Central Valley city--prison and all--threatened with flooding from spring snow melt

A team of Los Angeles Times journalists reported this week from Corcoran (population 24,000), where the rise of water in the Tulare Lake basin is threatening not only the town, but also a state prison and the California Drug Use Treatment Facility.  Together those institutions house 8,000 men and employ many residents.   

Here's an excerpt: 

A bottle of Tums antacid tablets rattled in the cup holder of Kirk Gilkey’s truck recently as he drove around the area surveying the rising water.

Gilkey’s family has been farming in the area for generations. He said this is the first year in decades that his farm won’t 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 who are dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods.

“People are scared,” he said. If “Corcoran floods, it’ll be a ghost town after. It won’t survive.”

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 “beyond frustrated” by the difficulty of accessing emergency funding.

Local officials want to see the levee reinforced and raised by 3.5 feet — an engineering feat that would cost $21 million, according to Gatzka. 

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. 

Corcoran is part of the Hanford-Corcoran metropolitan area, in Kings County, one of the poorest in the state.  Its population is majority Latino. 

A related Associated Press story out of nearby Leemore is here.

Here's a March story from CalMatters about state budget cuts for floodplains.

Another post about places imperiled by recent flooding and/or impending flooding from California snow melt is here. Another LA Times story about a community imperiled by snowmelt is here.