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It rained through most of the night in the Oroville area. A storm passed over and is currently dumping rain in the foothills and mountains to the east of the lake. It's a warm storm and can be expected to trigger some snow melt and runoff. As of 5 a.m. the reservoir level stood at 870 feet, 30 feet below the lip of the emergency berm. Inflow from the storm should begin late today and max out over the weekend. It remains to be seen whether this will cause the lake to rise dangerously as releases continue at the maximum....

The 2009 stimulus package funded millions of dollars for safety improvements for a dam in California that was in “good shape,” but not to the Oroville Dam that is now on the verge of a spillway crisis. Nearly 200,000 residents north of Sacramento were ordered to evacuate after fears that erosion would cause the emergency spillway to fail, which would lead to “catastrophic flooding“ from a 30-foot wall of water. Despite more than a decade of warnings about Oroville, there is no public record of the country’s tallest dam receiving any of the more than $34 billion from the American...

ROMNEY/RYAN 44479 48.87% OBAMA/BIDEN 42669 46.88%

An Orange Coast College student who secretly videotaped his instructor making anti-Trump statements was suspended from school and told to write a letter of apology as well as a three-page essay about the incident. The college suspended Caleb O’Neil for the current semester and the summer term, saying he violated a Coast Community College District policy prohibiting recording someone on district property without that person’s consent. “It is my hope that this experience will lead you to truly think through your actions and the consequences of those actions when making decisions in the future,” Victoria Lugo, interim dean of students,...

Oroville Crews worked into the night Wednesday to shore up the emergency spillway at troubled Oroville Dam, racing to fortify the structure before the next series of storms, the first of which was forecast to hit before midnight. Three storm systems will move into Northern California during the next six days, according to the National Weather Service. The first system will drop about an inch of rain in the Oroville area between 10 p.m. Wednesday and 4 p.m. Thursday. Greater amounts of precipitation will fall in the mountains northeast of the reservoir. Forecasters are confident that the first two storm...

A student at an Orange County, California community college has been suspended after he recorded one of his professors telling her class the election of Donald Trump was an “act of terrorism.” From the LA Times: In a Feb. 9 letter, Victoria Lugo, interim dean of students at the Costa Mesa college, informed Caleb O’Neil of the suspension for one “primary (fall/spring) semester in addition to the summer” and other disciplinary actions against him, including that he submit a written apology to the professor, Olga Perez Stable Cox, and a three-page essay asking him to examine why he filmed Cox’s class,...

Oakland schools partnered with the environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) to fight global warming by making student lunches climate-friendly. FOE gave kids a lunch menu designed to eliminate foods it says are “unsustainable for our planet.” The new menu features far less meat and more plant-based food. Any meat or cheese the school did use came from “pastured, organic dairy cows.” The student’s lunch menu went from beef hot dogs and pepperoni pizza to vegan stir fry tofu and vegan tostadas. The new FOE-approved menu served meat and cheese-less frequently and reduced the portion sizes. “This is a...

Photo series with detailed explanations.

"It's just hardwired into us and our religion," Harsimran Singh aid. "Anytime someone needs help, we need to be there." Members of the Sikh faith are inviting the 188,000 evacuees who were forced to leave their homes because of the damaged Oroville Dam emergency spillway to come to their temples for a nice vegetarian meal and a rest on the floor of their prayer halls. Yuba City and Sacramento — both about an hour's drive from Oroville — are central migration spots for Sikhs in California, most of whom originally hailed from Punjab, India. Several temples in the surrounding Northern...

Staunton was trying to exit through the front door of Rohrabacher’s office to visit a restroom when, according to Rohrabacher, a protester yanked the door open, causing her to fall and hit her head. The door also pushed over a 2-year-old child who was apparently brought along with the crowd, but she was not injured, the congressmen said. Staunton, who has managed Rohrabacher’s office since his first term in 1989, was treated by paramedics and taken to a local hospital, Rohrabacher said. ... “I am outraged beyond words that protesters who mobbed my Huntington Beach office violently knocked down my...

President Donald Trump approved federal emergency relief funds Tuesday, following requests by California Governor Jerry Brown. The requests for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid pertain to flooding in January and the evacuation effort due to the risk of spillway collapse at the Oroville Dam. The nearly 200,000 residents downstream of the Oroville Dam — the nation’s highest — were allowed to return home on Wednesday, but weregild by local authorities to remain “vigilant.”

President Trump approved Tuesday disaster relief for California, putting an end to speculation that the bad blood between the White House and Gov. Jerry Brown would jeopardize the state’s plea for emergency aid. The Federal Emergency Management Administration announced that the assistance would be provided “due to the emergency conditions resulting from the potential failure of the emergency spillway at Lake Oroville Dam beginning on February 7, 2017, and continuing.” Mr. Brown, a Democrat who called Mr. Trump a “fraud” during last year’s presidential campaign, made the request for federal help Friday after heavy rainstorms inundated Northern California, flooding creeks,...

President Trump has promised to eliminate regulations and rebuild the nation’s aging infrastructure. Federal agencies are awash with regulations and provisions based on the presumption that government is, and should be, the sole provider of infrastructure. But now that we understand the merits of public-private partnerships, which can provide more accountable public-purpose infrastructure, these numerous regulations and provisions serve as major obstacles preventing the improvement of highways and other infrastructure. Back in 1995, Reason Foundation published a policy study itemizing a number of these regulatory barriers. Sadly, most of them still exist today. If a state or municipal facility has...

BIG SUR, Calif. — Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge in Big Sur is starting to fail. According to CalTrans an active slide has been taking place on the mountainside under the bridge since Saturday. The slide is moving one of two column holding the bridge up and cracks are visible at the top of the post. "Basically the mountainside that it is sitting on is moving, which, causes the column to move," said Heath Johnston with CalTrans. The problem has the bridge closed to all vehicle traffic and California Highway Patrol is turning people around at Big Sur Station. -snip-

California Governor Prioritizes Illegals Over Infrastructure that Supports Citizens According to a report from the Washington Times, California Governor Jerry Brown has been spending $25 billion a year supporting illegal immigrants while neglecting the failing Oroville dam. From The Washington Times: The flood danger from the Oroville Dam receded Monday, but California was hit by a wave of criticism for failing to heed warnings about risks to the spillway at a time when the state spent generously on illegal immigrants and high-speed rail. California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, came under fire amid reports that federal and state officials for...

California was granted emergency funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency Tuesday for both the situation at Lake Oroville and to help with the damage caused by the severe January storms.

A Berkeley middle school teacher who instigated riots at the University of California Berkeley to stop a conservative speaker “by any means necessary” is lecturing America about “hate” speech.Yvette Felarca, a social studies teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss free speech and riots that broke out at UC Berkeley earlier this month at her behest. Felarca, an organizer for the left-wing group “By Any Means Necessary,” called her followers to action February 1 to successfully block conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, sparking rioters to loot the...

Oroville dam, the tallest in the nation, is currently in danger of structural failure. Thousands living downstream from its desperate cascading water releases are evacuating their homes in Hollywood disaster-film fashion. Something premodern and apocalyptic like this was not supposed to have happened in a postmodern California of Google, Hollywood, and Napa Valley wineries. California’s politicians and pundits in recent years of drought swore the state was entering a cycle of permanent drought (and thus saw no need to start construction on a single dam to store the rain and snow that supposedly would not return). Instead, they warned of...

The Oroville Dam — at 770 feet, America’s tallest — is on the verge of failing. And Sacramento, which has been fiddling for decades while Rome burns, is running for cover. This isn’t just any dam; it’s the primary storage facility located on the Feather River for the State Water Project, the state-owned conveyance system that provides drinking water to more than two-thirds of California’s population. If the dam were to fail, it could inundate not only the city of Oroville but numerous other communities downstream, including Yuba City, Marysville and even West Sacramento. At the moment, the emergency spillway...

Five separate videos shot by CA DWR as the emergency spillway becomes active (overtops) at 8:a.m. on Saturday morning through Sunday p.m., and work on Monday to drop rock to fill the erosion channels. Most videos are from drones and the relationship of the spillway to the main spillway on the right (direction southeast) and the parking lot on the left (direction northwest) can be easily seen. It appears that the fear of failure of the emergency spillway was two-fold with erosion moving back up to the narrow base of the spillway and possibly undercutting the concrete spillway, and the...