PLANADA, Calif. >> It’s been nearly a year since Erica Lopez Bedolla and her children fled their home as dangerous floodwaters rose around them, washing through neighborhood houses, drowning family pets and rendering much of her town of 4,000 uninhabitable.

The Lopez family is back home now, albeit living amid a construction zone, showering at a neighbor’s house and having anxiety attacks at the thought of rain. Up and down the streets of their close-knit community, where more than 80% of residents experienced losses in the floods, the story is the same: houses in various states of disrepair and residents trying to go about their lives without basic comforts such as hot water, drywall or insulation.

The flooding that ravaged Planada, a farm town in eastern Merced County, was a stark example in a broader pattern that played out across California during the epic rains of 2023: Atmospheric rivers pounded areas rich and poor with equal ferocity, but poor rural communities, often unincorporated, sustained crippling, widespread damage and bore the lasting brunt. Planada flooded in January after a creek near town burst its banks. Pajaro, a farmworker community of about 3,000 residents in Monterey County, flooded in March after a levee failed. In Tulare County, levee breaks and overwhelmed irrigation channels caused flooding in and around farm towns including Allensworth, Cutler and Alpaugh.

In many of these places, inadequate maintenance or lagging improvements by local districts, counties and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made flooding worse. In Planada, for example, it had been more than a decade since brush had been cleared from Miles Creek. In Pajaro, state and federal officials had known the levee protecting the town from the Pajaro River was at risk for failure but had not prioritized improvements because Army Corps models determined the cost-benefit ratio did not pencil out. In Tulare County, Allensworth saw water cascading toward town after someone cut a levee in the dead of night, presumably to divert the floodwaters from cropland.

After the storms blew through, many of these communities struggled to access aid because they are unincorporated and suffer from a long history of disinvestment. Many of their residents are undocumented, making them ineligible for federal assistance.

In California, as elsewhere in the U.S., such communities are at heightened risk for flooding. According to research published in September in the journal Earth’s Future, poor communities are more likely than affluent ones to be located behind levees and their levees are often substandard.

The challenges in California are amplified, said study author Farshid Vahedifard, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University, because so many of the state’s thousands of miles of levees were built by farmers, settlers and small irrigation districts and there is little data on their vulnerabilities in a flood.

“It’s not surprising,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine. “The underinvestment of physical infrastructure in these communities has been going on for decades.”

And, experts said, it’s likely to get a lot worse. Many of the state’s levees are deteriorating. Climate change is predicted to lead to more extreme swings in weather — so-called hydroclimate whiplash. As these forces converge, Méndez said, communities like these will be “first and hardest hit. They are physically vulnerable and socially vulnerable.”

State officials say they are aware of the problem. Karla Nemeth, director of the Department of Water Resources, said her agency is “working with communities on the front line of climate change who are often rural, underserved communities” by awarding grants for flood planning and levee maintenance. Agency officials noted they were in the final stages of planning improvements for the Pajaro River levee when the devastating March breaks occurred.

In response to the recent floods, state officials awarded $40 million in direct aid to Planada and Pajaro last summer, an effort to compensate for the fact that so many residents in those towns were ineligible for federal aid because of their immigration status.

Though grateful for the help, residents note they still don’t have the money. It took the state until October to get the checks to the local level and county officials have been debating how to spend the funds.

Merced County Supervisor Rodrigo Espinosa, who said he has spent much of the year trying to force his county to respond to the January disaster and prepare for the next one, put it bluntly: “Planada is not a priority.”

John McCorry’s family has been farming land in eastern Merced County beneath the peaks of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1800s, when William J. McCorry came from Ireland, toiled briefly in Northern California silver mines and then got work as a ranch hand near Merced. In the 1880s, he started buying land just east of what is now the community of Planada and eventually amassed more than 1,000 acres. McCorry and his son farm it now, and recently planted acres of pistachios that march across the former rangeland in sharp rows, like lines of soldiers.

Because of this long family history and a life tied to the seasons and their weather, McCorry grasps something that many people in California do not: For all the time and resources California has invested in manipulating the flow of water across the state, flood control is inherently local.

California’s water — which courses down from the mountains and into rivers that stretch across the Central Valley toward the ocean — is among the most heavily engineered in the nation. Over the last 150 years, the state and federal governments have built a complex network of aqueducts, pipelines and pumping plants that deliver water from the north state to crops and thirsty communities in Central and Southern California. The government has erected giant dams on most of the state’s great rivers, including the Sacramento, the American and the San Joaquin. Thousands of miles of levees crisscross the valley floor, holding water back or redirecting it where farmers need it.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter how big or strong the earthworks of the state and federal government are: If the rain pounds with enough force and a nearby irrigation ditch or culvert fails, the water will come.

For that reason, McCorry keeps a sharp eye on Miles Creek, which flows out of the Sierra Nevada and across the valley floor, intersecting with a channel maintained by a local irrigation district near the eastern edge of his farm.

The district took care of brush clearance in the creek and for a time typically came out to clear it every few years, McCorry said. But then it stopped — around the time municipal finances got hollowed out by the Great Recession. As the rains pounded through California in late December and early January, McCorry estimated it had been about 15 years since anyone had come to clear out the overgrown brush and stubby trees from the creek bed. And as storm after storm rolled in, McCorry and other residents grew more nervous.

Their pleas to clear the brush fell on deaf ears. It turned out Merced County’s permit with the state for stream clearance had lapsed, and without a permit, the county couldn’t legally clear the creek or hire anyone else to do it, McCorry and others said.

On the night of Jan. 9, the worst happened: The creek backed up amid torrential rains and blew out its banks in several places.

Water exploded across McCorry’s pistachio orchards — just a few weeks after he had made the decision not to buy crop insurance. As the creek continued to surge, another section blew out, a few hundreds yards southeast.

Eventually, all that water poured into Planada, rushing into town in the dark, surrounding people’s homes, rising up in their yards, eventually seeping in under door frames and window sills.

Hundreds of families looked up from their TVs, their dinner preparations, their reading of children’s bedtime stories and perceived that their homes were flooding.

The county alert system failed to notify them, and so, as sheriff’s deputies went door to door trying to reach as many people as they could, people helped one another escape. By morning, according to a study from researchers at UC Merced, more than half the community’s homes were damaged. Many residents were displaced for months.

“Everything is lost,” said Anastacio Rosales, 70, who was in Mexico visiting his wife when the floodwaters surged. He rushed back to find his home destroyed.

For McCorry, the damage didn’t become fully clear until after the flood, when it became apparent how many of his pistachio trees had suffocated and were now sick or dead. He estimated his crop losses at about $250,000 this year, on top of the cost of replanting and reduced production in years to come, which could top $3 million.

Two months after Planada flooded and 100 miles west, a similar dynamic played out along the Pajaro River, which forms a border between Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. Amid pounding storms, the river burst its levee, inundating Pajaro and trapping scores of residents.

Distributed by Tribune News Service.