How powerful land barons shaped the epic floods in California’s heartland
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At the end of the contentious hearing, Kings County supervisors took an action never before taken in county history. They voted to cut a levee on farmland owned by Boswell to buy time for Corcoran, home to 20,000 people and one of California’s largest maximum security prisons, as the town scrambled to raise earthen defenses against the encroaching floodwaters.
The decision was met with incredulity and fury by the powerhouse farming company.
“Boswell has been farming in the Corcoran area since 1925. Ninety-eight years,” George Wurzel, Boswell’s president and chief operating officer, told the supervisors. “And in 98 years, the county supervisors have never gotten involved in telling us where to put floodwater.”
In most parts of California, and indeed the United States, the idea that the government would largely cede to private companies management of a natural disaster that could decimate multiple towns, displace thousands of farmworkers and wreak destruction across hundreds of square miles would be unfathomable.
But that has long been how things operate in the Tulare Lake Basin. Land barons, chief among them J.G. Boswell’s founder, seized control of the basin and its water generations ago and have since managed it with minimal government interference.
In recent months, a team from The Times interviewed dozens of farmers, residents, government officials and policy experts; reviewed property records, court filings, water district records and historical documents; and spent hours driving around and flying over the lakebed.
The picture that emerged is one of a region that operates more like a secretive fiefdom ruled by a handful of legacy farming clans than a publicly governed jurisdiction where decisions affecting the well-being of residents are made on a foundation of transparency and accountability.
Among The Times’ findings:
The flood-prone Tulare Lake Basin is the one part of the Central Valley that has a special exemption from state-required flood control plans, leaving the area without a clear public strategy for managing floodwaters. State and federal flood maps offer scant information about the location or condition of the hundreds of miles of levees and canals in the basin — which spans portions of Kings and Tulare counties — because no one has ever reported it in detail.
And because the landscape is constantly in flux — as levees, berms and ditches are built, cut and rerouted as private landowners see fit — residents, lawmakers and water managers were unable to plan for and mitigate the damage as the floodwaters poured in.
The situation has been compounded by the unrestrained pumping of groundwater in recent decades. This is causing large swaths of the valley floor to sink, further changing the path water takes in the basin.
Local flood control and water conveyance districts, made up of powerful farming interests, make decisions about water infrastructure. Some refer to themselves as government entities; others receive tax-exempt status to store, divert and channel water.
Even the governor appeared flummoxed when he visited in April.
“It’s complicated,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said as he stood beside the newly formed Tulare Lake near Corcoran. He had come down after local officials begged the state for money to build up the Corcoran levee, a 14-mile-long earthen wall that protects the town and prison when water rises in the lake bottom.
But the region’s lawmakers had opted out of so many state programs, and officials had such scarce information about the region’s water dynamics, that figuring out how to provide aid was complicated. State officials, Newsom said, were trying to assess “exactly the rules of engagement.”
Six months later, they’re still trying to figure it out.
“I would observe that we have some big local landowners that say, ‘See, we managed this, and it went fine this year,’” said Karla Nemeth, director of California’s Department of Water Resources. “But there’s also a lot of folks in that region that came away from the spring saying, ‘We don’t understand what happened. We don’t understand who was making decisions, and we don’t understand what the plan is.”
This year, Corcoran and other towns in the Tulare Lake Basin were largely spared, in part because of decisions made by landowners and state and local officials — and in part just by pure luck as record snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada melted more slowly than expected. But in the years to come, the potential for more record precipitation and drought — volatile weather swings unleashed by the changing climate — is likely to stress the system in ways that will make this past year seem benign.
While whole towns were not destroyed, this year’s flooding left clear winners and losers. The revived Tulare Lake could put some farmland and orchards out of circulation for years. The economic devastation is projected at roughly $1 billion.
“Are we going to be bankrupt? Are we going to be in business? I don’t know,“ said farmer Makram Hanna, whose pistachio orchard was flooded by a broken levee, leaving hundreds of acres of trees suffocating under 2 feet of water.
The episode has fractured some longtime relations in this lucrative corner of the San Joaquin Valley, and left troubling questions about the wet winters and dry summers to come: When water is overwhelming — or desperately scarce — who will suffer and who will thrive? And who gets to decide?
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https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-09-28/central-valley-land-barons-tulare-lake-basin-kings-county-flooding-water-farms-boswell
