Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

But as an example of government subsidizing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, nothing would quite equal its performance thirty-five years later in the Tulare Lake floods of 1983. During the El Niño winter of 1983, when the eastern Pacific’s resident bulge of high pressure migrated to Australia and the storm door was left open for months, much of California got double or triple its normal precipitation. The previous year hadn’t been much different. By the early spring of 1983, all four Corps of Engineers dams were dumping hundreds of thousands of acre-feet over their spillways as the largest snowpack in the annals of official California weather records melted. Because the farmlands in what used to be Tulare Lake were now protected by dikes, most of the water couldn’t enter its old basin and had to go elsewhere. When the floodwaters began encroaching on nearby towns, the Corps of Engineers spent $2.7 million in emergency funds to erect levees around them. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, except that 80,000 acres of old lake bottom—land that could have absorbed the floods—remained dry; one need only have breached one of the levees that had since been built around the ex-lake. But the Tulare Lake Irrigation District, dominated by Salyer and Boswell, wouldn’t have that, so the growers convinced the Corps to spend taxpayers’ money on levees in order that their land, the natural catch basin for the floods, could remain in subsidized production.