San Joaquin Valley farmers dig in for the next battle: An epic Sierra snowmelt

CORCORAN, Calif. — Tom Barcellos has farmed the reclaimed soil of the Tulare Lake Basin for nearly five decades, and he’s rarely witnessed a winter like 2023.

A slew of drenching storms, funneled across the Pacific Ocean as atmospheric rivers, have prompted prolonged flooding in large swaths of the San Joaquin Valley. For the first time in decades, Tulare Lake is reemerging from the valley floor, as rivers swollen with runoff from heavy rains and snow spill down from the Sierra Nevada into the valley, overwhelming canals and levees. The lake’s return has engulfed thousands of acres of cropland, orchards, highways and homes, upending the region’s economy, possibly for years.

And even as blue skies return, the flood-weary farmers have only to look east, to the towering Sierra mantled in historic layers of snow, to know there is worse to come.

Barcellos is awed — and exhausted — by what nature has wrought. But like