Heavy rain, flooding near Fresno wreaks havoc on humans, cows. ‘It’s been a trying year.’ | Opinion

“My family has been yelling at me from all over the world,” Chappell said a couple hours before leaving her home outside Minkler. “I tell everybody, ‘When it gets up to the geraniums, I’m out.’”

Water from the Kings River, engorged from several inches of rain that pelted Central California’s record-setting snowpack, never quite made it to the geraniums next to Chappell’s elevated back deck. Only to the rosemary, which grows a few feet closer to the bank.

Still, with her long-haul trucker husband two time zones away and news-watching relatives from Florida worried for her safety, Chappell decided to seek refuge at her sister-in-law’s in Fresno.

“Growing up I told myself that I wouldn’t be one of those stupid people standing on their car, or on the roof of their house, or getting burned up, because I couldn’t leave my stuff behind,” she told me.

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After Chappell furnished me these incredible quotes, I helped her squelch a neighborhood rumor: The water encroaching upon their homes didn’t come from Pine Flat Lake. The culprit is Mill Creek, which caused flooding, road closures and evacuations along Highway 180 and in Wonder Valley before spilling into the Lower Kings about 0.5 miles below the dam across from Choinumni Park.

Here’s how nuts things got: At 8 p.m. Thursday, Mill Creek flows were measured at 200 cubic feet per second. (Since one basketball approximates a cubic foot, visualize 200 basketballs rushing past you in a second.) At 8 a.m. Friday, after rain soaked the foothills, flows were 18,266 cfs.

From 200 cfs to 18,266 cfs in the span of 12 hours! That’s a lot of basketballs … err, uncontrolled water.

The actual number might’ve been higher — I saw reports of 24,000 cfs for Mill Creek — but the Army Corps of Engineers stream gauge doesn’t give an hourly measurement for 9 or 10 a.m. (So high it exceeded the gauge?) By 11, it was “down” to 16,956 cfs and continued to recede throughout the day.

While Mill Creek flooded homes and roads, operators of Pine Flat Dam cut releases into the Lower Kings to barely a trickle (below 100 cfs) after “making room” earlier in the week.

Good thing they did. With water pouring into Pine Flat Lake from the Upper Kings, the snake-like 1 million-acre reservoir rose almost 15 feet in one day. Peak inflows registered above 40,000 cfs for seven straight hours.

Undammed Sierra rivers flood towns

All of which is a fancy way of saying there’s a lot of moving water out there. More than Central California and the southern Sierra have seen in quite some time. When all this is over, the winter of 2022-23 might go down in history alongside 1982-83. Even surpass it.

Friday’s most dramatic images came from places like Kernville, Springville and Three Rivers. Each are towns with undammed Sierra rivers (Kern, Tule and Kaweah) as neighbors. Dams on those rivers are downstream of the towns. When the worst-case flood scenario comes true, there’s no way to stop it.

Fresno hasn’t seen a major flood since 1938, before Friant Dam was erected on the San Joaquin River or Pine Flat on the Kings. Often overlooked and underappreciated are flood control investments on foothill creeks managed by the Fresno Metropolitan Flood Control District.

Most people don’t know about Big Dry Creek Reservoir. You can drive right by on Shepherd Avenue and not realize it’s there. Clovis and north Fresno residents should be thankful it is. Driving back to town on Highway 168, the amount of water headed toward the reservoir on the swollen creek from the vicinity of Tollhouse and Prather is staggering. No wonder managers have been spilling so much water into the San Joaquin River near Ball Ranch.

A cow in distress from swollen creek

Midmorning Friday I headed north on Auberry Road, a road I’ve driven and ridden my bike on hundreds of times. It didn’t take long to see something new: a cow standing on an island.

For most of the year, Little Dry Creek is more dry than creek. Right now it’s large and wet. After pulling over at the Fresno Rifle and Pistol Club turnout, I stepped out into the rain and spotted a black cow occupying a small rise with moving water on both sides.

I held up my iPhone and took a couple photos of the cow. It didn’t look happy.

Just then, a cattle truck pulled in about 20 yards away and out stepped three people wearing galoshes. I walked over to make conversation and as we stood talking, one of them started pointing excitedly at the creek and shouting.

I turned to look and saw a cow — the same one from the island — trying to cross while getting jostled downstream by the current. After a few anxious moments where it looked like she might get swept away, the cow managed to gain the opposite bank and rejoin the rest of the herd.

This particular cow didn’t belong to Rodney Thur, who owns a cattle and livestock ranch between Fresno and Kerman. He recognized it as one owned by a neighbor. The cows and calves graze the hillside between the gun range and Clovis’ waste management site.

Thur has already lost two cows this winter (one to a suspected drowning, the other to the cold), and the rest are skinnier than usual.

“The weather’s hard on them when it’s wet and cold like this,” Thur said. “It’s been a trying year.”

For cows and humans alike. And we might not be through it.