Editorial: Oroville is a model of how NOT to deal with a flood emergency
4/24/17
Transparency should always be a public agency’s default position, because problems always arise when it isn’t.
A case in point is how the state Department of Water Resources has handled Lake Oroville for years. It continues despite considerable public and political pressure since the spillway collapse.
Two developments last week perfectly illustrate the point.
One involves awarding a nine-figure bid to a company to fix the spillway without any detail about what the company is actually doing. The other involves an independent review of what went wrong, which takes on added weight because the promised review by the government is nonexistent so far.
The independent analysis was released this week by Robert Bea, a founder of UC Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and a nationally recognized expert, who reviewed what went wrong in high-profile disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.
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Water agency to hold community meetings on Oroville Dam project
Tim Hearden
Capital Press
Published on April 24, 2017 11:09AM
OROVILLE, Calif. — State officials are set to answer questions from the public about the Oroville Dam spillway repair project during a series of community meetings.
Leaders from the California Department of Water Resources and other experts will also take comments about the recovery process during the meetings, the first of which was to be April 27 at the Butte County Fairgrounds in Gridley.
The meetings are part of an outreach effort that has also included communications with local leaders and interest groups, said Bill Croyle, the DWR’s acting director.
“We are committed to pushing as much information as we can out,” Croyle said in a recent news conference at the project’s command center in Oroville.
The meetings will have a similar agenda and format, beginning at 5:30 p.m. starting with presentations of information and continuing with questions and answers. In addition to the Butte fairgrounds meeting, other gatherings will be held on the following dates:
• May 2 at the Oroville Municipal Auditorium, 1200 Myers St., Oroville.
• May 3 in the Sierra Nevada Room of the state Department of Transportation District 3 office, 703 B St., Marysville.
• May 4 at the Oroville Church of the Nazarene’s fellowship hall, 2238 Monte Vista Ave., Oroville.
• May 9 in Franklin Hall at the Yuba-Sutter Fairgrounds, 442 Franklin Ave., Yuba City.
• May 11 at the Chico Masonic Family Center, 1110 W. East Ave., Chico.
In addition, a similar meeting will be held at 1:30 p.m. May 15 at the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria, 828 I St., Sacramento.
The meetings come as the DWR on April 17 awarded a $275.4 million contract to the Omaha, Neb.-based Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. for permanent repair work on the Oroville Dam’s spillways, which is expected to continue through the summer.
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