First drought, then flood. Can the West learn to live between extremes?

Storm after storm had battered the state since New Year’s, bringing massive amounts of water and snow. The water made its way to the bottom of the valley, as it always did, flowing through waterways held in by earthen levees that dried out during dry years and became weak, pockmarked with squirrel holes. In some parts of the valley floor, the water was not contained at all. Deanna Jackson, the executive director of the local agency that manages groundwater in the Tulare Lake Hydrologic Region, described the flooding to me as “wandering streams, wild streams,” almost unmanageable streams of water across the landscape. Homes and farms and dairy farms were flooded and people used excavators to hastily build earth dikes around their properties. Some of these, around houses and small dairies, were a few feet high; others, around the country’s largest and wealthiest farms, were towering and miles long. Sometimes these fortifications enraged neighbours, whose land found the water instead. In a valley where powerful interests had long battled for access to water, the arguments now revolved around who would bear the flood.

A few days earlier, a canal wall along a train track just north of Allensworth, visible from Gonzales’ yard, had begun to crumble. A foam of brown rainwater began to spread to the houses. Neighbors grabbed shovels and came running; Gonzales and his son brought the tractors Gonzales usually uses to clear pastures. When they ran out of sandbags, their neighbor Ruben Guerrero, rushing from work at a nearby elementary school to join the emergency response, got an idea: reinforce the canal wall using a roll of plastic sheeting he planned to use for a home painting project. The men eventually forced the water back with a solution that was part berm, part sand burrito. As the tidal wave subsided, they celebrated their victory. But it turned out to be another case of conflict of interest: the railway company that owned the land dismantled their work, saying that by protecting their homes, they had threatened the company’s property. So they patrolled the dike hour after hour, watching the fast and deep flowing water.

Soon after, another warning went through town: Another levee, this one along Deer Creek, had failed. The floodwaters flowed back towards Allensworth. But first, the water rushed into a pistachio grove, where it threatened to uproot trees and drown them in sediment. A video that later went viral captured the farmer’s reaction: he drove two pickup trucks to the top of the embankment, filled their beds with soil to weigh them down, then revved the engines and drove the trucks straight into the flooded breach where the dike wall used to be. (One, fittingly, was a Chevy.) Heavy equipment and helicopterloads of sandbags from Cal Fire completed the job, but rumors circulated as to why the breakup had occurred. Jack Mitchell, the head of the local flood control district, reported that it appeared that a cut had been made with machines. Had someone deliberately cut the levee, endangering Allensworth, not to mention someone else’s farm, to save his own? “I don’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.”

In the city, houses were marked with what at first appeared to be small streamers, but were actually warning tape, placed by a rapid water rescue team, as a preliminary measure to indicate which houses were still occupied: red if a house was empty, yellow if that was not the case. “It’s rare to see red ones,” says Kiara Rendon, an Allensworth resident. Her car was packed with supplies, for herself and the younger siblings she cares for, but she had yet to leave: “A lot of people haven’t evacuated because this is all they have.” A community leader in Allensworth named Denise Kadara told me the same thing. Allensworth was the first city in California to be settled by African Americans. It is named for Colonel Allen Allensworth, who escaped slavery by fleeing behind Union lines and then joined the Navy before going to California. Later it became a home for farm workers and people who could not afford to live elsewhere. Kadara was sure that if the residents had followed the order to evacuate, Allensworth would have been sacrificed to save other places that were considered more valuable.

A few days earlier, Rendon came home to find her sister, five months pregnant and alone with a 3-year-old, shoveling mud as the water rose in the field behind their house. Rendon took me to where a crew from Cal Fire helped the family create a small drainage ditch and where the water finally drained away from their house. Her gaze continued to wander east, where the other legacy of the storms, a record-breaking snowpack, 50 feet high in places, glinted white on the distant mountains. All that water, she knew, would have to find its way to low ground. She didn’t know what would happen then.