Fears grow as floodwaters threaten to drown this California city and prison complex

CORCORAN, Calif. — Just west of this normally dusty prison town, a civic nightmare is unfolding: Tulare Lake, a body of water that did not exist just two months ago, now stretches to the horizon — a vast, murky sea in which the tops of telephone poles can be seen stretching eerily into the distance.

Anxious residents in this Central Valley city of 22,000 know all too well that the only thing keeping this growing lake from inundating their homes and businesses — as well as one of the state’s largest and most crowded prison complexes — is a 14.5-mile-long dirt levee that rises up from sodden earth to the west, south and east.

And that levee, according to city officials and local farmers, could be in big trouble.

They worry that this nondescript earthwork may be too low to hold back the millions of gallons of melted snow that are expected to course into the Tulare Lake