A lost California lake has roared back to life. Now some want to make it permanent

More than 100 square miles of roads, farms and homes in the formerly dry lake bed between Fresno and Bakersfield remain submerged in the entrenched floodwaters. Additional land is expected to go under through summer as record Sierra Nevada snow melts into rivers that fill the lake. Already, damages are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

While landowners as well as local, state and federal officials are focused on keeping major towns and infrastructure dry, the broader issue of whether there’s a better way to manage water in the basin looms. Some say the recent flooding is making the case to more naturally accommodate incoming water, perhaps broadening river plains, restoring old wetlands and, more dramatically, ensuring apermanent revival of Tulare Lake.

A century and a half ago, the marsh-ringed Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi River. It stretched some 800 square miles and was home to tule elk and antelope, flocks of white pelicans and cormorants and bountiful perch, hitch and suckers. Native Americans hunted and fished the shores. Sailboats crisscrossed the waters when Europeans arrived.

Since then, the rivers flowing to the lake have been tapped for agriculture through an elaborately rigged irrigation network (as has the basin’s declining aquifer) causing the lake to go dry. The exception is years like this when the whole system falls short and communities are caught in the crosshairs of flooding.

“The current status quo is not working,” said Rob Hansen, a retired biology professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia (Tulare County) who has spent decades advocating for the health of the watershed.“There are a lot of people clamoring to bring back Tulare Lake. What needs to be explored is a multiple-use approach to the lake bed.”

Any changes in the area won’t come quickly — or easily. Most of the land is privately owned, and the dominant agricultural industry doesn’t want to see more of its high-value fields of cotton, tomatoes and pistachios under water.

Still, the reemergence of the lake, for some, has sparked a sense of awe and enthusiasm, if not the desire for a more natural, more resilient landscape.

Nowhere does this sentiment run deeper than among the descendants of the native Yokuts whose creation story was inspired by the historical waters. While members of the Tachi Yokut Tribe, which operates a reservation and casino in nearby Lemoore (Kings County), offer sympathies for growers and others who have experienced loss, the sight of the lake is nonetheless spiritual for them.

“Imagine, if you’re Christian and if the Garden of Eden reappeared, how exciting would that be? It’s the same thing for the tribe,” said Shana Powers, cultural director and tribal historic preservation officer for the Tachi Yokut’s Santa Rosa Rancheria. “The lake is what created the tribe. It’s what made them who they are.”

No near-term fix

Tulare Lake is the low point of the vast watershed where the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers drain. Unlike many basins, this one no longer has an outlet to the sea.

In March, the patchwork of dams, dikes, ditches and canals that was designed to corral the rivers was simply overwhelmed by storms, leaving water to run uncontrollably into the lake bed for the first time since 1997.

The basin’s distinct Corcoran clay, which is named after the largest city built in the lake bed, provides a highly impermeable surface that causes the water to pool. The Kings County city with the same name is raising its 15-mile levee in a titanic effort to keep pooling water out and away from a state prison complex there. The Tulare County communities of Allensworth and Alpaugh also have experienced flooding and are hurrying to fortify levees.

The last time the lake filled to this extent, in 1983, the water stuck around for nearly two years, most of it evaporating under the San Joaquin Valley’s warm, sunny skies.

This year, the lake is likely to be even larger than it was 40 years ago and therefore linger as long, or longer. The snowpack in the nearby Sierra, which is just beginning to melt, is more massive — measuring three times the average in the region. Additionally, the floor of the valley has sunk in recent years as a result of heavy groundwater pumping by farms, known as subsidence, potentially creating new areas for water to collect.

Those who manage parts of the region’s sprawling and decentralized water grid are doing what they can to limit flooding.

“It’s very complex. It’s a highly managed system,” said Jeremy Arrich, chief of the division of flood management at the California Department of Water Resources. “It would probably take years to truly understand the workings of that basin and the lake bed area.”

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates upstream reservoirs on the four major rivers in the basin, is rationing water releases as the mountain runoff pours in so it doesn’t have to send potentially catastrophic gushes downstream.

The Department of Water Resources is considering an intervention to try to take water out of the river system and limit what’s piling onto the lake. The possibilities, state officials say, include pumping water from the Kings and Kern rivers, via a conduit known as the Friant-Kern Canal, to the California Aqueduct, which moves water to Los Angeles and other points south.

Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the regionTuesday to survey the situation and offer support.

Landowners and local communities in and around the lake bed, meanwhile, are trying to channel the immense inflow to places where it might do the least harm. The exercise, though, has been fraught with conflict because of competing interests.

Even farmers, who usually speak with one voice in the lake bottom, have been pitted against one another over whose fields should be first to flood.

Debating a permanent lake

The current crisis on top of the ongoing problems in the Tulare Lake basin — the overdraft of aquifers, the subsidence, many years of drought and water scarcity — are what supporters of change in the region see as an opportunity to win support for their cause, even in the farming community.

One group, the nonprofit Tulare Basin Watershed Network, is already working to restore parts of the lake bed to their original marshy state. The organization is building on decades of assertions by environmentalists and water experts that reviving the lake, at least partially, could yield widespread benefits, including absorbing floodwaters, recharging the aquifer, heading off subsidence and providing a long-term supply of freshwater on the valley floor.

One analysis from a little more than a decade ago suggested the lake could store nearly twice as much water as a reservoir proposed at the time, on the nearby San Joaquin River at Temperance Flat, and would cost just under $1 billion to build, about a fourth the expense of the new reservoir.

“我说个人乳品印度河try right now who want to revert some of their land to be used for open space and waterfowl,” said Steve Haze, executive director of the Tulare Basin Watershed Network, who is working to get buy-in for the restoration effort. “The backdrop now (of flooding) makes this even more significant.”

Haze’s vision is not to oust agriculture from the area but create a tapestry of natural spaces and farms that can better accommodate the rivers, much like the mix in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to the north.

Past studies, in addition to citing fixes for the basin’s water problems, maintain that restored marsh and portions of lake would bring benefits for wildlife and recreation, including opportunities for boating.

State and federal money for property acquisitions and land remediation as well as a greater public awareness of the value of wetlands are helping advance restoration projects, Haze says.

其他修复的支持者强调legal argument for bringing back the lake. Under California’s Public Trust Doctrine, the state is required to protect bodies of water for fish, wildlife, habitat and recreation, which some say applies to the basin’s periodic flooding.

“Is there not a public trust right to the floodwater?” said Richard Harriman, a land use and environmental attorney who has worked in the area and now works out of Chico. “I don’t think the landowners there have the legal right to assert that it’s their water.”

The lake bottom’s biggest property owner and agricultural giant J.G. Boswell Co. has not returned calls from The Chronicle.

Some in the industry said they were too focused on the flooding to think about a theoretical future for the basin. But Kings County Supervisor and fourth-generation farmer Doug Verboon says the idea of reviving Tulare Lake or extensive wetlands is a little far-fetched.

“I would love to have a lake in my backyard with houses around it,” he said. “But it isn’t sustainable.”

Noting the infrequency of the floods, Verboon says the rivers wouldn’t regularly bring enough water to support a wetter landscape. A lot of the river water, at least at this point in time, is spoken for before it gets to the lake bed and after that the rest is usually slurped up by farms.

With climate change, scientists say flooding will become more prevalent as weather grows increasingly extreme, but even then, Verboon says, big changes in the basin don’t make sense.

“If there’s a cycle with rains more frequently, it’s just going to become a lake more frequently,” he said. “As for those that are farming a lake, that’s the chance you take.”

Reach Kurtis Alexander:kalexander@sfchronicle.comkalexander@sfchronicle.com