Thought the California leadership said that the water was going down and the situation is more under control? Did I misunderstand or are they lying?
I think you misunderstood. At no point did they ever say that the human evacuations were being reversed, or that the situation is not very serious.
They did say that the water levels have declined a bit, such the emergency spillway is not being further eroded, but that is only so until the next big rainstorm or warm day with heavy snowmelt occurs.
The situation is still very concerning and there is not a good medium-term solution in place at all, and the authorities have not said otherwise. So, no, they are not lying.
The reporting on this has been criminally bad.
There are two spillways, and the media seems to have been referencing them interchangeably, causing much confusion.
As far as I can tell, the concrete, or primary, spillway is the one that initially had a hole form in it.
So, they shut it down and let the water fill and overtop the emergency (often called auxillary in the reporting too) spillway. This spillway appears to consist of a 30 ft tall concrete wall, and discharges to an earthen channel.
Well, when this was overtopped, it was chaos because it started ripping the ground apart...and the real concern is that this concrete wall could get undercut, allowing a 30 ft tall wall of water to blast through.
So, when the media says “The spillway has a hole in it and could fail”, they are conflating the two spillways.
The dam operators have decided that the hole in the concrete spillway is really not a danger to the dam, and letting that rip - and that is what we see in this video. It looks awful, but it seems to have carved a nice channel down to the rock, and isn’t hurting anything.
Now, if it rains again, and again goes over the emergency spillway...which could blow out all at once, well then they’re in trouble again.
But for now, the dam operators appear to be honest - the emergency spillway is dry again. And, as always, reporters have shown themselves to be idiots in their reporting.
I just hope the jerkoffs are catching some of it before it just runs back into the ocean or the bay. Idiots.
The video shows water coming down the main spillway. Nobody said they were going to shut that spillway off.