Testosterone Replacement Therapy in Lemoore, CA

LEMOORE, Calif. (AP) — Ron Caetano is packed and ready to go. His family photos and valuables are in the trailer and he’s put food in carry totes. He moved the rabbits and chickens and their automatic feeders to higher ground.

He and his family and dogs could get out in less than an hour, they figure, should more heavy rain or hot weather melt so much mountain snow that gushing water overwhelms the rivers and channel that surround their tight-knit, rural Central California community and give it its name, the Island District.

“The water is coming this way,” said Caetano, who started a Facebook group to help organize his neighbors. “I am preparing for the worst and praying for the best and that’s all we can do.”

After more than a dozen atmospheric rivers dumped epic rain and snowfall on California, a reservoir that stores water upstream is expected to receive three times its capacity in the coming months. Caetano and his neighbors in the tree-lined Island District, home to a school, pistachio orchards and horse ranches about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, could soon be marooned by rising rivers or flooded out.

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Water managers are concerned that the spring snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada will be so massive that the north fork of the Kings River won’t be able to contain it and carry it toward the Pacific Ocean. Much of the water also is being channeled into the river’s south fork, which winds through the area near the small city of Lemoore to fill a vast basin.

More than a century ago, that basin was an enormous body of freshwater known as Tulare Lake, the largest west of the Mississippi River. It would grow in winter as snowmelt streamed down from the mountains. But over time, settlers dammed and diverted waterways to irrigate crops, and the lake went dry. Now, Tulare Lake reappears only during the rainiest years, like this one, covering what is now a vast swath of farmland with water.

Today, paved roads vanish beneath the lake’s lapping waves and utility poles and trees jut out above the water, vestiges of land-living put on hold. Fields that typically grow wheat, tomatoes, and other crops lie underneath.

David Merritt, general manager for the Kings River Conservation District, said the Pine Flat Reservoir about 50 miles (80 kilometers) upstream can hold up to 1 million acre feet of water, but is expected to receive more than 3 million acre feet this spring from the melting snow. Officials have been forced to increase the flow of water out of the reservoir to make space for more, Merritt said.

“Once we’re at capacity, now you’re putting a lot of stress on those conveyance channels,” Merritt said. “It’s a very fast moving stream and it’s very deep right now.”

Island District residents have revived a decades-old network of neighbors for the first time since 1983 to assist each other in the event of a crisis. The last time the Island Property Protection Association activated, there was no such thing as text messages or even emails to quickly spread the word, said Tony Oliveira, a former county supervisor and the network’s administrator.

In a week, more than 200 people volunteered to help neighbors through the network, and the group’s website received more than 4,000 hits.

“It’s going to be four months of holding our breath,” Oliveira said.

The winter rains were welcomed by California’s parched cities and desperate growers, who have been grappling with intense drought for the past several years. The state has long tended toward wet and dry periods, but scientists at University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography have said they expect climate change will lead to drier dry years and wetter wet years.

What will determine how communities fare now is how quickly the weather heats up. If temperatures remain cool, snow will melt slowly, with water gradually flowing from the mountains. But a hot spell could send massive amounts of water churning through rivers that could potentially overflow, officials said. A beaver or a squirrel that tears a hole in a levee could also bring trouble.

Rising temperatures this week have many residents on edge. Park officials announced plans to temporarily close part of Yosemite National Park starting Friday due to the threat of flooding. Reservations for campgrounds and lodging in eastern Yosemite Valley will automatically be canceled and refunded.

Michael Anderson, California’s state climatologist, said water inflows into some reservoirs are expected to double though he doesn’t expect the warming trend to cause immediate flooding in residential areas.

But in the coming weeks and months that could change. Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the reemerged lake Tuesday and said the worst is likely yet to come as more water reaches the basin.

“Where we’re standing likely will be underwater in a matter of weeks, if not months,” he said. “That’s very sobering.”

It isn’t the first time Kings County, home to 150,000 people in the fertile San Joaquin Valley, has faced these challenges.

Many longtime residents recall when Tulare Lake reappeared 40 years ago. Officials believe crops will remain under water much longer this time due to the massive snowpack, said Dusty Ference, executive director of the Kings County Farm Bureau. To date, more than 60,000 acres of farmland (242 square kilometers) have flooded, he said.

It also returned on a smaller scale in 1997, said Nicholas Pinter, associate director of the University of California, Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. He said the lake has always fluctuated in size due to California’s highly-variable water cycle, and farmers have long known there would be periods like this.

“It has been an engineering problem all along,” he said. “This is a bathtub with no drain.”

Near the lake, the city of Corcoran, which is home to 22,000 people including 8,000 state prisoners, began emergency construction to raise a levee that protects the community. The water behind the levee is already at 178 feet (54 meters), just 10 feet (3 meters) below the top. Officials want to raise the levee another 3.5 feet (1 meter), city officials said.

“If that water rises above that amount, we will have water coming into our city and we will be in a critical situation,” said Greg Gatzka, Corcoran’s city manager.

In the Island District, residents don’t have a levee to protect them. They snap photos of wooden sticks placed near waterways to gauge water levels and banks and post them online to keep others informed. They’re helping place sandbags on elderly neighbors’ property and paying close attention to reports from water and county officials, and from each other.

Oliveira, whose family has lived in the area for generations, said he remembers moving cattle and horses when the rains came in 1983, and will do the same this time, if necessary.

“We’re farmers. We have bulldozers and backhoes, we have trailers. We can bring things to bear sometimes faster than the public agencies can,” Oliveira said. “The people who live in the Island are just kind of those neighbors taking care of neighbors.”

___

Taxin reported from Orange County, California.

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The tub runneth over.

Only a handful of the world’s finest surfers remain, currently, in Western Australia twiddling thumbs and anticipating the final day of the Margaret River Pro. Yes, that window is nearly shut with Filipe Toledo, Barron Mamiya, Gabriel Medina and Griffin Colapinto waiting to see which amongst them will be crowned a king. Carissa Moore, Caroline Marks, Tyler Wright and Bronte Macaulay waiting to see which amongst them will be crowned a queen.

The rest of the championship tour, those who did not get chopped and/or did get chopped but also received a bonus wildcard from the World Surf League, are likely home packing their bags for the upcoming Surf Ranch Pro which doesn’t kick off until the end of May but the excitement is impossible to contain.

Oh, who am I kidding. Everyone hates that event. The surfers hate it, the fans hate it and, apparently, nature hates it too for Lemoore, Surf Ranch’s home, is predicted to be underwater by the time the World Surf League rolls into town.

Yes, a historically wet winter has left California’s lakes full, its rivers running over and its mountains covered in snow. As the weather warms, that snow will melt and flood the Central Valley.

Per the Associate Press:

Water managers are concerned that the spring snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada will be so massive that the north fork of the Kings River won’t be able to contain it and carry it toward the Pacific Ocean. Much of the water also is being channeled into the river’s south fork, which winds through the area near the small city of Lemoore to fill a vast basin.

Residents are packing trailers and ready to flee, farmers worried as the long dormant Lake Tulare has reemerged.

Governor Gavin Newsom is so stressed that not even the Liberty Farms pekin duck pressé with buttered popcorn grits, sunny side up quail egg, crispy cipollini onion and pimentón jus from The French Laundry can cheer him up.

But how do you think nervous locals will feel when Erik Logan, Jessi Miley-Dyer and gang show up all giggly and goofy?

Moreover, what will the threat of disaster do to already slashed ticket prices?

THE MOMENTUM IS REAL.

People have worked for a century to make California’s Tulare Basin into a food grower’s paradise. That pastoral landscape now looks more like the Pacific Ocean in many areas.

Months of atmospheric river storms have pummeled the area and saturated the basin’s soil, which sits about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, not far from Fresno. The rains have led to floods that damaged towns and deluged farms and have begun to refill what was once a sprawling lake.

The floods have pitted neighboring property owners against one another and raised tensions over how to manage the flows, which have damaged hundreds of structures. And more water is on the way.

Heavy rain in California easing historic drought

March 17, 202301:27

Experts say a monthslong, slow-burning crisis will play out next: A historic snowpack looms in the mountains above the basin — as it melts, it is likely to put downstream communities through months of torment. The flooding, which follows several years of extreme drought, showcases the weather whiplash typical of California, which vacillates between too wet and too dry. The influence of climate change can make the state’s extremes more intense.

“This is a slowly unfolding natural disaster,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California. “There’s no way to handle it with the existing infrastructure.”

The re-forming Tulare Lake — which was drained for farming a century ago — could remain on the landscape for years, disrupting growers in a region that produces a significant proportion of the nation’s supply of almonds, pistachios, milk and fruit. High-stakes decisions over where that water travels could resonate across the country’s grocery store shelves.

In the farming communities that dot the historic lake bed, accusations of sabotaged levees, frantic efforts to patch breached banks and feuds — common occurrences during flood fights in the area — have started already, said Matt Hurley, a former water manager for several water districts in the Tulare Basin.

In the nearby town of Allensworth last month, a dispute over a culvert caused anxiety and friction with the railroad that sends trains through town. Residents worked into the night to plug a culvert — a drain under Highway 43 — with plywood and sandbags in a desperate effort to keep floodwater out of town.

But later that night, workers with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad unblocked the pipe, which left some Allensworth residents fuming as water flowed closer.

The residents had used BNSF materials without permission, said Lena Kent, a railroad spokesperson. Damming the culvert threatened the highway — the only access point to Allensworth at the time — and the rail tracks that run parallel to it.

Stress levels could remain high for months.

“The problem this year is it’s just begun. We may have water running at or near our flood level — in all of our streams, through August or September,” Hurley said. “This impending monster — a 50-foot-plus deep snowpack that we haven’t seen in 75 years — is sitting up there, and we just don’t know how fast it’s going to turn into water and come out of the mountains.”

The Tulare Basin is at the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley — and in essence, it’s a massive bowl. Before irrigators dug canals and rerouted water for farming in the late 1800s, Tulare Lake filled the bowl’s lower reaches. Shallow water stretched across the landscape, and the lake was the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.

Several rivers — Kings, Tule, Kern and Kaweah — historically dead-ended at the lake and replenished its water levels every spring, but farmers have diverted and rerouted so much water that the lake bed is now usually dry. It’s among the most fertile farmland in the country.

Today, the irrigation system is designed to “use every single drop of water” that flows into the basin, Mount said.

In fact, through aggressive groundwater pumping, farmers collectively use more water than what would flow to the lake every year. Pumping has caused the land to sink dramatically — it has subsided in parts of the San Joaquin Valley by as much as 28 feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey — deepening the bowl.

This season, far more water is flowing than can be used.

For about two weeks, farmers and emergency workers have been scrambling to plug levees and prevent the worst as the ground became saturated and rivers swelled after a seemingly endless series of atmospheric river storms battered California.

The flooding has breached dozens of levees, forced rescues, swamped construction sites at California’s high-speed rail project and seeped into several communities, including Allensworth, a historic community that in 1908 was one of the first settlements west of the Mississippi to be founded and governed by Black Americans.

“What you’re seeing now more than anything else is traditional flood problems,” Mount said. “All of that water is making its way into the bottom of the bowl and starting to fill the bowl.”

What could come next is more unusual — and worrisome.

The Sierra Nevada mountains, above the Tulare Basin, are storing two to three times as much water as snowpack as is normal. If the snow melts quickly, it will send floodwater churning toward the lake bottom.

Tulare Lake refilled in 1997 and 1983 during very wet seasons. The snowpack is larger this year.

“If we use 1983 as an example: They had more than 80,000 acres of land underwater. If it’s bigger than that, it could be as much as 100,000 acres underwater,” Mount said.

Tulare County ranked second in the country for agricultural market value, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture. The region produces almonds, oranges, pistachios, wine grapes, milk and cheese.

“This has a ripple effect on the nation’s food supply,” Mount said.

California officials have geared up for a long fight against flooding. Nearly 700 people were assigned to help with the emergency response just in Tulare County, where floodwater has damaged more than 900 structures so far.

But sandbags and helicopter-delivered super sacks — bulk bags filled with rocks and other material — can do only so much.

“At some point, you know, we do realize that there’s too much water, there’s more water in the Sierra than these facilities can handle,” Karla Nemeth, the director of the California Department of Water Resources, said at a recent media briefing. The agency will do the best it could to help mitigate damages, Nemeth said.

Once water makes it to the historic lake bed, there will be few options to remove it, other than to wait for it to evaporate or to try to move it through canals and pump it away.

Pumps are expensive and inefficient over such sprawling terrain. Differing levels of subsidence along the lake bed have changed the geometry of canals, which could complicate efforts to move water away.

In 1983, remnants of Tulare Lake remained on the landscape for about two years, Mount said. Hurley estimated that if it floods again, the expense required to return the landscape to growing crops would be in the billions.

The flooding could also spell disaster for farmworkers and those who live in the rural communities that dot the Tulare Basin.

“This is a low-income community. People are not out here stocking up food. They go paycheck to paycheck in a lot of cases,” said Kayode Kadara, of Allensworth, a community organizer. “All we’ve heard so far is with this unprecedented snowfall, what we’ve seen so far is a baby flood.”

For now, the best everyone can hope for is a cool summer — with a steady, manageable melt — and as much cooperation as they can muster.

CORRECTION (April 12, 2023, 1:04 p.m. ET): A photo caption in a previous version of this article misspelled the last name of a man standing on a flooded farm road. He is Mark Grewal, not Grewel.

Evan Bush

Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at Evan.Bush@nbcuni.com.

Readers, This is my last Looking Back column, but Looking Back will continue thanks to Donna Galletti, who will be putting together the column for your and her enjoyment. I know that I am looking forward to reading her discoveries. Thank you for all of the positive comments that I have heard about the column over the years.

30 Years Ago

Fresno State’s football program gained its freedom Tuesday night in Anaheim in more ways than one. Not only did the Bulldogs humble favored Southern California 24-7 in the Freedom Bowl but Fresno also gained its freedom from all those critics who said the Bulldogs couldn’t play Division 1 football. For Lemoore High School’s Lorenzo Neal, Tuesday’s win was the culmination of a brilliant football career that saw him win a pair of Big West championships, one Western Athletic Conference championship, a California Bowl, and finally a Freedom Bowl. Neal capped his Fresno State career by earning the game’s Most Valuable Player award.

A motorist (photo shown above caption) attempted to skirt instant lakes that formed earlier this week at the intersection of Hanford-Armona Road and Hwy. 41. This was a common sight all around the San Joaquin Valley with measurable rainfall throughout the area and snow in the mountains. The rainfall at Lemoore Naval Air Station over the last 28 hours, as of noon Wednesday, was .31 inches. For the month (Dec. 1992) the rainfall total is 1.83, while the figure since the first of July is 3.05. Although there has been a great deal of flooding in low areas. In recent days, the Central Valley is still a long way from the end of a drought that has lingered for six years.

Recycling of Christmas trees got under way this week in Lemoore according to Dave Wlaschin, public works director. Wlaschin said recycling began on Wednesday and will continue as long as necessary. The recycling will be handled in two ways, Wlaschin said. On some days the shredder will be used as trees are picked up. If the number of trees become excessive, trees will be picked up on trucks and hauled to a central location to be shredded. Residents should remove all decorations, ornaments, stands, and nails from the trees and place them by the side of the street. For residents of apartment complexes, trees should be piled next to the dumpster.

35 Years Ago

For the next month Lemoore watercolorist Sallie Marcellus will be trying to paint the winter splendor of Yosemite National Park. But Sallie isn’t a tourist making day trips. She’s living within the park as part of Yosemite’s second annual Artist in Residence program. In exchange for being provided with a cabin to live in during the winter, Sallie and the other Artist in Residence each will give one of their paintings to the park.

Upper grade classroom Students of the Month at Meadow Lane School for December are Vicki Finn, Aaron Duty, Ramona Ide, Ron Mitchell, Melissa Jasmanka, Chris Kelly, and Felicia Lizardo.

Lemoore High football standout Lorenzo Neal received yet another honor this week for his prowess on the gridiron: selection to the 80-man all-Northern California football team.

45 Years Ago

And didn’t it rain! Kings County residents greeted the holiday storm with glee, thankfulness, and a glimmering of hope as rain fell settling whatever dust was left from the “fallout” of the Bakersfield area dust storm last week. That storm had deposited between 200 and 250 pounds of silt per acre in Kings County according to the U.S. Conservation estimate and the following rainstorms brought welcome water in the third year of drought.

The new year will bring many changes to the Lemoore area, one of the more important, the opening of the Save Mart store in the Pioneer Square at 18^th and Hanford-Armona Road, shortly after the first of 1978.

70 Years Ago

Business education students of Lemoore High School under the direction of Francis Albrecht, instructor, were busy at work on their speed tests in shorthand recently. The first to obtain pins this year were Leona Buyense, Reba Fletcher, Doris Avila, and Delores Silva.

Lemoore and Stratford residents in responding with 176 pints of blood to the visit of the Red Cross Mobile Blood Bank in this city last week set a new record for Kings County, previously held by Hanford, with 138 pints donated.

Residents in Lemoore, California, a rural Central California community known as the Island District, fear spring snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada Mountains could bring gushing waters to the region, overwhelming the rivers, channel and basin that surrounds the community.

The area is situated about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco and is filled with pistachio orchards, horse farms, a school and a community of roughly 25,000 residents.

The drought-stricken region recently experienced over a dozen atmospheric rivers that brought excessive rainfall and fierce winds, filling reservoirs. But now there is concern that the melting snow will bring more water to an upstream reservoir that could fill it three times over its capacity, the Associated Press reported.

CALIFORNIA SEES 12TH ATMOSPHERIC RIVER EVENT WITH MORE SNOW ON THE WAY

"The water is coming this way," Ron Caetano told the news wire. Caetano started a community Facebook group for the Island District that keeps a pulse on the impending weather and deteriorating conditions. "I am preparing for the worst and praying for the best and that’s all we can do."

According to the AP’s report, water managers are the north fork of the Kings River does not have the capacity to contain snowmelt from the Sierra Nevadas and give it a carved route to the Pacific Ocean.

(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Additionally, water from the river is moving into the south fork, which is the channel that winds near Lemoore, toward a basin.

NEW EVACUATIONS ORDERED NEAR CALIFORNIA TOWNS WHERE LEVEE BROKE

Over 100 years ago, the basin was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, called Tulare Lake. Historically, the lake would grow in the winter from snowmelt, though settlers and farmers diverted the waters to their crops and created dams, leading to the lake running dry.

The only time the lake appears these days is when the region experiences torrential rains like it has over the past few months. The residual rain waters now cover swaths of farmland, paved roads and show signs of what is beneath through utility poles and trees that poke up out of the water.

The general manager of the Kings River Conservation District told the AP that a reservoir located about 50 miles upstream called the Pine Flat Reservoir, has a capacity of 1 million feet of water. But once the snow melts this spring, the reservoir is expected to receive over 3 million acre feet of water.

The anticipation of added waters has forced officials to make space for more water by way of increasing the flow of water out of the reservoir. It has also put downstream communities on alert.

SOCAL MOUNTAIN COMMUNITIES STILL CLEARING SNOW FROM RARE BLIZZARD, OTHERS TRAPPED WEEKS LATER

In the Island District, residents brought back a system last used in 1983, of neighbors helping neighbors during a crisis. This time, cellphone technology can help spread the word a little more quickly.

Over 200 residents signed up to help their neighbors if waters take over the community.

Scientists with San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California expect climate change will lead to drier drought years and wetter wet years, though how communities will fare during these times greatly depends on how fast the weather heats up.

A gradual warming with cooler temperatures remaining low longer would mean the snow will melt slower and not overwhelm the rivers.

A hot spell could melt snow much faster and send enormous amounts of water through the rivers and potentially cause them to overflow.

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Unlike areas like Corcoran, which are protected by a levee, the Island District is without such protections. Instead, they are using cell phones and social media to share photos of wooden sticks near waterways to keep everyone informed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.