Decision to dump water from Tulare County lakes altered after sending locals into a mad scramble
Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive
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“Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive amounts of water from Kaweah and Success lakes.
Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night.
Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs.
Those levels were last seen, and surpassed, during the 2023 floods, which destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and caused significant damage to infrastructure.
“We were able to get them to back off that,” said Eric Limas, General Manager of the Lower Tule River and Pixley irrigation districts, of the Army Corps. “They’ll still be releasing water sometime tonight, but it will be a smaller amount, which will increase tomorrow.”
Limas and Tulare Irrigation District General Manager Aaron Fukuda were unsure how high releases would ultimately go and for how long but Kaweah has about 27,000 acre feet and Success about 5,000 acre fee that are above levels allowed by the Army Corps during winter.
Water managers will continue working with the Army Corps to limit the amount of water released from the lakes, Fukuda said.
… Rick Brown, chief public affairs officer for the Sacramento office of the Army Corps, would only say that levels in both lakes were “currently in the flood control space.”
He directed further questions to the Army Corps’ headquarters, which did not return an email Thursday asking: Who made the decision to release the water? Why? Why so suddenly? And why weren’t safety personnel notified?
Some people interviewed for this story speculated that the move was political on the part of the new administration, a kind of water “flex,” but declined to elaborate. …”
