The level was dropping slowly all day, the need to get it DOWN!! NOW!! showed up around 4pm when the erosion in the emergency spillway was discovered. At the moment, it’s just reached the point where the flow down the emergency spillway has stopped.
Perhaps no good choices then. Still, it would have seemed a little bit more earlier might have helped put less people at risk. We have not lived in California for 8 years now, but I am hard pressed to think of a similar evacuation order of that magnitude in the last 50 years. Evacuations are confusing and messy, especially when no-one practices them.