[Thud]

There's an apparently sturdy concrete lip on top of the emergency spillway, with a concrete spashwaay extending some distance beyond it. My concern was erosion in the spillway lip. See the KCRA video here:

http://www.kcra.com/article/water-begins-to-spill-over-oroville-emergency-spillway/8732032

And a Sacramento Bee video of the base of the concrete lip here:

http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article132154774.html

At this point there'd have to be a danger of the lip eroding from underneath in the splashway area, and I don't see the flow getting so bad that this would happen. The spillway horizontal area is just too long, and the splash surface right below the lip looks to be concrete as well.

Eventually the dirt catchment area to the left (west) of the main concrete spillway (the one with the crater) will start eroding up towards the horizontal concrete catchment area of the emergency spillway and undermine that, because most of the emergency spill water will be flowing there, but this will take a while.

Every day of delay before the concrete part of the catchment surface, and the emergency spillway lip, start eroding gets us another day closer to the end of the rainy season.

Things do no look anywhere near as grim as I feared.

[Mariner]

Consider this: There’s 30+feet of snow in the mountains. More coming.

If we get a genuine Pineapple Express in late March, all bets are off. That emergency spillway will cut the mountain in half, all the way to the river bed.