Tulare Lake re-emerged after intense storms battered the state this winter, and will likely remain in the Central Valley for months — and maybe years — to come.
It sounds like the sea and approaches the size of Lake Tahoe. Its wind-driven waves are unexpectedly silky and warm. Tulare Lake seems to go on forever on the immense brown and green flat of California’s Central Valley, shimmering like a great blue mirage.
Three months have passed since the lake, which dates to the Ice Age, re-emerged in the basin that once held the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. Dammed dry by humans, it has periodically attempted a comeback, though rarely with the force seen after this winter’s storms.
First a trickle, then a flood, the water that coursed into the lake bed over a handful of months swallowed one of the nation’s largest and most valuable stretches of cropland in about the time it takes to grow a tomato. Thirty square miles, then 50. Then 100. Then more.
Now, at the onset of summer, Tulare Lake sits at about 168 square miles, trapped by thousands of acres of clay soil and the lack of a natural outlet, so big that it is best tracked by satellites. Caused initially by climate-amplified sheets of rain over the riversheds coursing through the Sierra Nevada, it is being fed by the melting snowpack that piled up in the mountains to near-record levels.
Detours and roadblocks bedeck its shores. Chemicals, manure and diesel pollute it. Palm trees and power poles poke from its surface. Day brings dragonflies. Dusk brings mosquitoes. Flocks of birds are settling in — swallows, wrens, ducks, egrets, chattering red-winged blackbirds.
Algae bobs on the waves; underneath, on the tomato and cotton fields that make up most of the lake bottom, abandoned cars rust and catfish lurk.
“I’ve never seen something of this magnitude,” Jeffrey Coughlin, an airboat pilot, said on a recent weekday, threading his bayou-style craft across the debris-filled water. “The devastation that’s affected some of these poor people, farms, homes.”
State water engineers have used virtually every trick in California’s considerable playbook to preserve as much of that water as possible and divert it elsewhere. Models suggest the lake’s growth has finally topped out.
But the phenomenon that remains is promising to be a formidable long-term guest in California farm country. Mr. Coughlin, who normally works in the San Francisco Bay about 230 miles northwest, has been ferrying crews from the Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has been painstakingly removing sunken electrical transformers from the lake bed. With him on a recent day was a member of the Kings County Sheriff’s Office, which, because of Tulare Lake’s resurrection, is buying its own airboat.
“It’s a lot bigger than I anticipated,” marveled Sgt. Nate Ferrier, who, like most people in the region, had not yet ventured much beyond the shoreline. Like most law enforcement, he has spent the past several months telling the public to stay off the lake and respect the “Do Not Enter” warnings.
Most have obeyed, he said, but it isn’t easy. Tulare Lake has been a hazard and, for many farmers, an economic disaster, Sgt. Ferrier said. But in some respects, he added, it also is “freaking cool.”
Tulare Lake selfies have become a genre, for instance — couples watching the sun set, adventurous souls wading out into the toxic water. Some have tried driving through it, only to end up swimming to shore or having to be rescued. A pair of journalists recently kayaked across to see if they could paddle their way from Bakersfield to the San Francisco Bay………