Roads leading out of Oroville, Calif., were jammed with traffic Sunday evening as more than 130,000 people were ordered to evacuate the area due to the possibility of failure of the alternate spillway at Oroville Dam, authorities said.
Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said during a news conference Sunday night that he had no choice but to order the evacuation.
"I didn't have the luxury of waiting to see if all was OK. We need to get people moving quickly and to save lives in case the worst case came to fruition," Honea said.
"This is a very dynamic situation. This is a situation that could change very, very rapidly," he said.
A gaping hole in the spillway for the tallest dam in the United States has grown and California authorities said they expect it will continue eroding as water washes over it but the Oroville Dam and the public are safe. Earlier this week, chunks of concrete flew off the nearly mile-long spillway, creating a 200-foot-long, 30-foot-deep hole. Engineers don't know what caused cave-in that is expected to keep growing until it reaches bedrock. But faced with little choice, the state Department of Water Resources resumed ramping up the outflow from Lake Oroville over the damaged spillway to keep up with all the runoff from torrential rainfall in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Officials said the critical flood-control structure is at 90 percent of its capacity. But the dam is still safe and so are Oroville's 16,000 residents. "The integrity of the dam is not jeopardized in any way because the problem is with the spillway and not the dam," department spokesman Eric See said.
Located about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco, Oroville Lake is one of the largest man-made lakes in California and 770-foot-tall Oroville Dam is the nation's tallest.
Source:
The Sacramento Bee reports that the emergency spillway of Oroville dam on lake Oroville in CA is in danger of imminent collapse. Lake Oroville is the largest drinking water reservoir in the US.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article132332499.html
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday February 13 2017, @06:05AM
I'm particularly glad about things (potentially) stabilizing, because the evacuation has been a mess. Residents were told everything was perfectly safe — then word suddenly went out over Facebook, Twitter, and robocalls that it was expected to collapse within the hour, so roads promptly jammed. Worse, there apparently were no door-to-door warnings of potential danger at any point, so there's probably a lot of elderly/disabled people and pets who will drown if the spillway collapses.
As a side note, I was surprised to see 2-3 other non-urgent stories approved while these submissions sat in the queue for a few hours. (Was it because the submitters didn't use "Breaking News" in their titles...?)
(Score: 3, Informative) by charon on Monday February 13 2017, @06:30AM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 13 2017, @07:29AM
Those early stories didn't mention spillway breakage, thus no breaking news?
(Score: 1) by charon on Monday February 13 2017, @07:46AM
I see you're trying to play gotcha, so ok, you win: you got me to respond. The earlier stories say the spillway (not the dam, mind you) was broken but there was no danger to the residents living downstream. It is right there in the summary. You don't even have to click on the link to see this:
When a County Sheriff ordered an evacuation of over 100,000 people, yes, then it became breaking news.