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So what’s the real situation there?

I’ve heard numbers thrown around that the lake continues to fill at around 40,000 cubic feet per second.

They’re talking about (obviously) turning down the main spillway to under that tomorrow now that they’re under the emergency spillway threshold.

OK. But they still need to keep spilling at 40k... and if it rains more... even more than that.

Just how long are they planning on keeping people evacuated? Until March? What?

I kind of doubt they can drop the lake 30 feet anytime soon with the main spillway looking like that.

There were two hours of very low inflow, and it’s back to about 33,000 now. https://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryF?ORO

Not sure what that was about. Maybe did a little tweaking up-river?

So far as I know, the main spillway is dropping 100k cfps and will continue to do so until the lake is at least 50 feet down. That has the Feather at barely monitor stage where I live. The emergency spillway is no longer being used as the lake has lowered below that level.

So what's the real situation? ‘Hey, we got a hole forming, and it's cutting back towards the face of the emergency spillway, I think this thing's going to go within an hour.’ (45 minutes of discussions later) Evacuate Oroville. About 30 minutes later, Yuba & Sutter counties ordered evacuations of low areas, and then 20 minutes after that, Marysville was ordered to evacuate.

I'm not sure what the plan is at this point. The dam is stabilized at this time. They have a plan to shore up the areas of concern, though the damaged spillway is still an ongoing issue and will likely remain so until July.

Meanwhile, twiddling thumbs in a hotel waiting for more information.