Free Republic

The Oroville Dam in northern California is the nation’s tallest dam and it creates the state’s second-largest reservoir. In February of 2017, an atmospheric river dumped a huge amount of snow then a huge amount of rain into the reservoir’s watershed. A 30-foot wall at the top of the dam, called the weir, nearly gave way to the volumes of water and 188,000 people had to be evacuated. “Rainfall from the atmospheric river was enhanced by about 11 to 15 percent by climate change, compared to what it would have been in pre-industrial times,” said Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist...

OROVILLE, Calif. - The woman who was shot and killed last week aboard a Greyhound bus in Oroville, Calif., died protecting her children, according to her family. Karin Dalton, the 43-year-old mother of four, was gunned down allegedly by Asaahdi Coleman, who started shooting at passengers as they exited the Los Angeles-bound bus after it stopped at a convenience store authorities said.

Fed up with COVID-19 regulations and vaccine mandates, the leaders of one California city have decided to take matters into their own hands. Oroville’s City Council overwhelmingly voted to declare the town a “constitutional republic” earlier this month. What that means, according to the declaration, is: “Any executive orders issued by the State of California or by the United States federal government that are overreaching or clearly violate our constitutionally protected rights will not be enforced by the City of Oroville against its citizens.” What does it mean in practice? Oroville’s mayor told the East Bay Times it “doesn’t change...

Democracy isn’t as popular as it used to be. Take the Oroville City Council’s overwrought recent declaration that it’s a “Constitutional Republic City,” which is steeped in creeping disregard for a once-presumptive American ideal. The measure declares that the council’s members and constituents need not follow the laws of the duly and democratically elected state and federal governments in which they’re located — and upon which they’re deeply dependent — because, well, they don’t want to.

Democracy isn’t as popular as it used to be. Take the Oroville City Council’s overwrought recent declaration that it’s a “Constitutional Republic City,” which is steeped in creeping disregard for a once-presumptive American ideal. “NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED by the Oroville City Council that the City of Oroville is declared to be a Constitutional Republic City,” thunders the resolution, and “that any executive orders issued by the State of California or by the United States federal government that are overreaching or clearly violate our constitutionally protected rights will not be enforced by the City of Oroville against its...

A Northern California city has declared itself a “constitutional republic” city in an effort to take a stand against Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s COVID-19 mandates.

The Oroville Reservoir reached a record low level of 195.66 m (641.93 feet) above mean sea level on August 5, 2021, forcing authorities in California to shut down their second-largest hydroelectric plant. This is now the lowest level since the nation's tallest dam was completed in 1967 and the first time the hydroelectric plant was shut down due to lack of water. The old record was 196.59 m (645 feet) set in 1977. The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) State Water Project operations managers have taken the Hyatt Powerplant at Lake Oroville offline due to falling lake levels, California...

45-year-old, Ari Gershman, a pulmonary doctor, was off-roading in a new four-wheel drive Jeep with his son Jack near Downieville when a gunman opened fire. The gunman killed Gershman, but his son escaped and called police. The fundraising page says the son hid for over 30 hours in the Tahoe National Forest before a search team found him. Deputies stated the gunman is believed to have shot two other people in the area on Friday. The two unidentified victims were taken to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries. After the victims were taken to the hospital the sheriff's office...

Video at link. By using the word "Test" he is not referring to official stress testing, but stating that expected rains are going to exert pressure on the dam's specifications and spillway. I didn't watch the whole video, the first few minutes gives the idea.

Juan Browne on site...at the spillway...

By February, the snow made many neighborhoods here feel subterranean. Twenty-foot walls of white, corniced by the wind, leaned over the plowed roads. Residents worked feverishly to keep the snow from swallowing their homes. They dug tunnels and narrow passageways to the street, opened portals to get light through second-story windows, shoveled dangerous weight off their roofs. inRead invented by Teads ADVERTISEMENT Unoccupied homes were so buried that a child might unknowingly sled down one. On still nights, when the wind stopped and the plows had passed, the silence was absolute. Only the streetlights and spirals of smoke from unseen...

The $1.1 billion spent to repair Oroville Dam is failing as water is seeping through the rebuilt spillway threatens new mass evacuations over the risk of the dam collapsing. According to national dam expert Scott Cahill of Watershed Services of Ohio, Oroville Dam is on the same failure track as in 2017, with visible water seepage trickling from the foot of the dam and dozens of points along the dam's principal spillway. Cahill warns that warming temperatures magnified by precipitation is a growing threat to the dam. American Thinker reported on March 1 that the Sierra snow pack was at...

Millions of Californians could end up with higher water bills after the Trump administration on Friday announced that federal emergency officials aren’t going to reimburse the state for $306 million in repairs to Oroville Dam stemming from the 2017 spillway crisis. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said federal taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for problems that existed prior to a massive hole forming in the dam’s concrete spillway in February 2017, eventually prompting the two-day evacuation of 188,000 downstream residents and a $1.1 billion emergency response and repair job. Oroville Dam – the nation’s tallest – is operated by a...

Two years after 200,000 people evacuated as the nation's tallest dam threatened to spill over, a judge will hear arguments Friday about whether accusations of corruption, sexism and racism at the California Department of Water Resources played a part in it all.(SNIP)

NBC Bay Area obtained a memo written by engineers at California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) in June 2017 that raises safety questions involving seven dams owned and operated by the agency. The memo was sent by DWR to the state’s Division of Safety of Dams and copied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees dam safety and regulation around the country. It states the seven dams are in need of immediate evaluation. The memo questions whether the seven dams, which are similar in age, design and construction to Oroville Dam, may have, “potential geologic, structural or performance issues...

The state Department of Water Resources could have lost control of the spillway radial gates for days during the Oroville Dam crisis if crucial power lines had gone down, according to department officials. DWR leaders Cindy Messer and Joel Ledesma stated this Jan. 10 during a legislative oversight hearing on the dam at the State Capitol. This has since led some local groups to wonder why there was no backup power supply. Representatives of Friends of the River, the Sierra Club, South Yuba River Citizens League, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and American Whitewater filed a letter with the Federal Energy...

California’s Department of Water Resources was blasted in an independent report for having a culture of complacency and incompetence that contributed to last year’s near-disaster at Oroville Dam. The full 584 page independent forensic team report is here. The agency’s largest water storage site and the nation’s tallest dam at Lake Oroville fell into disrepair. In February, pounding rain and large water releases caused the reservoir’s spillway to collapse. A back-up spillway also failed. Fears that water would pour uncontrollably downstream prompted the evacuation of 180,000 people. The independent panel of safety experts said the dam was badly built from...

Complacency, bureaucracy and an inadequate safety culture led to the failure last year of the Oroville Dam spillway, according to an independent investigation report released Friday. The findings point to human error by a number of organizations but say that the dam's owner, the California Department of Water Resources, was "significantly overconfident and complacent about the integrity of its State Water Project civil infrastructure, including dams." It describes the department as an "insular organization which inhibited accessing industry knowledge and developing needed technical expertise." Within the department, the engineering division clashed with the operations and maintenance staff, resulting in a...

OROVILLE — The cost of repairing the crippling damage to Oroville Dam’s spillways caused by last winter’s fierce storms has almost doubled, state water officials said Thursday. Kiewit, the Nebraska-based construction firm that has the main contract to rebuild the main spillway and emergency spillway at Oroville, the nation’s tallest dam, estimated in its winning bid in April that the work would cost at least $275 million. But the price tag has now grown to at least $500 million, said Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for the Department of Water Resources.

Several climate experts, flummoxed by the failure of a widely predicted El Niño to make a dent in California’s drought during the winter of 2015-16, are saying they are unsure what this winter will bring. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says December-February in California will be a winter with equal chances of normal, below normal and above normal rain. “That means they do not know. There is no strong signal,” said Bill Putzert, the expert climatologist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who incorrectly predicted tons of rain from the “Godzilla El Niño” for the 2015-2016 winter. For this coming...