The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking
The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif. , was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. The Cross Creek Levee in Corcoran, Calif. , was rebuilt in 2017 after sinking seven feet since 1983. The levee is now at least twice the size of the previous one. CORCORAN, Calif. In Californias San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimilliondollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp. Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11. 5 feet in some places enough to swallow the entire first floor of a twostory house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastestsinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey. Subsidence is the technical term for the phenomenon the slowmotion deflation of land that occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from deep underground, causing underlyi
|
|