Residents in Lemoore, California, a rural Central California community known as the Island District, fear spring snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada Mountains could bring gushing waters to the region, overwhelming the rivers, channel and basin that surrounds the community.
The area is situated about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco and is filled with pistachio orchards, horse farms, a school and a community of roughly 25,000 residents.
The drought-stricken region recently experienced over a dozen atmospheric rivers that brought excessive rainfall and fierce winds, filling reservoirs. But now there is concern that the melting snow will bring more water to an upstream reservoir that could fill it three times over its capacity, the Associated Press reported.
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“The water is coming this way,” Ron Caetano told the news wire. Caetano started a community Facebook group for the Island District that keeps a pulse on the impending weather and deteriorating conditions. “I am preparing for the worst and praying for the best and that’s all we can do.”
According to the AP’s report, water managers are the north fork of the Kings River does not have the capacity to contain snowmelt from the Sierra Nevadas and give it a carved route to the Pacific Ocean.
Additionally, water from the river is moving into the south fork, which is the channel that winds near Lemoore, toward a basin.
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Over 100 years ago, the basin was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, called Tulare Lake. Historically, the lake would grow in the winter from snowmelt, though settlers and farmers diverted the waters to their crops and created dams, leading to the lake running dry.
The only time the lake appears these days is when the region experiences torrential rains like it has over the past few months. The residual rain waters now cover swaths of farmland,…
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