"Why were two prisons built in a lakebed in the first place?"
"Macio Lindsey, who is incarcerated at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility (SATF) in Corcoran, California, was watching the news last March when he first heard about the flooding. He could only gather “bits and pieces” about what was happening, he says. One news segment mentioned “broken levees.” Another made it clear that the water surrounding the prison was steadily rising. When his wife and daughter tried to make their regular drive to Corcoran to visit him, they faced road closures and detours. “I was definitely concerned,” Lindsey says.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) made no attempt to calm inmates’ fears, Lindsey says. In the event of a natural disaster, incarcerated people like Lindsey have no control over when or how to respond. At the time of the flooding, Lindsey heard a rumor from another inmate that they might be evacuated and transferred to a vacated prison facility in the nearby town of Tracy, but he didn’t know what to believe. Lindsey worried that, during an evacuation, he and others might have to leave their personal possessions behind: photos of family members who have passed away, legal documents, and other items that are irreplaceable.
Inside the prisons and the nearby city, the flooding incited panic. But for the local Indigenous tribe, the Tachi Yokut, who live along the edge of the water, the flooding, which led to the reemergence of Tulare Lake, was something to celebrate—it marked the return of a long-lost ecosystem and way of life.
The Tulare Lake Basin had been mostly dry for the past 150 years, ever since white settlers diverted the rivers that naturally flowed into the lake. But last spring, after a particularly long and wet winter in the Sierra Nevada, snowmelt rushed toward the lake basin. For the first time in decades, the lake refilled. Water sloshed against the 14-mile dirt levee that surrounds the city of Corcoran and two state prisons, where Lindsey and 8,000 other incarcerated people are housed. Thousands of acres of farmland flooded, as the typically dusty, dry landscape transformed into a vast sea."
Claire Greenburger reports for Sierra magazine July 17, 2024.
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