![]() “You’ve got diesel fuel, oil, manure, chemicals used to kill bugs and stuff. “It’s farmland, underwater,” Nate Ferrier of the Kings County sheriff’s office tells the publication. Though it is considered private property, the lake has drawn visitors to its shoreline-but it isn’t safe to swim or recreate in, per the Guardian. In the valley, small family farms sit beside huge megafarms, and some people fear the effects of the flooding will be felt unequally, per the Guardian’s Katharine Gammon. Then, on March 18, water flooded the property, and the family only had time to grab some clothes and documents before leaving their house. “We have to start over from the bottom,” Javier De La Cruz, an assistant manager at Foster Farms, tells the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Gauthier and Melissa Gomez.ĭe La Cruz lived on a ranch in the lake basin with his partner and seven children, and there, he helped care for more than a million chickens, per the publication. But the lake’s return-which was welcomed with a ceremony from tribal members-also means devastation for some local families. Fish have populated its waters, and birds have flocked to its shores. The lake now stretches about 111,000 acres, just a fraction of its historical size of nearly 512,000 acres (800 square miles), and it’s currently five to seven feet deep. Everything that we lived off of was offered to us by this lake.” “This lake-this is who we are,” Robert Jeff, the vice chairman of the tribe, tells NPR. Now, they live a few miles away on a reservation called the Santa Rosa Rancheria. The Tachi Yokut tribe once relied on the lake for food, shelter and as a trade route, reports Soreath Hok for NPR. ![]() But in the 1800s, settlers drained the lake for farmland and forced the Tachi Yokut tribe, who lived on its shores, out of the area. ![]() Located in the lowlands of the San Joaquin Valley in central California, Tulare Lake was once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. Experts estimate the water will remain for at least a year before it evaporates. The waters have inundated the long-dry basin of Tulare Lake, submerging hundreds of acres of cotton, tomato and pistachio fields, as well as homes, roads and power infrastructure, writes Dani Anguiano for the Guardian, causing hundreds of millions in damages. A dormant lake in California has refilled for the first time in decades, after a series of intense storms and meltwater from record snowfall flooded the state. ![]()
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