The article seems like badly-written, unresearched garbage.
For example:
“The last time the water level rose to 815 feet in February 2017 and engineers began opening eight huge spillway gates to allow 100,000 acre-feet per second to race down the face of the dam”
In fact, water didn’t race down the face of the dam; it raced down the spillway. Big difference, and if the author can’t keep them straight he probably gets a lot of other stuff wrong.
100,000 acre-feet/second is an insane number. The old Oroville spillway was rated at about 100,000 cubic fit/second. An acre-foot is 43,560 cubit feet.
Another crazy:
“The difference of the huge water pressure on the dam and the lower pressure from water running down the spillway caused the huge cement plates to rise and fall.”
Nope! The water pressure on the DAM had nothing to do with the failure of the SPILLWAY in 2017.
As a couple of people have already said, if you want to know what’s happening with the Oroville Dam, the “blancolirio” channel on youtube has reported the straight facts for more than 2 years now. Accept no substitutes.
As measured downstream at Aswan.