The Latest Breaking News from Tulare Lake

Here's how 2023’s storms compare to past extremes and what to expect in the future.

Draining the lake allowed agriculture to thrive, but left the region vulnerable to floods

To get a sense of the enormous amount of water atmospheric rivers dumped on the Western U.S. this year and the magnitude of the flood risk ahead, take a look at California’s Central Valley, where about a quarter of the nation’s food is grown.

CORCORAN, Calif. — Tom Barcellos has farmed the reclaimed soil of the Tulare Lake Basin for nearly five decades, and he’s rarely witnessed a winter like 2023.

KETTLEMAN CITY, Calif. — Here at the western edge of the Tulare Lake Basin dwells a smelly industrial site the size of 150 football fields. Roughly eight times a day, its operations are replenished with a truckload of human waste from the residents of Los Angeles County.

Tulare Lake was drained a century ago. Now locals fear flooding as agencies rush in sandbags and rebuild levees

CORCORAN, Calif. — Sixth Avenue used to cut through miles of farmland. Now, the road has disappeared under muddy water, its path marked by sodden telephone poles that protrude from the swelling lake. Water laps just below the windows of a lone farmhouse that sits alongside the submerged route.

It wasn’t that long ago that increasingly arid California seemed as watery as a wet sponge. At the time the state became part of the U.S., Tulare Lake was the largest body of freshwater west of the Great Lakes, and winter flooding made it even larger. In particularly wet years,…