Thursday Top of the Scroll: How powerful land barons shaped the epic floods in California’s Central Valley
In most parts of California, and indeed the United States, the idea that the government would largely cede to private companies management of a natural disaster that could decimate multiple towns, displace thousands of farmworkers and wreak destruction across hundreds of square miles would be unfathomable. But that has long been how things operate in the Tulare Lake Basin. Land barons, chief among them J.G. Boswell’s founder, seized control of the basin and its water generations ago and have since managed it with minimal government interference. … The flood-prone Tulare Lake Basin is the one part of the Central Valley that has a special exemption from state-required flood control plans, leaving the area without a clear public strategy for managing floodwaters.
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