By Amy Taxin and Jae C. Hong

The Associated Press

LEMOORE, Calif. — Ron Caetano is packed and ready to go. His family photos and valuables are in the trailer, and he’s put food in totes. He moved the family’s rabbits and chickens and their automatic feeders to higher ground.

Caetano and his family and dogs could get out in less than an hour, they figure, should more heavy rain or hot weather melt so much mountain snow that gushing water overwhelms the rivers and channel that surround their tight-knit, rural Island District community.

“The water is coming this way,” said Caetano, who started a Facebook group to help organize his neighbors. “I am preparing for the worst and praying for the best and that’s all we can do.”

After more than a dozen atmospheric rivers on California, a reservoir that stores water upstream is expected to receive three times its capacity in the coming months. Caetano and his neighbors in the tree-lined Island District, home to a school, pistachio orchards and horse ranches about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, could soon be marooned by rising rivers or flooded out.

Water managers are concerned that the spring snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada will be so massive that the north fork of the Kings River won’t be able to contain it and carry it toward the Pacific Ocean. Much of the water is being channeled into the river’s south fork, which winds through the area near the small city of Lemoore to fill a vast basin.

More than a century ago, that basin was an enormous body of fresh water known as Tulare Lake – the largest west of the Mississippi River. It would grow in winter as snowmelt streamed down from the mountains. But over time, settlers dammed and diverted waterways to irrigate crops, and the lake went dry. Now, Tulare Lake reappears only during the rainiest years, like this one, covering what is now a vast swath of farmland with water.

Today, paved roads sit beneath the lake’s lapping waves, and utility poles and trees jut out above the water. Fields that typically grow wheat, tomatoes and other crops lie underneath.

The Pine Flat Reservoir about 50 miles upstream can hold up to 1 million acre feet of water but is expected to receive more than 3 million acre feet this spring from snowmelt, said David Merritt, general manager of the Kings River Conservation District. Officials have been forced to increase the flow of water out of the reservoir to make space for more, he said.

“Once we’re at capacity, now you’re putting a lot of stress on those conveyance channels,” Merritt said. “It’s a very fast-moving stream and it’s very deep right now.”

Island District residents have revived a decades-old network of neighbors for the first time since 1983 to assist each other in the event of a crisis. The previous time the Island Property Protection Association was activated, there was no such thing as text messages or even emails to quickly spread the word, said Tony Oliveira, a former county supervisor and the network’s administrator.

In a week, more than 200 people, via the network, volunteered to help neighbors. The group’s website received more than 4,000 hits.

“It’s going to be four months of holding our breath,” Oliveira said.

The winter rains were welcomed by California’s parched cities and desperate growers, who have been grappling with intense drought for the past several years. The state has long tended toward wet and dry periods, but scientists at University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography have said they expect climate change will lead to drier dry years and wetter wet years.

What will determine how communities fare now is how quickly the weather heats up. If temperatures remain cool, snow will melt slowly, with water gradually flowing from the mountains. But a hot spell could send massive amounts of water churning through rivers that could potentially overflow, officials said. A beaver or a squirrel that tears a hole in a levee could also bring trouble.

Recent rising temperatures have many residents on edge. Park officials announced plans to  due to the threat of flooding. Reservations for campgrounds and lodging in eastern Yosemite Valley will automatically be canceled and refunded.

Michael Anderson, California’s state climatologist, said water inflows into some reservoirs are expected to double, though he doesn’t expect the warming trend to cause immediate flooding in residential areas.

But that could change in the coming weeks and months. Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the reemerged lake on April 25 and said the worst is likely yet to come as more water reaches the basin.

“Where we’re standing likely will be underwater in a matter of weeks, if not months,” he said. “That’s very sobering.”

It isn’t the first time Kings County, home to 150,000 people in the fertile San Joaquin Valley, has faced these challenges.

Many longtime residents recall when Tulare Lake reappeared 40 years ago. Officials believe crops will remain under water much longer this time due to the massive snowpack, said Dusty Ference, executive director of the Kings County Farm Bureau. To date, more than 60,000 acres of farmland have flooded, he said.

Tulare Lake returned on a smaller scale in 1997, said Nicholas Pinter, associate director of the University of California, Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. The lake has always fluctuated in size due to California’s highly variable water cycle, and farmers have long known there would be periods like this, he said.

“It has been an engineering problem all along,” he said. “This is a bathtub with no drain.”

Near the lake, the city of Corcoran – home to 22,000 people, including 8,000 state prisoners – began emergency construction to raise a levee that protects the community. The water behind the levee is already at 178 feet, just 10 feet below the top. Officials want to raise the levee 3.5 feet more, city officials said.

“If that water rises above that amount, we will have water coming into our city and we will be in a critical situation,” said Greg Gatzka, Corcoran’s city manager.

In the Island District, residents don’t have a levee to protect them. They snap photos of wooden sticks placed near waterways to gauge water levels and banks and post them online to keep others informed. They’re helping place sandbags on elderly neighbors’ properties and paying close attention to reports from water and county officials, and from each other.

Oliveira, whose family has lived in the area for generations, said he remembers moving cattle and horses when the rains came in 1983, and will do the same this time, if necessary.

“We’re farmers,” he said. “We have bulldozers and backhoes. We have trailers. We can bring things to bear sometimes faster than the public agencies can. The people who live in the Island are just kind of those neighbors taking care of neighbors.”

Editor’s note: Taxin reported from Orange County, California.

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By Peter Smith

The Associated Press

PITTSBURGH – The caretakers of the Tree of Life synagogue intend to transform the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history and expand the group’s mission.

Newly released design plans show a revitalized complex housing a sanctuary, a museum, a memorial and a center for fighting antisemitism – unified symbolically and physically with a dramatic skylight running the length of the structure.

Organizers are also planning to launch a Tree of Life nonprofit that would work with the synagogue’s congregation, oversee the building complex and offer education, museum exhibits and programming to counter hatred aimed at Jews and other groups.

The synagogue building – located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, the heart of Jewish Pittsburgh – has been vacant since Oct. 27, 2018. A gunman, who for what prosecutors say was a hate-motivated attack, killed 11 worshipers from Tree of Life and two other congregations – Dor Hadash and New Light – that shared the building.

The new design is by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, whose previous works include Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials and the master plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

Organizers said they don’t have a cost estimate or a timetable yet for the construction project. And many of the interior details, including the design of a memorial, are still being determined.

The organizers are raising funds locally and nationally. They see the announcements as a big stride.

“We’re eager to be back in our spiritual home,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, a survivor of the attack and rabbi of Tree of Life / Or L’Simcha Congregation, as it is formally known.

The plans call for retaining the synagogue’s large, main sanctuary, which wasn’t being used on the day of the attack.

Other parts of the complex, including a separate chapel where most of the killings occurred, would be razed; however, its historic stained-glass windows would be preserved. A new addition – framed by dramatically angled exterior walls, a hallmark of previous Libeskind projects – would incorporate the museum, a memorial to the victims and space for education and other programs.

Unifying the complex – at about 45,000 square feet in all – would be a skylight that spans the entire length of the roof, according to Libeskind’s design. The “Path of Light,” as Libeskind titles it, would begin in the historic sanctuary and widen, ray-like, across the programming area toward a new, more secure entrance.

“The light is not only physical light; it’s also spiritual light,” he said.

Libeskind said he met with congregants and survivors of those killed as he prepared the design. He kept in mind the long history of the congregation – it was founded in 1864 and dedicated its current sanctuary a century later – as well as its present reality.

“The building has to be a response to the needs of the community, but it is also a response after the attacks,” he said. “This is no longer the Tree of Life before the attacks. It’s a different space.”

The attacks targeted “Jews praying in a synagogue,” he said, and the design had to reflect the building’s new purpose.

“It’s also about America; it’s about American democracy,” he added.

Libeskind said the project “means something very deep to me” as the child of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the U.S. with his parents after facing communist-era antisemitism in Poland.

“We were able to be Jews in America,” he recalled. “That was like another promised land. Who would have ever thought America would be a country where Jews would be targeted for being Jews?”

He said his family was helped by the same Jewish refugee-aid organization the alleged gunman ranted against online.

All three congregations targeted in the attacks have since been worshipping at nearby synagogues. While Dor Hadash and New Light plan to stay in their new locations for the foreseeable future, Tree of Life members look forward to returning, Myers said.

“It’s an incredibly beautiful building,” he said. “However, what’s also important is what emanates from that. It provides a foundation for what we want to do.”

Diane Rosenthal, whose brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal were among those slain at Tree of Life, said they “would want this place to be rebuilt in some shape and form.”

The two men, who had intellectual disabilities, were faithful attendees and bonded closely with the congregants, she said.

“This was their home,” she said. “They felt safe there. … I’d like this to be a safe place again.”

Rosenthal is helping plan the memorial. While no designs are under consideration yet, “What we’ve all agreed upon is we want something that is tasteful, that represents the lives we lost there,” she said.

The new nonprofit that will oversee the complex and educational programs will merge with The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, which had already announced plans to move into the renovated complex.

Programming would include exhibits telling the story of past and present manifestations of antisemitism, including the Holocaust and the 2018 attacks, along with programming on ways to counter antisemitism and other identity-based hate.

Barbara Shapira, chair of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, said the 2018 attacks caused her “to want to do something to stand up against these acts of hate that are becoming more prevalent in our world.”

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By Tom Foreman Jr.

The Associated Press

PRINCEVILLE, N.C. – As Carolyn Suggs Bandy exits her hometown’s only restaurant clutching an order of cabbage and hush puppies, she pauses to boast about a place that stakes its claim as the oldest town chartered by Black Americans.

“It is sacred to me,” said Bandy, 65. “We got roots in this town.”

Yet historic Princeville, nearly 140 years old, is one hurricane away from disaster.

The city is on the banks of the Tar River in eastern North Carolina. With an ever-changing climate, future hurricanes are likely to be more intense. And melting glaciers are causing sea levels to rise, making more flooding inevitable.

Princeville’s future rests not only on flood protection but also younger generations choosing to stay. The latest U.S. Census puts the town’s population at 1,254. In 2020, the median income was $33,325.

Gaining new residents will require providing opportunities that make the move worth it, or convincing young families to stay.

Mayor Bobbie Jones, in his second term, is a full-time school principal who lives in Princeville but commutes one hour each way to his job in Hertford County. History compels him – and others – to work for his town’s survival, he said.

“These are sacred grounds,” Jones said. “These are sacred African-American grounds.”

Princeville was incorporated in 1885 by former slaves on swampy, low-lying land. The town grew from a population of 379 in 1880 to 552 at the turn of the century. It had a school, churches and businesses.

The town has endured racism, bigotry and attempts by white neighbors to erase it from existence.

Today, Princeville features single-family homes interspersed with empty homes that have been boarded up and abandoned following the two latest floods. One church sits with its windows covered in plywood.

Commerce focuses on a small strip where a barber shop and a liquor store flank a convenience store where residents can get snack foods, buy lottery tickets and fill their cars with gasoline. A separate building holds the small sit-down restaurant where Bandy got her food.

Princeville is in a bad spot when it comes to hurricanes because of its position on the Tar River. The town lies 124 miles from the Atlantic Ocean at the edge of North Carolina’s Coastal Plain, an area where the biggest threat from tropical weather tends to be rain, not wind. When slow-moving storms come ashore and move inland, drenching rains that can extend far from the core of the storm drain into the rivers and flood towns along the banks.

If not hurricanes, then ocean levels could be a threat, according to a summary of the state’s climate written by North Carolina State University.

Melting glaciers add water to the ocean, and seawater increases in volume when it warms up, the report says.

Attempts to protect the town from floodwaters have been mixed.

In 1967, the Army Corps of Engineers completed an earthen dike along the Tar River’s southern bank. Nearly 3 miles long and up to 49 feet above sea level, the levee surrounds the town on three sides.

For more than 30 years, it held nature at bay. Then, in September 1999, Hurricane Floyd hit.

Swollen by rain, pushed by winds, the river surged over, around and even under the dike, washing homes from their foundations and the dead from their graves.

“When Floyd came, it seemed like the end of the world,” said Navy veteran Alex Noble, 84. “It seemed like you just were turned outdoors. You know, everything was wide open.”

In the spring of 2016, after years of study, the Corps announced plans to try and prevent another disaster. The levee would be extended, roads would be raised, and gates would be installed in culverts to prevent water from passing through the dike.

Just a few months after that announcement, Hurricane Matthew struck, and with it came more devastating flooding.

In response, Congress approved nearly $40 million to better protect the town. The money was appropriated in 2020, but as another hurricane season approaches, nothing has happened.

Despite the delays, Col. Benjamin A. Bennett, commander of the Corps’ Wilmington district, said Princeville is a priority.

“We have a team of engineers every single day and a large part of our district focused on Princeville,” he said. “We are actively tweaking our design and trying to optimize the engineering, and running models to make sure that we protect Princeville without causing problems somewhere else.”

Meanwhile, as Princeville’s population ages, young people ultimately will have to succeed them to keep the town moving forward. And currently it has neither its own industry nor significant commercial outlets.

Luring new business into Princeville will likely involve incentives such as tax breaks – the kind that are offered by state governments seeking to land a major manufacturer.

Housing is also an issue. While some homes are being elevated, other homeowners have accepted buyouts from the North Carolina hazard mitigation grant program.

Despite the many challenges, those who live in Princeville aren’t ready to give up.

Noble, who came to Princeville with his wife in 1963, thinks of the freed slaves who built the town, and what they might say to today’s residents.

“You know, they always said, ‘Don’t give up. Don’t give up,’” he said. “And that’s what we got to do – stick with it. … You know, we didn’t come this far to turn around.”

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By Ted Anthony

The Associated Press

ALLISON PARK, Pa. – Should the hanging from Thailand stay on the living-room wall where it has lived since I was born? Should we lay out the family room as it was when I was 8, when I was 17 or in a completely new configuration? Should we leave my mother’s spice rack on the north wall of the kitchen? What about the spices?

When you live in a house passed down over generations, deep-time design opportunities lurk around every corner. There are so many . And the weight of history can arise and knock you down at the most unexpected moments.

In 2007, we moved into the midcentury modern house that my parents built in 1965 – and that I came home to as a day-old infant in the spring of 1968. It was a split-level, and it showed. Upstairs, my mother’s Scandinavian-design sensibilities ruled, with clean lines and blond wood everywhere. Downstairs, my father’s purview, was cluttered with books and framed stamps and record albums and musical instruments.

When my parents left, they moved to a retirement community with some clothes, some furniture, some files, a television and little else. Behind they left 42 years of accumulated possessions – things collected locally, things gathered during extensive international travels, things we were overjoyed they saved, things everyone agreed should have been thrown out.

It was up to us to add their distinctiveness to our own. But how?

My wife, the one with the finely honed sensibilities, recognized in her kindness that what for her was an act of design was, for me, an encroachment upon good memories. It probably didn’t help that when she did something like move a stack of bowls from one cabinet to another, she might encounter me in the doorway shouting, “YOU’RE DESTROYING MY CHILDHOOD!” I was joking. Sort of.

Eventually, some decorating patterns emerged. Some were deliberate, others either inadvertent or executed quietly to avoid discord.

Existing furniture items were replaced with new ones more congruent with our sense of design, but they stayed in the same places. This occasionally lent locations like the living room the sense of an Ikea design showroom, where the layout was exactly the same as decades ago except that, say, the Kivik had suddenly been replaced by the Vallentuna.

My wife’s increasing proclivity for building industrial-style furniture using stained lumber, metal piping and flanges created an increasingly unified look for the house. But more often than not, many of the items displayed on these new-but-vintage-looking shelves were carefully curated from my parents’ collection. Best of both worlds.

Certain things were sacrosanct. That Thai hanging stayed right where it had been since Lyndon Johnson was president. But the blank wall around it sprouted with our maritally acquired stuff – cabinets from China, a 1940s soda-pop crate from eastern Pennsylvania, a Thai spirit house from our years in Bangkok. The items of a previous generation became centerpieces for the design musings of the next. Similarly, a Chinese throw rug purchased by my parents in 1980 became the perfect accessory for a circular coffee table we got in Thailand – one made by fusing wood to the steel wheel of a massive Thai truck.

I have a patient wife; this much should be said. Someone with as many great ideas as she has about how a house should look is a patient partner indeed when confronted with these emotionally freighted details. But what we have now, 15 years into living here, is something of a design détente.

She (as she has been from the beginning) is accommodating to the sometimes annoying fingers of the past when they reach into present-day discussions about, say, which color of paint to use in the kitchen or what kind of light fixture is best for the upstairs hallway. I, in turn, have learned (not quite from the beginning, alas) to be open to new things.

The result: a home that summons the past without getting lost in it, and the promise that, if something new and innovative is possible, it doesn’t get shot down just because history says so.

My parents are long gone now; our home stands as, among other things, a tribute to them and what they gave us. But I close with an anecdote from the years immediately after 2007, when they moved out and we moved in.

In that time, as our decidedly less minimalist aesthetic started to prevail, my parents would come over for dinner often. We always worried that my mother would blanch at the clutter and the usurpation of her clean lines. Instead, she’d sit by our newly installed “Family History Wall” – a busy concoction that came from our aesthetic, not hers – and invariably express her delight.

“It’s not the same as when we lived here,” she’d say, “but I love it just as much.”

She’d add: “This will always feel like our home, but I love that it’s your house now.”

In trying to blend the sensibilities of multiple generations and the emotions that come with them, that’s about the best outcome I can imagine.

Editor’s note: Ted Anthony, the director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990.

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By Adrian Sainz and Bruce Schreiner

The Associated Press

MAYFIELD, Ky. – Sundays at the Bullock home in rural Kentucky were filled with lasting memories: big family dinners, cornhole, basketball and karaoke.

Those gatherings ended the night of Dec. 10, 2021, when a massive tornado obliterated their Dawson Springs house, trapping Chris Bullock, her 17-year-old son, Stevie, and miniature poodle Dewey under a crumbled brick wall in the basement. Chris’ husband pulled them from the rubble with minor injuries, but the house where the Bullocks lived for 26 years was gone.

“There were things we were never able to find,” Chris Bullock told The Associated Press recently. “Our neighbor’s dryer was in our yard. We found our ketchup, but we couldn’t find our refrigerator.”

Four months after the tornado upended the lives of many Kentuckians, Chris Bullock and hundreds of others are arduously rebuilding their pre-storm existence. Thanks to a vast network of municipal workers, contractors, churches, charities and volunteers, communities like Dawson Springs, Mayfield and Bowling Green are edging toward recovery.

The storm system that spawned the tore through a handful of states. The National Weather Service recorded 41 tornadoes on Dec. 10 and 11, including 16 in Tennessee and eight in Kentucky. Eighty-one people died in Kentucky, state officials said. Thousands found shelter with relatives and friends, or in emergency facilities, hotels and state parks.

In Mayfield, a candle factory, a nursing home and government buildings were destroyed. Homes were ripped from foundations and splintered by fierce winds. Crews worked day and night to clear debris and restore power.

Audible evidence of reconstruction in Mayfield has been difficult to miss: the cracking and crashing of excavators breaking apart wood and glass, the beep-beep-beep of heavy machinery reversing, the popping of roofers’ nail guns.

In an AP interview, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said removing debris and finding temporary housing were early priorities after the tornado. More recently, attention has turned to keeping residents in Kentucky.

“These are towns that have almost been wiped off the map,” Beshear said. “We will continue to be concerned about getting people back on their feet and concerned about not losing the population of these towns.”

Some have moved to more permanent shelter, including travel trailers, the governor said. In Graves County, tiny homes were approved for displaced residents, and several larger homes are being built in Mayfield, emergency management Director Tracy Warner said.

“We really hold the future of Mayfield and Graves County in our hands,” Warner said. “And that is scary, yet exciting.”

Although there’s cause for optimism, progress remains slow in places. In Dawson Springs, where Bullock and her family now live in a camper, the 54-year-old registered nurse said she has seen just a few houses being rebuilt, and some friends say they won’t stay.

Bullock and her husband had paid off their home but didn’t have insurance. A disaster-response charity is helping them build a new house on their property, and Bullock hopes to see a day when their family gatherings resume.

“Sundays were fun days. … I just want to have that again,” she said.

Beshear, a Democrat, said millions of dollars in housing assistance payments from a state relief fund are being distributed. Approximately $64 million in federal assistance has been approved for storm victims in Kentucky, with some aid targeting temporary housing, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Recovery will take “a couple of years, but it shouldn’t take any longer,” Beshear said. “There are days that it’s a little more frustrating … but we are going to get this done.”

After the storm, bottled water, diapers and other supplies poured in from across the country. Heartland Church in Paducah became a collection point as volunteers with trucks and trailers made deliveries. The Rev. Marc Glass and volunteers loaded a church outbuilding and a donated warehouse with everything from paper towels to toys.

Herschel Evans, a driver for the American Trucking Associations’ Share the Road program, volunteered to drive a 53-foot-long semitrailer full of supplies from Atlanta to Paducah.

“I don’t have a lot of money, but I’ve got skills,” Evans said. “I’ve got the ability to move that truck around the country.”

Heartland’s relief efforts have shifted to rebuilding, with donated furniture and beds for folks who have found new places to live. But Glass said the church’s community spirit goes further than that.

“We don’t simply care about your physical needs, but we care about you as a whole person,” he said. “We care about your soul.”

In Dawson Springs, charity group God’s Pit Crew is rebuilding Chris Bullock’s home free of charge.

The nonprofit, based in Danville, Virginia, relies on volunteers and donated equipment to rebuild houses after disasters ranging from hurricanes to forest fires, said Chris Chiles, a staff member with the group.

Chiles led a convoy carrying about $1 million worth of heavy machinery, tree removal tools and a shower to Kentucky in January. God’s Pit Crew also brings volunteers who counsel victims.

“There’s more healing that goes on with that than putting a tarp on their roof,” Chiles said. “They can sit with someone and let them know that somebody cares about them.”

Bullock and her husband thought briefly about leaving Dawson Springs or finding an existing home rather than rebuilding on their property, “but we lived in that house for 26 years and we raised five children there.”

“It’s just home,” she said. “It just didn’t feel right to be anywhere else.”

Editor’s note: Schreiner reported from Frankfort, Kentucky.

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