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Thanks for all the work you and others have put into this thread. It’s a great resource.

It looks like we dodged a bullet on this particular storm, but the crisis is not yet over. The main spillway is presently the only way to get water out of the dam, and it is heavily damaged.

The best way to release water is through the dam itself, but water released that way must go through the generators or it cannot be done. It will be a major job to get the generators back on stream, particularly if the early reports about the generator room being flooded turn out to be true. (Clearly reliable information about this has been nearly impossible to get.)

There may be more major storms this spring. But even if there are not the spring melt is certain to pour huge amounts of water into the reservoir. The upshot is that the main spillway MUST be used for quite a while longer.

Continued erosion on the lower half of the spillway until the spring melt is over seems certain. The information we have been given indicates this is not likely to be a threat to the dam itself.

A rarely mentioned element in all this is the nine upstream dams that feed into Lake Oroville. All of them are full. They have been used to reduce the flow into the lake, but that is not possible now that they are full. So, at least until they can be drawn down a bit, what goes into them must also come out at the same time. This lowers the margin of safety for the dam if there is another big storm.