Tulare Lake is normally a dry lake. It has been dry since the late 1800s and early 1900s when the rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate Central Valley farm lands. But there has been so much rain lately that the rivers overflowed. Water has flooded the farm lands that were in the dry lake.
Driving back to San Francisco from Los Angeles last weekend I stopped by to view the flooding and take these pictures. It is disastrous and will take years to recover.
Flooding events of the (normally) dry Tulare Lake in recent years included 1938, 1955, 1969, 1983, 1997, and now the spring of 2023.
◆ Main rivers feeding the Tulare Lake basin:
Up until the 1800s, Tulare Lake was fed by five Sierra Nevada rivers – the Kings, Kern, Kaweah, Tule and White Rivers:
⏶ 2,287 cu ft/s avg discharge rate — Kings River [Pine Flat Dam (1954)]
⏶ 946 cu ft/s avg discharge rate — Kern River [Isabella Dam (1953)]
⏶ 554 cu ft/s avg discharge rate — Kaweah River [Terminus Dam (1962)]
⏶ 197 cu ft/s avg discharge rate — Tule River [Success Dam (1961)]
⏶ 10 cu ft/s avg discharge rate — White River [no dam]
(Flow rates were taken from Wikipedia in April 2023.)
Thanks for the pictures, but be careful when taking them.
What the rest of the country doesn’t seem to realize is that this will impact agriculture. California’s Central Valley, of which this is part, is a major, major producer of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Those items will still be available, but there will be less supply and the same demand. That means rising prices and the occasional shortage in some areas.
This isn’t something that matters to people in California. It matters to all of us. Or at least it should - many remain unaware of the impact this will have.
The San Joaquin Valley has about 8000 square miles of farm land. The flooded area in Tulare Lake is currently less than 300 square miles, although it will grow with the snow melt. That’s a big flood, but just by the numbers it seems like it will reduce the agricultural capacity of the valley by only a few percent.
I don’t see it as “flooding” so much as “recharging the aquifer.” Every 14 years or so it floods. If The Powers What Is can’t keep the levees in good shape in the meantime, it sounds like they should be replaced by someone who can.
Thanks for trying to dig that up. I was trying to find a figure for the current size of the flood. But your cite doesn’t contain that figure, just the quote “At its widest point, the reformed lake stretches about 10 miles from bank to bank”. Maybe they updated the story. This story, linked from your cite, estimates the flood could grow to 100,000 acres (156 sq miles), but doesn’t estimate the size of the current flood. I saw another story that said the flood couple triple in size without saying how big was the current size. Terrible reporting.
From the cite above:
So in 1983 we had 125 square miles of flooding. I agree, that sounds unlikely to have a large impact on produce prices.
Yeah, I couldn’t find an exact area either. I based my “less than 300 sq mi” figure on the “10 miles from bank to bank” number. If the lake were circular, that would be 314 sq mi, but it’s far from circular so it must be much less than that.
I believe the main crop in that part of the valley is cotton. Definitely a disaster if you’re a cotton farmer, but the impact on food prices shouldn’t be huge.
The United States Geological Service is a little-heralded but vitally important government agency with a crucial public science mission, and can provide all manner of information about the geology and hydrology of every region in the United States:
This accumulation and the large watersheds from snowmelt will have a significant impact upon agriculture this year but will help to replenish the Central Valley aquifer, albeit not to the extent to come anywhere near bring it back to even 1960s levels, which would require several wet winter seasons like 2022-2023.
It seems to me that it isn’t normally a dry lake. It’s normally a normal lake, with water in it; but it’s been artificially drained since the late 1800’s; and every once in a while it goes partially back to normal. People do very routinely both put up what are supposed to be permanent buildings, and establish farm fields that they don’t intend to be intermittently flooded, in areas that the general water system is trying to fill with water; but this may be an example of why that’s not a good idea.
It’s more of a marshy wetlands with a wide smattering of smaller lakes that us subject to periodic flooding and upwell that, because of redirection and sequestering of inflows and groundwater irrigation combined with more recent chronic drought conditions has turned it into a quasi-permanent dry bed. It isn’t deep enough to maintain a permanent surface lake and hasn’t been for the last several hundred thousand years but the current pre-2023 flooding state is definitely a result of human intervention and groundwater overuse.
I would like to point out that the lake was there first and that any farmer willing to farm this “land” is taking a calculated risk. Perhaps farming here is the actual disaster, not the lake reappearing.
When I say this, I mean it. My family and many neighbors lost a lot of land when our once shallow lake refilled to its more natural borders. The MN DNR had no sympathy when several homes in the region got flooded out. Our property is half the size it was and our septic system is now just a holding tank that has to be regularly emptied. Lake water dumped into our well, and we had to create a breakwater to prevent waves eating the hill the house sits on. Truth is, had the family done their homework before buying the lakefront property, we would have known where the original shoreline sat. Had we even looked at our long beach properly, we would have seen that the lake had been drying up. But things change. We took it on the chin. It’s my brother’s place now and everone in that chain of lakes is aware that Mother Nature does her thing regardless of human wishes.
I read recently that it’s estimated that 236 billion gallons of water are estimated to be locked up in the snow in and around Yosemite Park. I did a few unit conversions, and this translates to about 0.2 cubic mile or 733,000 acre-feet. It sounds like a flood of Noah’s proportions, but it really isn’t.
I asked here a while back about whether the big flooding in Texas could replenish its aquifers, in part due to all the capped oil wells. People here who know way more about this than I do said it would take centuries to see the difference.
A few percent here, a few percent there… it all adds up.
Central Valley agriculture has been taking hit after hit, between drought and now flood. As I said, we aren’t going to starve but prices will go up because the overall amount of production has gone down.
