Lake Kaweah by Jason Chung

SJV WATER: Decision to dump water from Tulare County lakes altered after sending locals into a mad scramble

By Lois Henry, SJV Water

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.

“We’re still trying to wrap our minds around the numbers that made this happen,” Fukuda said. “We haven’t received much information from the Army Corps, just very vague answers.”

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.

Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said one of his officers had heard about the pending releases through the grapevine late Thursday afternoon and they were getting conflicting information through the evening.

The Tule River goes through the heart of Porterville and there are a number of agreements about how releases should be made, including notifications to first responders, which is why Porterville didn’t flood in 2023.

Army Corps reservoirs are required to be drawn down every fall to make room for winter storms and later runoff.

But the Army Corps typically works with downstream agricultural users to allow them to keep a bit more water in the lakes to hedge against dry years, such this one is shaping up to be.

Kaweah River Water Master Victor Hernandez said Lake Kaweah’s winter capacity is 12,000 acre feet, but had been allowed to go up to 39,000 acre feet after an aerial snow survey showed the watershed currently only has another 45,000 acre feet in snow cover.

“Even if everything came down at once, it would only be enough to fill the reservoir halfway,” he said. “We were on track with the Corps working with the models and forecasts and doing our planning and then I get a call at 2:15 p.m. telling me they were going to channel capacity.”

Hernandez was floored.

“In 25 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “I was given no explanation at all.”

Before they got word of the Army Corp’s decision to release less water, Hernandez, Fukuda and Limas were planning for the worst.

Hernandez had already notified managers on the old Tulare Lake Bed to expect possible flood water. And Limas and Fukuda had crews ready to work through the night stripping out weirs and channel guides, which were only recently rebuilt after the 2023 floods, to keep the water moving.

“Normally, these kinds of flood releases are done with a lot of notification and coordination,” Fukuda said. “I’ve been doing this 18 years and have never seen something like this.”

The Army Corps also operates Isabella and Pine Flat lakes on the Kern and Kings rivers, respectively.

Kern River Watermaster Art Chianello and Kings River Watermaster Steve Haugen both said they had not received notice of flood releases from Isabella and Pine Flat.

But neither of those lake levels are above their winter allowance, Haugen said.