there are strange things happening because of the past months of rains flowing to California. Key to this story, is the dry lakebed called Tulare Lake, now the largest freshwater lake West of the Mississippi, and the second-largest freshwater lake entirely in the United States based upon surface area

In town of Allensworth last month, residents worked into the night to plug a culvert — a drain under Highway 43 — with plywood and sandbags in a desperate effort to keep floodwater out of town.

But later that night, workers with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad unblocked the pipe, which let Allensworth flood.

The residents had used BNSF materials without permission, said Lena Kent, a railroad spokesperson. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/long-dormant-lake-reappeared-california-bringing-havoc-rcna75942
 

Tulare Lake was drained for farming a century ago and is at the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley — and in essence, it’s a massive bowl. Before irrigators dug canals and rerouted water for farming in the late 1800s, Tulare Lake filled the bowl’s lower reaches.

In fact, aggressive groundwater pumping has caused the land to sink dramatically — it has subsided in parts of the San Joaquin Valley by as much as 28 feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey — deepening the bowl.

Several rivers — Kings, Tule, Kern and Kaweah — historically dead-ended at the lake and replenished its water levels every spring, but farmers have diverted and rerouted

Allensworth, a historic community that in 1908 was the first settlement west of the Mississippi to be founded and governed by Black Americans.