California flooding: Thousands of acres are underwater in California, and the flood could triple in size this summer

Corcoran, California
CNN
 — 

Torrents and torrents of rain have drowned thousands of acres of farmland in California’s Central Valley this winter and resuscitated a lake that vanished decades ago. As far as the eye can see, water stretches to the horizon — across roads, across crop fields, through homes and buildings.

Now, the massive snowpack that piled up on the Sierra Nevada this winter is a dripping time bomb. As it melts, the flood could triple in size by summer, threatening the surrounding communities and costing billions in losses.

“All of the crops are completely flooded and ruined,” resident Martina Sealy said as she held her baby daughter and gazed out across white-capped water, where vast fields of cotton and alfalfa had grown all her life. “It takes a lot of jobs for people. That’s a lot of food that we provide for up and down California and all around the nation. It’s pretty scary.”

Even scarier when you realize the standing water that’s there now is just the beginning of their ordeal.

“This is just from the rain,” Sealy said of the flooded fields. “But when the snow melts, there’s nowhere for it to go besides here.”

Tulare Lake was once the biggest freshwater body west of the Mississippi until farmers consumed so much of the Sierra Nevada runoff that it dried up and, over the decades, the lake bed became crop land.

Water was always a concern here, but mainly because there was never enough. As thirstier crops like almonds and pistachios came into vogue, relentless pumping of groundwater made Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas of the nation, just in time for Tulare Lake to come back from the dead with a vengeance.

“The ground is literally sunk in some places by 10 or 15 feet over the past decade,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “That has literally changed the topography of the historical lakebed. Some places are lower even than they were the last time there was a big flood event.”

Longtime residents, like Sidonio Palmerin, remember how the last great flood in 1983 took two years to dry out while the loss of agricultural work hollowed out Corcoran.

“We lost half our school population and about…