Drive on Shephard Avenue in northeast Clovis, near Harlan Ranch and you’ll see a tall earthen berm on the north side of the road. It’s perfectly flat and stretches for nearly three and a half miles. It has an interesting story – one tied to the City of Fresno’s unusual geography and a natural disaster that struck nearly 90 years ago – that’s our story today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
Fresno was founded by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1872 at a site known as the Sinks of Dry Creek. It’s where several creeks that originate in the foothills north and east of Clovis converge. They include Big Dry Creek, Fancher Creek, and Redbank Creek. But instead of draining to either the San Joaquin or Kings Rivers, these streams collect their waters, where they spread out over the sandy soil near downtown.
Early on, this left Fresno susceptible to flooding. Many of those natural creeks were eventually transformed into canals, or the canals were fed by them. In March 1938 – record rain sent the Herndon Canal over its banks, flooding the Fig Garden neighborhood. As a result, in 1948, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a reservoir north of Clovis to hold the waters of Big Dry Creek.
It was expended in the 1990s and can now hold up to 30,000 acre feet of water. Most of the time it is dry, but it is designed to keep Fresno safe, even in a 230-year flood event. It’s this levee that you see today on Shephard Avenue in Clovis.
