[Mariner]

Disaster!

this is 200,000 - 300,000 people.

[barmag25]

Just saw a person on twitter say that this area shouldn’t get any state help because this area is full of Republicans

[Lorianne]

5.0-magnitude quake rattles Northern California
http://www.kcra.com/article/50-magnitude-quake-rattles-northern-california/8500161

[GOPJ]

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/12/oroville-residents-told-to-evacuate-spillway-failure-imminent/

“At 770 feet tall, the structure that holds back the Feather River is taller than the Washington Monument and as thick as 10 football fields at its base. Lake Oroville, at 10 miles long, is the second largest reservoir in California behind Shasta Lake.”

[Mat_Helm]

The Lake is @ 790,000 acre feet (AF) above flood control level. As of Sunday 167,000 CFS was flowing into the lake and they were releasing @ 100,000 CFS down the damaged normal spillway. This means +70,000 CFS is going over the emergency spillway which basically just stops water from running over the dam itself. When the spill way gives way it could threaten the dam and immediately release a 30 foot wall of water with @ up to 500,000 acre feet of water rushing down the feather river all at once. This could even threaten Beal Air Force Base.

On our normal weekly operations call with the Bureau of Reclamation they said the Department of Water Resources (DWR) did not expect water levels to rise enough to go over the emergency spillway. Boy was DWR wrong. DWR damaged an emergency valve at the base of the dam a few years ago in a stupid experiment by Fish agencies to let cold water at the bottom of the lake flow for fish. A failure when a concrete wall broke and flooded the control room nearly was catastrophic and just before the control room flooded an engineer was able to hit the emergency control to close the valve. That has not been repaired and is not being reported. They new they were in trouble when the main spillway came apart and lots of water was coming into the lake.

[connyankee]

Poetic justice.

[trebb]

Incompetence - can’t be that nobody knew that the dam was not up to snuff if/when rain ever came.