“California’s Lake Tulare Returns After a Century, Bringing Floods with It”

Just a few months ago, this landscape in California’s Central Valley was parched and filled with pistachio and almond groves.

Today, one of America’s largest lakes is back, after being drained for over a hundred years.

After a historically rainy winter, Lake Tulare has now risen from the dead.

– Surrounded

For Kayode Kadara and the other residents of their hometown of Allensworth, which once again sits on the banks of the Tulare, the return comes as a shock.

– We are completely surrounded by water, Kadara tells The Guardian.

In a region that suffers from frequent droughts and usually begs for rainfall, the arrival of so much water at once is a paradoxical but slow-moving disaster.

Now the local population fears floods, while the authorities bring in sandbags via helicopter and build dams and walls to keep the water masses out.

– Will worsen

Large tracts of farmland are already inundated, and scientists predict the lake could exist for the next two years, continuing to fill up as runoff from a record amount of snow in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains melts.

Daniel Swain is a climate scientist at the University of California (UCLA), and believes that the problem will probably get even worse.

“Unfortunately, the reality is that all of these areas will probably flood eventually this spring, as the flooding will likely continue to worsen,” Swain told a news conference about Tulare.

In Allensworth, residents are taking matters into their own hands. A few weeks ago, when the rivers rose, Kayode Kadara and dozens of others stopped the flow of water through two culverts along Highway 43.

– It works, for now, but the city is still struggling without any solutions in sight, says Kadara.