“General understanding” is what I derive too as the full implications of the specific parts of the report referred to are not obvious to me - much as I’d like to understand them after months watching and waiting to get to the stage of this report.
What jumped off the page earlier in my read were the references to the designer of the spillway (unnamed) being inexperienced, not visiting the construction site more than once, having no real interaction with the geologists involved and not being consulted about what seem to be innumerable on-the-hoof changes in the original spec. It seems clear that the spillways were badly built to start with - makes me edgy about the rest of the complex.
The so-called “green area” in the dam, which is totally unrelated to this spillway disaster is of more concern to me than the entire spillway fiasco.
Earthen dams have been know to have major failures related to such things. Without the installed sensors still functioning to show groundwater changes within the dam, this is a problem of which the dimensions are, and will be, a mystery. I don’t like problems that cannot be diagnosed in the tallest earthen dam in North America that also sits above a very populated area.