The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking

A 2021 investigative collaboration with Lois Henry of SJV Water on the causes of tremendous ground subsidence in California’s south valley. We spent time in the prison town of Corcoran, where the land is steadily collapsing under the weight of decades of groundwater extraction. The reporting tracks how intensive agricultural pumping—especially during drought years when surface water deliveries fall short—has compressed the aquifer system, dropping parts of the town by more than 11 feet and reshaping everything from canals to flood zones. The transfers driving this collapse remain difficult to fully account for, with limited data on who is pumping how much and a regulatory system only recently beginning to respond, even as large-scale agriculture continues to depend on the same underground reserves that are causing the ground to sink.

NYTimes