“Unveiling the Terrifying Future of California’s Floods and Droughts – Brace Yourself!”

Since New Years, storm after storm had hit the state, dumping epic amounts of water and snow. The water made its way down the valley, as it always had, through channels held back by earthen levees that, during the years of drought, dried up and weakened, filled with squirrel burrows. In some parts of the valley floor, the water was not contained at all. Deanna Jackson, executive director of the local agency that manages groundwater in the Tulare Lake Hydrological Region, described the flooding to me as “errant flows, wild flows,” an almost unmanageable sheet of water that cuts across the landscape. Homes, farms, and dairies were flooded, and people used bulldozers to hastily build earthen dikes around their properties. Some of these, around houses and small dairies, were a few feet high; others, around the lands of the largest and wealthiest agricultural companies, were towering and miles long. Sometimes these fortifications angered the neighbors, whose lands found the water instead. In a valley where powerful interests had long competed for access to water, the arguments were now over who would bear the flood.

A few days earlier, a canal wall along a railroad track just north of Allensworth, visible from Gonzales’s yard, began to crumble. A brown storm water foam began to spread towards the houses. Neighbors grabbed shovels and came running; Gonzales and his son brought the tractors that Gonzales usually uses to clear the paddocks. When they ran out of sandbags, their neighbor Rubén Guerrero, who ran from work at a nearby elementary school to join the emergency response, had an idea: strengthen the canal wall with the help of a roll of plastic sheeting. that I planned to use. for a house painting project. The men eventually pushed the water back with an arrangement that was part berm, part sandburrito. When the pulse of the flood receded, they celebrated their victory. But it turned out to be another case of competing interests: the railway company that owned the land dismantled their work, saying that by protecting their houses, they had threatened the company’s property. So, hour after hour, they patrolled the dam, watching the water flow, fast and deep.

Soon after, another alert went through the city: a different levee, this one along Deer Creek, had given way. Floodwater was flowing back into Allensworth. First, however, the water entered a pistachio orchard, where it threatened to uproot trees and drown them in silt. A video that later went viral captured the farmer’s response: He drove two trucks to the top of the levee, filled their beds with soil to weigh them down, then revved up the engines and propelled the trucks straight into the flooded breach where the levee wall used to be. (One, appropriately, was a Chevy.) Cal Fire’s heavy equipment and sandbag-laden helicopters completed the job, but rumors swirled as to why the breach had occurred. Jack Mitchell, chief of the local flood control district, reported that it looked as if it had been cut by machinery. Had someone intentionally cut through the levee, endangering Allensworth, not to mention someone else’s farm, to save his own? “I can’t see how a tree, or a product, a vegetable, is more important than a life,” Guerrero said, shaking his head. “Tomatoes are not the only ones that matter. Our lives matter too.”

Around the town, houses were marked with what at first appeared to be small streamers, but were actually pieces of caution tape, placed by a whitewater rescue team, as a preparatory measure, to mark which houses were still occupied: red if a house was empty. , yellow if not. “It’s rare to see the reds,” said Kiara Rendón, an Allensworth resident. Her car was packed with supplies, for her and the younger siblings she cares for, but she hadn’t left yet: “A lot of people didn’t evacuate because this is all they have.” A community leader in Allensworth named Denise Kadara told me the same thing. Allensworth was the first California city established by African Americans. It is named for Colonel Allen Allensworth, who escaped slavery by fleeing behind Union lines and later joined the Navy before heading to California. Later it became a home for farm workers and people who could not afford to live elsewhere. Kadara was certain that if the residents had followed the evacuation order, Allensworth would have been sacrificed to save other places considered more valuable.

A few days earlier, Rendon came home to find his sister, five months pregnant and alone with a 3-year-old boy, shoveling mud as water rose in the field behind their house. Rendon took me to see where a Cal Fire crew helped the family dig a small drainage ditch and where the water finally leaked out of her house. His gaze kept shifting to the east, where the other legacy of the storms, a record snowpack, 50 feet in places, shimmered white on the distant mountains. He knew that all that water would have to find its way to low ground. She didn’t know what would happen then.