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In Oregon, seven dams have been deemed unsatisfactory - one in Josephine County, another in Curry County. Oregon Water Resources Department and Josephine County Parks say they know the McMullen Dam in Lake Selmac has problems. They have known for years. "With the parks budget being just over $1 million, the cost of the dam itself is going to come in between {$1 million and $3 million] dollars to improve it," Josephine County Parks manager Sarah Wright said. To get an 'unsatisfactory' result means the dam cannot contain or handle a moderate sized flood. At Lake Selmac, that's rare -...

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...

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...

"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 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...

I had some one contact me from my ad on Craigslist offering me a trade, an AR 15 for a Shaver post pounder. I thought it very odd, especially as I am in CA and transfer is illegal. Definitely steering clear.

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,...

Photo series with detailed explanations.

Empty buildings, empty streets, empty businesses. It's like a Hollywood ghost town movie set in Oroville, California due to the dam overflow.

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’s $7.545 billion Water Bond (2015), “Proposition 1, has seven funding categories, with a pot of money allocated to each. The bond language preauthorized spending in the largest area—$2.7 billion (36%) for water storage projects. For the other six areas, spending must be appropriated in the state budget. With the passage of the most recent budget, nearly 80 percent of the bond has now been appropriated. The only category with no funds appropriated is flood management, which is still spending down money from earlier bonds " - – Public Policy Institute of California, “How is California Spending the Water Bond?”...

It was the first black bloc for Neil Lawrence, a third-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He had demonstrated with Black Lives Matter and seen people in bandannas show up at events and smash things. But after the Berkeley College Republicans announced controversial Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos would be speaking on campus, Lawrence decided it was time for a more aggressive form of protest. “It became clear to me and my close friends that the tone of living in America is changing, and in order to stop being scared, we started organizing,” he says. “I, a...

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.

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...

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...

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...

Authorities lifted mandatory evacuation orders Tuesday for communities below the Oroville Dam. At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea announced the order had been changed to an evacuation warning after he said the risk of flooding had been reduced. "We have concluded it is safe to reduce the emergency evacuation order to an evacuation warning"said Honea, who had made the initial call Sunday to evacuate a large swath of three counties below the imperiled dam. At the time, residents were told the spillway to the dam could collapse within an hour. Roadblocks on the two main...

Praise God and thank all you FReepers for your prayers and offers of assistance!

Footage of crews using helicopters yesterday to move large bags of rocks into Oroville emergency dam spillway.