FWIW.
I would hope that someone on this forum has all ready pointed this out. But short of reading every post about the Oroville Dam situation and why this is a very real disaster in the making, I’ll point out a few things.
Water, is a very difficult thing to control.
Water, contrary to popular belief, does in fact flow “uphill”.
The failure of the spillway is just one aspect where the water will migrate, literally up hill, being absorbed and pulled into the earthen dam until gravity takes over. That, combined with rain water on the surface could reach the point were the entire hillside that was designed to hold back the weight of the water in the lake, just lets loose to the forces of gravity.
If the rain forecast is expected to be up stream from the dam itself they may dodge a bullet. If however, they get rain locally, I’m afraid they will experience a mud slide that will be historic.
FWIW
“Water, contrary to popular belief, does in fact flow “uphill”.”
That’s what our water “authorities” don’t seem to understand so can only assume “authorities” all over the nation don’t either. A bit of a different uphill is when there is a flood at my house. It doesn’t much matter about the dam and spillway up stream when the water is coming in from rivers and tributaries down stream. When those flood, the water spreads in all directions to find its level. The waters will turn uphill. I can watch the wave moving up stream. My particular area, the river width is bottle necked so the flood wave gets higher as it squeezes through.
Then they’ll inevitably open the dam gates above us so when that water meets the back up flood wave.... well, it’s fun. The so called “authorities” will argue with us that they’re not flooding us out because they’re looking on their computer models (2 hours away) which shows the gauges in the main lake at safe levels. Back in the day, there were human monitors on site who did a much better job than computers.
“If the rain forecast is expected to be up stream from the dam itself they may dodge a bullet.”
Any rain upstream will flow down into the lake if the soil is already saturated. You can get flooding with rains 2-3 counties away.