmelt and ‘water jiu jitsu’
Several regions could experience higher-than-usual flood risk from snowmelt, experts said, but the Tulare Basin’s reservoirs are smaller than the central and northern Sierra reservoirs so they hold much less water, Abatzoglou said. It’s an unfortunate mismatch with the high snowpack in the southern Sierra.
Despite intermittent flooding over the years, the region’s levees, canals and dams may not be able to handle such large and rapid water flows, experts said. Floodwaters in some areas are not sinking into the ground, recharging underground water stores.
“We just don’t have the systems in play to put water in places where you can really get a lot of groundwater recharge while minimizing the impacts to communities and agriculture,” Abatzoglou said.
“I think a year like this, hopefully, will be a catalyst for the state to find ways to be more resilient to climate variability and the extremes of climate change — because this is not likely to be the last rodeo that we’re gonna go through.”
Ferguson, the state emergency services spokesperson, said the current break in storms is giving emergency management officials a rare chance to prepare for the possible coming disaster.
They are assessing potential toxic hazards from agricultural or oil sites in the flood path, he said, so they can prevent contaminating nearby farmland or waterways. For example, officials may build a dam around a waste treatment plant run by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts in Kings County, according to a KVPR news report.
They’re also reaching out to underserved communities to help people access emergency information in their native languages.
And state officials are working with local water managers and county emergency personnel, planning for worst-case scenarios, he said.
“It may be that this water is not such that there are enough sandbags, or you can’t physically stop it,” Ferguson said. “You might be doing water jiu jitsu to move it, to flow with it, as opposed to trying to physically stop it … to move it in the smartest possible way to keep as many people safe as possible.”
That may involve finagling a compromise from local agencies and land owners who have been working at cross purposes. In Kings, Kern and Tulare counties decisions about handling flood waters have devolved into local tugs-of-war, with individual farmers influencing where waters go.
In a local conflict that made national headlines, the historic Black town of Allensworth, nearby Alpaugh, and farmers along the Tulare Lake bed were flooded after a large landowner refused to allow his property to flood. As Allensworth residents pleaded for official intervention and scrambled to save their community, SJV Water, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the landowner had placed heavy farming equipment in the way of a water manager’s efforts to use the farmer’s private canal.
The creek recently burst into the canal anyway, after it also overflowed a bridge and road.
State officials have been coordinating with local emergency forces to shore up levees and distribute sandbags.
Although state officials are exploring options for taking a more active role in managing flood waters, local authorities have the jurisdiction to determine where floodwaters go, said Karla Nemeth, director of the Department of Water Resources.
Several communities in southern San Joaquin Valley had opted out of the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, so the ultimate authority over where water goes — and whose property floods — can reside with county officials, small flood districts and even individual property owners.
“At the moment all of those issues need to be addressed at the local level,” Nemeth said. “We are checking into our state authorities on flood management kinds of decisions.”
The governor’s office recently issued an executive order that temporarily waives several state codes related to environmental protections around the Tulare Lake basin. But the order doesn’t allow state officials to step in and arbitrate these conflicts, a governor’s spokesperson said.
Dairies stay on high alert
The Goni family has begun rebuilding their dairy. Their employees and cows are back and production is slowly restarting.
Not everyone has been able to recover. Some dairies and farmland in the Corcoran area still are covered with water. Raudabaugh said two large dairies have closed or relocated.
Coordination among local and state emergency resources has improved since those first two weeks, when industry leaders were fielding panicked calls from farmers, Raudabaugh said. She said she hopes they’ll be ready for the next round of flooding when the snowpack melts.
Stephen Mancebo stands near a canal by his farmland in Tulare County on March 23, 2023.Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
Stephen Mancebo, a relative of Goni’s whose dairy is a few miles down the road, was among those who rushed to help Goni and hosted some of his cows. He said the lack of infrastructure exacerbated the disaster.
“If we could have put more water storage in place, bigger and better infrastructure, more sinking basins, when we got this flood it wouldn’t have been near as bad to those guys on the west side,” said Mancebo, a board member of the Land O’ Lakes dairy co-op.
“We’ve avoided putting money into infrastructure. And I know the governor and nobody else wants to hear that, because they really like showing up to be the hero, and it’s more reactive than proactive.”
Mancebo had to make other quick decisions that week. The canal linked to Lake Kaweah crossing his property began overflowing into fields where he grew winter wheat for his dairy.
Many farmers and residents, rushing to protect their property, built berms to keep the water out. He knew if he did that, too, the water would have flooded another dairy down the road and some neighboring homes. His dairy was safe on higher ground, but he didn’t try to stop the water from flooding his fields.
Standing on the banks of the Tule River and later the ditch outside his own dairy in late March, Mancebo pointed out where the river burst through the levee protecting Goni’s dairy and had ripped out large metal drainage pipes, and where water had flooded his own fields, leaving a layer of silt and debris.
Debris could clog the canal where it flows under the road, he said, and could cause flooding risks over the next few months.
“Everybody is just going to have to stay on high alert,“ he said.
A “domino effect” of damage to dairies and farmers has already begun, he said, with owners laying off workers because they have no work for them.
“That’s why I have a really hard time talking about this or feeling sorry for a couple hundred acres, you know?” Mancebo said.
Getting financial help to farm laborers could be a challenge. Dairies employ higher numbers of undocumented workers than other agricultural industries, which hire workers from a federal visa program for seasonal workers. Dairies operate year-round.
A Cutler resident shovel mud off his driveway in Cutler on March 12, 2023. The area was recently flooded after the levee in the area was breached during a series of storms that hit the Central Valley.Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
‘We couldn’t save anything’
Small communities in the Central Valley, especially on the eastern edge of Tulare County near the mountains, have flooded repeatedly this year.
In Cutler and Orosi, two towns in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, more than 131 homes flooded in mid-March, after water breached an overwhelmed canal in eight places and left many homes uninhabitable.
Weeks after his home in Cutler flooded, Victor Cabrera said he still didn’t have heat or hot water. He was able to use a space heater by running an electrical cord from a neighbor’s house on higher ground.
The house next to Cabrera sustained so much damage it was condemned, and his neighbors were forced to relocate, he said.
“It’s been rough on us,” Cabrera said, referring to his neighborhood.
Many of the hardest-hit families in Cutler lived in the Tulare County Housing Authority homes near a flooded canal. Residents pleaded for help at a recent Tulare County Board of Supervisors meeting, saying the destruction left behind was unsafe for children.
Juanita Martinez cried during her testimony, saying her 9-year-old son fears the canal would break again if they return home.
“We couldn’t save anything,” she said during the meeting. “I’m in tears. I’m frustrated. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
The housing authority transferred Martinez’s family to a home in Dinuba, but she told CalMatters her application for federal disaster aid was rejected. Many families who don’t qualify for aid still need help, she said; plus, who is going to fix the canal?
“We don’t want the money,” Martinez said. “We just want the canal fixed. We’re afraid it’s going to happen again.”
Christina Cabrera cleaning out the water and mud in her family home after a series of storms on March 12, 2023.Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
