Tulare Lake - Decline

Decline

In the wake of the United States Civil War, late 19th-century settlers drained the surrounding marshes for early agriculture. The government dammed the Kaweah, Kern, Kings and Tule Rivers upstream in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which turned their headwaters into a system of reservoirs. In the San Joaquin Valley, the state and counties built canals to deliver that water and divert the remaining flows for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses. Tulare Lake was nearly dry by the early 20th century.

Enough water remained so the Alameda Naval Air Station used Tulare Lake as an outlying seaplane base during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Flying boats could land on Tulare Lake when landing conditions were unsafe on San Francisco Bay.

In 1938 and 1955, the lake flooded, which prompted the construction of the Terminus and Success Dams on the Kaweah and Tule Rivers in Tulare County and Pine Flat Dam on the Kings River in Fresno County. The lake bed is now a shallow basin of fertile soil, within the Central Valley of California, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. Farmers have irrigated the area for a century, so soil salination is becoming a concern.

The destruction of the terrestrial wetlands and the lake ecosystem habitats resulted in substantial losses of terrestrial animals; plants; aquatic animals; water plants; and resident and migrating birds. Although now dry, the lake occasionally reappears during floods following unusually high levels of snow melt, as it did in 1997.