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As a conservative I have spent some time trying to envision what the inevitable failure of our government would look like, given that we have borrowed 20 trillion dollars and committed perhaps ten times that amount to "entitlements".

The Oroville Dam situation provides one aspect of this failure. We are dealing with repairs that could have been made ten years earlier at much less expense. Lack of judgement on the part of liberals has resulted in a situation where we must now spend many tens of millions by November or face the distinct possibility of wiping out a fairly large part of the state. Even if we spend the money, the weather may not cooperate by waiting until November or we may fail to get our money's worth for the repair costs.

Either way we are entering an era wherein the government's resources will be very limited at a time when demands on government will be serious and non-negotiable. It is the youth of our nation which will have to pay for these errors. The upside is that this will create a smarter generation with a deep conviction that "there ain't no free lunch".

The entire cost of repairs to Oroville Dam, including the already taken emergency repairs, do not even come close to equaling what the City of Los Angeles pays each year for retired employees. I believe that 2018 is the year that 20% of every dollar spent by LA will go to pay for people who will never work for LA again. 50% of every dollar spent for police or fire will go to pensions.

There is no lack of money in the system, it's just already been embezzled by decades of city employees and politicians who continually told themselves that pension funds will earn more money than they ever have, never repaying any of the losses and assuming some future economic boom will rescue them from this looming issue. That's just one of the major water users from Oroville Dam, and one of the bodies who vetoed extensive maintenance on the spillway that failed.

And while it's complicated, the damaged main spillway never was in danger of failing, a 50 foot tall emergency spillway wall was in danger of toppling due to undercutting from a waterflow of about 20% of the designed operation flow, so it just draped and hit the ground right in front of the spillway skirt. Of course, this was explicitly explained in the dam's operating manual, but the state had just re-declared a drought emergency which called for keeping as much water as possible in Oroville...

A very stupid and nearly deadly plan that was immediately thrown out as soon as sane people arrived and pointed at the manual on how to operate the dam.

The main reason to repair the main spillway is less any fears that a compromising event might happen and much more a case that the bedrock pathways that have been cut into the rock was causing a dramatic increase in sediment being sent downstream, cutting off maximum capacity of the Feather River from 405,000 cfps to only 365,000 - a mark it has reached several times and likely would result in many of the levees downstream of Oroville being topped.

“The Oroville Dam situation provides one aspect of this failure. We are dealing with repairs that could have been made ten years earlier at much less expense. Lack of judgement on the part of liberals has resulted in a situation where we must now spend many tens of millions by November or face the distinct possibility of wiping out a fairly large part of the state. Even if we spend the money, the weather may not cooperate by waiting until November or we may fail to get our money’s worth for the repair costs.”

Exactly.

Hey California, how’s that billion dollar bullet train to nowhere going?