'Frustrated' and 'confused': Army Corps dam releases sent farmers scrambling

By Caleb Hampton

Local water managers in Tulare County may have prevented a disaster last week. 

On the afternoon of Thursday, Jan. 30, an announcement by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that it was set to immediately begin dumping water from dams at Lake Kaweah east of Visalia and Lake Success near Porterville sent farmers downstream scrambling to prevent floods. 

“It was a scary moment,” said Tom Barcellos, president of the Lower Tule River Irrigation District, who owns a dairy and grows pistachios and other crops in Tulare County.

The Army Corps told local water authorities the dams would release water into the Kaweah and Tule rivers at “channel capacity,” the maximum flows allowed in the rivers. 

Alexandra Biering, a water policy expert and director of policy advocacy for the California Farm Bureau, said she had never seen anything like it. “There is a huge danger to the downstream public,” Biering said of making unscheduled releases of that magnitude. 

“The communities and the cities typically could flood with that much flow,” said Dave Van Groningen, who grows walnuts and other tree crops near Visalia.

The dams, which hold runoff from the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, usually release water in the winter only when flood control space is needed in the reservoirs. And the releases are coordinated days or weeks in advance with local officials and water managers. But it has been a dry winter in the southern Sierra, posing little risk of flooding, and water managers said they were given only an hour’s notice before the dams would be thrown wide open.   

“That’s going to put people in a panic a little bit,” said Blake Wilbur, a dairy farmer who grows forage and tree crops west of Tulare. 

“The window was just way too short,” Barcellos said. 

Cities need time to warn homeless people to clear the channels, he said. And irrigation districts need to remove debris and pull out boards that divert water from canals into irrigation ditches. 

“With all the checks and blocks in place, if you turn that much water into the river at once, it’s going to blow out the banks,” Barcellos said. “That could flood surrounding farmland. It could flood the little groups of rural houses that are along the banks.” 

Irrigation district staff prepared to work through the night removing the irrigation blocks. Barcellos, who owns an excavator company, worked alongside his operators Thursday stationing heavy equipment at critical sites along the Tule River, “just in case debris came down and created any problems,” he said. “It was all hands on deck from every facet that you can imagine.”

Meanwhile, water managers were working the phones trying to get someone to intervene.   

“A lot of folks were talking with Washington, D.C.,” Aaron Fukuda, general manager of Tulare Irrigation District, said in an email. “We don’t know who actually was called to get the release dialed back.”

Eventually, the evening of Jan. 30, the Army Corps agreed to delay the releases until the following morning and to scale them back to less than a third of channel capacity. 

“Farmers in Tulare County are really fortunate that they have exceptional local water managers who were able to advocate for themselves,” Biering said. Had they not managed to get the releases dialed back, she said, “it would have been potentially quite disastrous.”

According to federal data, from Friday, Jan. 31, through Sunday, Feb. 2, the dams released around 6,700 acre feet of water, lowering water levels by about 2% in each reservoir.  

The water has stopped gushing, but farmers, water managers and elected representatives continue to seek answers about why it was released. 

“Everybody is very confused,” Wilbur said. “We’re all kind of picking up the pieces, trying to figure it out.”

President Donald Trump has appeared to take credit for the decision and to celebrate the Army Corps’ releases. On Jan. 31, Trump posted on social media a “photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California.”

The Army Corps did not respond this week to questions from Ag Alert® about what was achieved by releasing water from Lake Kaweah and Lake Success. Last week, Gene Pawlik, a spokesperson at the Corps’ Washington, D.C., headquarters, said in an email to the news site SJV Water, which first reported the incident, that the water was released to help fight wildfires. 

During the past month, as fires raged in Los Angeles and reports emerged that fire hydrants in the city ran dry, Trump blamed the tragedy on California’s “disastrous” management of its water resources, conflating issues related to urban water systems with environmental rules that have prevented more water from being pumped through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms in the San Joaquin Valley. 

In his first days in office, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to override state policies and rescind endangered species protections to provide more water to farms and cities, repeatedly urging state leaders to “turn on” the water. 

“Consistent with the direction in the Executive Order on Emergency Measures to Provide Water Resources in California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Success Lake to ensure California has water available to respond to the wildfires,” Pawlik said in his email, which was provided to Ag Alert®. By then, the fires were almost entirely contained.

During a press briefing Monday in the Oval Office, Trump said he sent Richard Grenell, his envoy for special missions, to “turn on the water” in California. “We turned it on,” the president said, apparently referring to the dam releases in Tulare County. “It was on three days ago. You probably saw.” Later in the briefing, Trump said, “It’s a great thing. It’s too bad they didn’t do it themselves. I had to do it, and it was not easy. We did it in a very rough way.”

The water released from the dams did not go to Los Angeles. Lake Kaweah and Lake Success hold snowmelt that is owned by San Joaquin Valley farmers and stored in the reservoirs during winter so that it can be used for irrigation in the summer. 

In the winter, “we need as much water at the top of the hill as we can possibly keep there,” Wilbur said.

Barcellos estimated the water the Army Corps drained from the reservoirs may cost farmers a couple days of summer irrigation. “That sounds like it isn’t much, but it’s enough,” he said, referring to the intense demand for water in dry years in the San Joaquin Valley. 

“Everybody is in sync in frustration,” Van Groningen said. 

Much of the water released by the Army Corps was diverted into basins managed by irrigation districts to replenish the region’s aquifers, with some farmers also taking water for on-farm groundwater recharge and for minimal winter irrigation needs. “It was all used efficiently,” Barcellos said. “However, we would have preferred to have had it in June or July.”

Farmers said the episode did not diminish their appreciation for the president’s stance on California water issues. “He understands that we need more water,” Van Groningen said, referring to Trump’s support for pumping more water through the delta to supply farms. Going forward, he added, “There has to be a little more education or reliance on local people here.”

(Caleb Hampton is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. He may be contacted at champton@cfbf.com.)