‘This is Not Good’: Oroville Dam Managers Made Missteps in Handling Crisis
By Ellen Knickmeyer and Michael R. Blood
Late in the afternoon of Feb. 12, Sheriff Kory Honea was at the emergency operations center for the tallest dam in America when he overheard someone say something that stopped him in his tracks: “This is not good.”
Over six straight days, the operators of the Oroville Dam had been saying there was no immediate danger after water surging down the main spillway gouged a hole the size of a football field in the concrete chute. But now suddenly they realized that the dam’s emergency backup spillway — essentially an unpaved hillside — was falling apart, too, and could unleash a deadly torrent of water.
snip
They had better pray the weather doesn’t warm too rapidly and melt the snow in the river drainage...