[CedarDave]

Your analysis is right on point, to wit, if the initial event occurs, the chance of stopping it would be extremely difficult if not impossible:

... there’s active hydraulic excavation going on below the face of the emergency spillway.

The exposure of the rock after only about 30 hours of scour shows that the rock is badly jointed and fractured and capable of being moved out from the vicinity of the emergency spillway. But worse than that, it is being scoured out back toward the concrete pad at the base of the spillway.

If it had worked its way underneath the spillway base to the lake itself, there would be 30 feet of hydraulic head pushing water out the breach causing more vertical and horizontal erosion under the concrete spillway leading to its failure and exposing the lake water to catastrophic release.

Looking at now dry photos show how close the erosion got to the bottom of the spillway and how close to disaster they came. Though people may now cry about the evacuation being unnecessary, with the volume of water rushing over the emergency spillway on Sunday afternoon and no idea of the depth of scour, officials had no choice but to issue the evacuation order.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

listening to radio in car. Dummy news reader said they may have dodged a bullet but "repairs to spillway may be necessary."

Ya think, moron?

[RayChuang88]

What worries me is we may be on the verge of a spectacular failure like the Baldwin Hills Dam collapse in 1963--but on a VASTLY larger scale. And that right now threatens millions of lives and the potential damage could top US$2 TRILLION as everything downstream of Oroville Dam gets inundated with muddy water, the cities of Antioch west to Martinez are under threat along its shoreline, and we could have flooding threats in the Carquinez Strait, San Pablo Bay and possibly even the piers on the eastern shore of San Francisco.

That level of damage is enough to send the USA into a recession.