Shocking Images Of $1 BILLION Friant-Kern Canal CRACKING

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]The billion-dollar fix for California's most important irrigation canal is already broken and they are desperately trying to figure out what to do.

[00:00:09]Bureau of Reclamation Regional Director Karl Stock told reporters that 250 cubic feet per second of restored capacity had already been lost.

[00:00:21]A quarter of the promised flow gone.

[00:00:25]Eaten by the dirt under their feet on the day of the ceremony.

[00:00:29]The new canal is now sinking at 1 foot per year, the same speed as the old one.

[00:00:35]But here is the detail that tells the real story.

[00:00:38]The concrete is not failing. The concrete is intact. The earth is just walking away from underneath it 1 inch every month while 15,000 farms downstream pump harder to make up for the water the canal can no longer carry, which is precisely what is making the ground sink in the first place.

[00:00:57]The fix has no end state and no one told you phase two will cost $730 million more.

[00:01:04]This is the Friant-Kern Canal.

[00:01:07]152 miles of concrete arterial running south from Friant Dam near Fresno down the east side of the Central Valley all the way to Bakersfield. It crosses four counties: Fresno, Tulare, Kings, and Kern.

[00:01:22]It feeds roughly 2 million people and irrigates more than a million acres of almonds, pistachios, oranges, dairy pasture, and processing tomatoes.

[00:01:32]Fresno County is the number one agricultural county in the United States. $9 billion of food last year alone depends in part on the water this canal carries.

[00:01:42]The canal cannot carry it anymore.

[00:01:45]The numbers are brutal. The original 1951 design moved 5,000 cubic feet per second at the head end and 4,000 at the Deer Creek Check.

[00:01:54]By 2021, the worst pinch point had collapsed to 1,600, a 60% loss in conveyance.

[00:02:01]60% >> [music] >> In a single 33-mile stretch known as the middle reach, the ground had dropped 12 feet below the original grade.

[00:02:09]>> [music] >> The canal was designed to fall 6 inches per mile. Subsidence destroyed the gradient. Water stopped flowing where gravity needed it to.

[00:02:17]So the Bureau of Reclamation and the Friant Water Authority did the obvious thing.

[00:02:22]They built a parallel canal, >> [music] >> 10 miles of new concrete raised back up to design elevation parallel to the worst sunk section.

[00:02:31]$326 million.

[00:02:35]Three years of construction. Even before the ribbon-cutting in March 2023, an atmospheric river breached the construction zone at Deer Creek while concrete was being poured.

[00:02:47]Workers stared at concrete forms torn open.

[00:02:50]The fix was already failing during construction.

[00:02:54]And then it kept failing.

[00:02:56]On February 16th, 2024, 4 months before the ribbon-cutting, the Friant Water Authority and the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District filed suit in Tulare County Superior Court. Their own court filings, signed by Friant Chief Operating Officer Johnny Amaral, stated that the new construction zone had already subsided more than 1.8 feet since the 2021 cost-share agreement was signed.

[00:03:20]>> [music] >> That was Amaral's exact phrase.

[00:03:23]Land beneath the newly rebuilt section is collapsing faster than anticipated, about 1 foot a year, the same speed it was sinking before the fix.

[00:03:33]Picture what that means in the field.

[00:03:35]A Friant Water Authority engineer walks the bank of the new 10-mile section with a survey rod and a piece of chalk.

[00:03:43]Station 412 + 50 -0.31 feet from June grade. Station 420 -0.58 feet from June grade.

[00:03:52]Station 425 -0.71 feet from June grade.

[00:03:58]Three months in.

[00:03:59]The concrete is intact. The earth is sinking.

[00:04:03]Why is the earth moving? Here is the doom loop and it tightens every year.

[00:04:09]Step one.

[00:04:10]The canal loses capacity.

[00:04:13]Friant Water Authority Chief Executive Officer Jason Phillips estimates 100,000 to 300,000 acre-feet of water are not being delivered every year because of subsidence. Step two. Farmers downstream still need that water. 15,000 farms, permanent crops in the ground, almond trees, pistachio orchards. You cannot turn them off for a season. So they pump 100,000 to 300,000 acre-feet of groundwater pulled out from beneath their own fields.

[00:04:45]Step three. The aquifer compacts.

[00:04:49]The clay layers, the Corcoran clay, named for the town in Kings County, squeeze together as the water leaves.

[00:04:56]The surface drops.

[00:04:58]United States Geological Survey hydrologist Michelle Sneed, who has led 25 years of subsidence research at the California Water Science Center, has documented Central Valley groundwater levels more than 100 feet below previous historical lows.

[00:05:14]New cones of depression, new zones of accelerated sinking in places engineers had not even modeled.

[00:05:21]Step four. The land that drops is the land the canal sits on. So the canal sinks more and it carries less and farmers pump more and the canal sinks more.

[00:05:34]Phillips said it himself on the record, 100,000 to 300,000 acre-feet of water is not being delivered, which means 100,000 to 300,000 acre-feet more is being pumped out of the ground every year and that is making the subsidence problem worse. Step five. There is no exit. The contractor and the saboteur are the same person. The farmer who irrigates from the canal also pumps the groundwater that sinks the canal.

[00:06:02]Now zoom out and look at what was supposed to stop this.

[00:06:06]In 2014, California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act known as SGMA.

[00:06:13]21 critically overdrafted basins were identified. Each basin was required to file a groundwater sustainability plan.

[00:06:20]The State Department of Water Resources reviewed every plan.

[00:06:24]As of late 2025, the department had formally rejected the plans of seven of the most critical Central Valley subbasins: Tulare Lake, Tule, Kern County, Kaweah, Chowchilla, Delta-Mendota, and Pleasant Valley.

[00:06:40]The agency directly responsible for stopping the pumping in the zone where phase one is sinking is called the Eastern Tule Groundwater Sustainability Agency.

[00:06:49]In 2021, Eastern Tule committed $200 million toward the canal repair.

[00:06:54]By early 2024, it had paid $16 million.

[00:06:59]On March 26th, 2026, in a closed-session settlement, Eastern Tule was effectively dismantled. It was stripped of its right to issue groundwater allocations for water year 2026.

[00:07:11]The regulator collapsed before it could regulate.

[00:07:15]And the impact does not stop at the canal bank.

[00:07:18]Drive an hour west to the town of Corcoran in Kings County, population 22,000. It is also home to the state prison that once held Charles Manson.

[00:07:27]Corcoran has sunk 11 and a half feet in the past 14 years.

[00:07:32]The Cross Creek levee that protects the town from Tulare Lake floods was raised in 2017 and it is already 4 feet shorter than it was on the day they finished raising it.

[00:07:44]They are raising it again. Same physics, same aquifer, same mouth eating the same valley. This is no longer a canal story.

[00:07:53]Near Mendota, the southern San Joaquin Valley has dropped almost 30 feet since the 1920s. It is possibly the largest documented human-caused land subsidence on earth. The Friant-Kern repair is being poured on top of geology already deformed beyond recognition.

[00:08:10]And Tulare Irrigation District General Manager Aaron Fukuda is now deferring a $57 million district-wide infrastructure rehabilitation because every available dollar is being pulled toward the Friant-Kern shortfall.

[00:08:24]He is not fighting the coalition.

[00:08:26]He is being financially broken by his coalition's failing solution.

[00:08:32]So what happens next? No one knows.

[00:08:36]On December 11th, 2024, Representative Adam Gray introduced the Central Valley Water Solutions Act, $730 million for phase two.

[00:08:47]On March 17th, 2026, $200 million more in federal funding was announced.

[00:08:54]The total program is now projected past $1 billion to fix what cost $60.8 million to build in 1951.

[00:09:02]The Friant Water Authority's own Chief Operating Officer has stated under oath that phase one is already sinking a foot a year.

[00:09:10]Will phase two sink the same way? Almost certainly. Will phase three exist?

[00:09:16]The ground keeps moving, so eventually, yes. Will the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act ever get teeth?

[00:09:24]The regulator in the worst zone has just been dismantled, so picture it again.

[00:09:28]Right now, somewhere along 10 miles of fresh concrete near Pixley, California, a survey rod is being lowered onto a brand new bank.

[00:09:37]A chalk mark is being made. The number is going down. The aquifer is compacting. A pump is running.

[00:09:45]An almond tree is drinking.

[00:09:47]A levee is shrinking.

[00:09:49]A town is dropping.

[00:09:52]And the only piece of paper that was supposed to stop any of it is sitting in a settlement file from a closed session signed last March with no enforcement attached.

[00:10:02]The cracks you are seeing in the photos are not the hazard. The cracks are the symptom. The hazard is that the United States has just spent a billion dollars to build a canal on top of a hole that cannot stop deepening.

[00:10:14]And the pumps are still running tonight.