Homes beneath California‘s crumbling Oroville Dam lay abandoned on Tuesday as their owners took shelter in evacuation centers where they may remain for weeks.
They were forced to flee on Sunday when two spillways on the 49-year-old dam failed. Erosion caused a huge hole in the first, the main spillway, putting all of the strain on a never before used emergency spillway. Backed only by weak rocks and soil, it buckled as water overwhelmed it at a rate of 94,254 gallons per second.
The combined result is that water is making its way down into the Feather River at a frightening speed and entire communities are at risk of becoming totally submerged if more water, brought by rainfall, causes Lake Oroville to rise again.
Emergency services are now frantically trying to drain it as a pair of storms forecast for Wednesday and Friday threaten to set back their make-shift repairs.
Some 200,000 residents of Butte, Sutter and Yuba have been displaced in the meantime, taking refuge in make-shift shelters where they could remain for weeks before it is safe for them to return. They fled on Sunday evening when authorities were finally forced to issue an emergency evacuation order after days of claiming the situation was safe.
Residents have since told of their hurried escape, describing the scene of entire communities fleeing in their packed up cars as ‘pure chaos’.
‘Everyone was running around. It was pure chaos.
‘All of the streets were immediately packed with cars, people in my neighborhood grabbing what they could and running out the door and leaving,’ Maggie Cabral told KFSN.
The emergency situation has been in developing for a week and began last Tuesday when officials were forced to acknowledge a gaping hole in the main spillway.
They halted water flow on the spillway to investigate the damage but said at the time there was no immediate threat to the public.
The emergency spillway, which had never before been used, was then put to work but soon buckled under the pressure. Because it was backed only by land and soil, authorities were forced to admit that it would likely fail and evacuated the area suddenly on Sunday afternoon.
The sudden order after days of of public assurances that the situation was safe created pandemonium in the town of Oroville and others surrounding the dam.
Some already had their bags packed and hit the road immediately but others were left to scramble after being told for days that they were in no danger.
On Monday it was revealed officials were warned about the main spillway’s fragility 12 years ago but ignored concerns.
Environmental groups predicted that the main spillway could erode under heavy rainfall and flagged their fears to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2003, requesting updates and improvements to the dam spillways.
The improvements were never made because water agencies which would have had to pay for them deemed them unnecessary. Infrastructure improvements earmarked across the state in January this year didn’t include the Oroville Dam either.
The $100billion list was made by the governor’s office and included plans for the Folsom Dam but made no mention of Oriville.
On October 17, 2006, three environmental groups – the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League – filed a motion with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) urging the government to fully reinforce the dam’s emergency spillways with concrete, according to The Mercury News.
In the face of heavy rainfall, the groups said, the earthen spillways might begin to collapse and erode, leading to the river downhill being inundated with water – as happened over the weekend.
Worse, they said, there was a serious risk of ‘loss of crest control’ – that is, the lip of the dam might fail, resulting in a massive and dangerous surge that would ’cause damages and threaten lives in the protected floodplain downstream’.
But the Department of Water Resources, and the agencies in the line to foot the bill – told the FERC that the spillways could handle 350,000 cubic feet of water per second and there was no danger.
‘The emergency spillway meets FERC’s engineering guidelines for an emergency spillway,’ wrote John Onderdonk, a senior civil engineer with FERC, in 2006. ‘The guidelines specify that during a rare flood event, it is acceptable for the emergency spillway to sustain significant damage.’
Despite that, the weekend saw the earthen spillways being eroded with flows of just 6,000-12,000 cubic feet per second – less than five percent of FERC’s supposed safe rate.
State officials said in 2008 no ‘significant concerns’ about the spillway’s integrity had been raised in any government or independent review.
Also on Monday, it emerged that California Governor Jerry Brown had overlooked the Oroville Dam in the $100 billion list of ‘key’ infrastructure projects filed this month.
The list, generated at the request of the National Governor’s Association after Donald Trump called for $1 trillion of infrastructure investment, is a ‘wish list’ of projects for Brown, CNBC reported.
But while the list mentions the Folsom Dam, some 60 miles south of Oroville, as well as flood control in Sacramento, 66 miles away, there is no mention of Oroville Dam itself.
Instead, most of the suggested upgrades in the three-page document are related to transportation, such as highways, bridges and railroads.
Projects to reduce flooding risk in Marysville, 30 miles south of Orosville – and which is in danger of flooding if the dam breaks – are mentioned, as are other levee and dam plans.
All are placed below a proposed high-speed rail track between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the list – although the governor’s office says that the order of the list does not represent how important the projects are.
It added that the list was ‘an initial list of projects. By no means does it represent all of the state’s priorities.’
Brown later said that he was not aware of the 2006 report or the concerns raised about the dam.
As waters that had been ejected from the dam into the Feather River over the weekend drowned riverside parks and inundated Marysville cemetery, some as 30 miles away, schools in the area closed and people fled the potential disaster zone.
And President Trump was left deciding whether to declare a disaster in the state, opening up access to federal funding after Brown sent him a letter on Monday asking for financial aid.
Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris asked the President on Monday to provide the $162.3 million in disaster assistance that California has requested.
No confirmation has yet arrived, and California’s defiant attitude towards the President might not count in its favor, CBS San Francisco reported. Trump has yet to publicly speak on the possible catastrophe.
Meanwhile, state superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson told administrators in the district that they could apply for aid for the periods that they were shut down.
He said schools should not suffer ‘for putting the safety of our students first based on these unprecedented flood dangers.’
In Butte County, where the Oroville Dam is located, 13 of 15 school districts were closed. The county has about 31,000 total public school students.
California appears to have been particularly caught off guard by the recent rainfall, which has seen flooding in the north of the state, near where Oroville is located, and heavy storms in the south.
That’s because it has been in a state of so-called ‘permanent drought’ for five years – a drought that only ended with rain and snowfall in December.
That rainfall continues to hit the state in waves – and so concerns remain high about the short-term prospects for the dam.
Despite the wet weather, however, the state has extended its water bands until May, although those bans continue to vary from area to area.
In other news, residents were evacuated from Tyler Island – around 40 miles south of Oroville Dam – on Monday after authorities said a levee was in danger of breaking. The incident was unrelated to the Oroville problem, The Mercury News reported.
Residents are not the only ones who have fled the region.
Billy Croyle, acting chief of the Department of Water Resources, ordered his staff to leave the dam area on Sunday.
They joined tens of thousands of panicked residents who took to the freeways at the weekend, causing total gridlock on the roads and sending anxiety levels soaring as they wondered if the dam would burst while they were sat in their cars.
‘Everyone was running around; it was pure chaos,’ Oroville resident Maggie Cabral told CNN affiliate KFSN on Sunday.
‘All of the streets were immediately packed with cars, people in my neighborhood grabbing what they could and running out the door and leaving. I mean, even here in Chico, there’s just traffic everywhere.’
On Monday, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said the evacuation below the nation’s tallest dam will not end right away.
He added that they are working on a plan to allow residents to return home when it’s safe – but offered no timetable for when they would be allowed to go home. It was later said residents would have to wait until spillway repairs were completed.
He added that so far there have been zero reports of looting in any of the evacuated towns.
Honea also said more than 500 Butte County jail inmates were safely transferred to Alameda County Jail farther south.
And as officials rushed to release water from the dam and fix the spillway, the empty abandoned cities resembled ghost towns after the forced evacuations.
However, while the situation seemed less dire by Monday morning, it is still critical and the evacuees were told they could not return to their homes because the coming storm might still destroy part of the dam.
Meteorologists are predicting the rain to begin on Wednesday night, dumping up to four inches by Thursday morning with more to drain from the mountains during the day.
On Monday, emergency crews prepared loads of rock to be dropped by helicopters to seal the crumbling spillway that threatens to inundate communities along the Feather River in Northern California.
Local crews were seen in dump trucks dropping off piles of rock, which were then loaded into the bags with backhoes. The operation to close the gap would begin as soon as it was feasible, authorities said.
The crisis suddenly and dramatically began on Sunday afternoon when the Department of Water Resource said the spillway next to the dam was ‘predicted to fail within the next hour’.
However, it has remained intact.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4221808/Officials-warned-Oroville-Dam-12-years-ago.html#ixzz4Yg3aAi90
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