{"id":1388,"date":"2023-04-24T11:29:21","date_gmt":"2023-04-24T15:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/?p=1388"},"modified":"2023-04-24T11:29:21","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T15:29:21","slug":"floods-threaten-to-drown-corcoran-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/education\/floods-threaten-to-drown-corcoran-california\/","title":{"rendered":"Floods threaten to drown Corcoran, California"},"content":{"rendered":"

CORCORAN, Calif. \u2014\u00a0 <\/span>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 \u2014 a vast, murky sea in which the tops of telephone poles can be seen stretching eerily into the distance.<\/p>\n

Anxious residents in this Central Valley city of 22,000 know all too well that the only thing keeping this growing lake<\/a> from inundating their homes and businesses \u2014 as well as one of the state\u2019s largest and most crowded prison complexes \u2014 is a 14.5-mile-long dirt levee that rises up from sodden earth to the west, south and east.<\/p>\n

And that levee, according to city officials and local farmers, could be in big trouble.<\/p>\n

They worry that this nondescript earthwork may be too low to hold back the millions of gallons of melted snow<\/a> that are expected to course into the Tulare Lake Basin as summer sunshine warms the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. They worry even more that with water sloshing against the levee for up to two years, it may start to erode and breach.<\/p>\n

Many here say they are perplexed and frightened that state and federal officials don\u2019t seem to be taking the threat seriously, since the federal government has estimated that flooding would cause $6 billion worth of damage. They note that both California State Prison, Corcoran, and the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility \u2014 a dual prison complex that holds about 8,000 incarcerated men and employs many local residents \u2014 stand in the path of potential destruction.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody has ever seen that much snow,\u201d said Jason Mustain, a clerk at the Corcoran hardware store and a former firefighter. \u201cOf course I\u2019m stressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mustain is not alone.<\/p>\n

A bottle of Tums antacid tablets rattled in the cup holder of Kirk Gilkey\u2019s truck recently as he drove around the area surveying the rising water.<\/p>\n

Gilkey\u2019s family has been farming in the area for generations. He said this is the first year in decades that his farm won\u2019t plant cotton because of flooding. But what distresses him most is not the financial pain big farmers will experience but the hardship that will be visited upon workers and their families<\/a> who are dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are scared,\u201d he said. If \u201cCorcoran floods, it\u2019ll be a ghost town after. It won\u2019t survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

City Manager Greg Gatzka, who for weeks has been waging an unsuccessful campaign to marshal state and federal funds to bolster the levee, said he is \u201cbeyond frustrated\u201d by the difficulty of accessing emergency funding.<\/p>\n

Local officials want to see the levee reinforced and raised by 3.5 feet \u2014 an engineering feat that would cost $21 million, according to Gatzka.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the Cross Creek Flood Control District, which is responsible for the levee, has tapped reserve funds to begin gathering dirt to reinforce it. But Gatzka said the agency has exhausted its resources and needs state help.<\/p>\n

Read more from \u00a0Jessica Garrison<\/a>, Susanne Rust<\/a>,\u00a0Ian James <\/a>of the LA Times:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/california\/story\/2023-04-24\/floodwaters-threaten-to-drown-a-california-city-and-prison<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CORCORAN, Calif. \u2014\u00a0 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 \u2014 a vast, murky sea in which the tops of telephone poles can be seen stretching eerily into the distance.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1865,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1865"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1389,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/1389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}