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One of California’s most critical hydroelectric plants is at risk of closing for the first time in five decades as water levels continue to sink. A megadrought and scorching heat, both worsened by La Nina weather effects, have depleted some of the water supply at Northern California’s Lake Oroville. The lake’s current water levels are hoovering around 700 feet above sea level, but if 640 feet is breached, then officials “will likely be forced to close the Edward Hyatt Power Plant for the first time since it opened in 1967,” California Energy Commission spokesperson Lindsay Buckley told CNN. The lake’s...

The California Department of Water Resources is being forced by looming El Niño rainstorms to open the uncompleted Oroville Dam main spillway next week. The Department of Water Resources issued public reassurances on February 21 that uncompleted repairs at the Oroville Dam, which forced about 188,000 emergency evacuations after a near collapse in February 2017, are not a problem, since DWR did not expect the reservoir water level to rise enough to use the spillway anytime soon. But the timing of DWR's announcement came just a week after the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center issued an advisory that an...

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...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The federal government has rejected $306 million in reimbursements for California's repair of damaged spillways on the nation's tallest dam, a state agency said Friday. California has so far requested about $639 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the Oroville Dam repairs, said Lisa Lien-Mager of the state's Natural Resources Agency. FEMA has agreed to cover $333 million. That's less than about a third of the $1.1 billion the state's Department of Water Resources said it took to repair the dam. Spillways on the Oroville Dam crumbled and fell away during heavy rains in February...

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...

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...

multiple videos in comments

Design flaws, construction shortcomings and maintenance errors caused the Oroville Dam spillway to break apart in February, according to an independent analysis by Robert Bea for the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley.

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...

DWR just turned the main spillway off as the Reservoir Elevation reaches 836' (Mean Sea Level), the minimum level of the Main Spillway.

When state water officials scaled back their mass dumping of water from the damaged Oroville Dam this week, they knew the riverbed below would dry up enough to allow the removal of vast piles of debris from the fractured main spillway. But they apparently did not anticipate a side effect of their decision to stop feeding the gushing Feather River — a rapid drop in river level that, according to downstream landowners, caused miles of embankment to come crashing down. With high water no longer propping up the shores, the still-wet soil crashed under its own weight, sometimes dragging in...

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt” – Mark Twain “Consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though … the concern falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under...

I cant copy and paste anything from the article... Probably some way around them disabling that function, but you will just have to go read it on their site, but there is a ton of new images now that the flow got shut off on the main spillway.

Some officials failed to act until people were scurrying to flea their homes without any notice. They had no time to get anything packed, but did grab their pets…thank God for that, as pets are a vital life force for humanity. Whether they realize it now, they can make a home from scratch with their family, pets, and the kindness of strangers. Praise God for the Red Cross and other charities. We must stress the kindness of strangers in this world of a failing humanity, as those strangers represent the best in us. Nguyen and his family had spent all...

NASA eyes Pineapple Express soaking California – video followsFrom the NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTERNASA has estimated rainfall from the Pineapple Express over the coastal regions southwestern Oregon and northern California from the series of storms in February, 2017. IMERG rainfall estimates for the period from Feb. 15 at 00:30 UTC (Feb. 14 at 7:30 p.m. EST) to Feb. 23 at 23:00 UTC (6 p.m. EST). The initial surge was responsible for bringing part of the rainfall (up to about 2 to 3 inches) was seen over the coastal regions southwestern Oregon and northern California.CREDIT NASA/JAXA, Hal Pierce The West...

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. – VoltaireIt is peculiar how the Left, who likes to mock God-fearing Christians as “superstitious religious Neanderthals”  and “compulsive believers,” are quick to embrace their own secular religion of politically correct ideologies: The reason these secular, individualistic and utilitarian ideologies are unchallengeable is that they’re held to represent not a point of view but virtue itself. That’s because they are all utopian. In their different ways, they represent an idea of the perfection of the world. So, class divisions would give way to equality, the capitalist despoliation of...

Although the Oroville Dam supplies drinking water to the entire State of California, no politician seemed to care…especially Obama. Almost 200,000 residents north of Sacramento were ordered to evacuate while authorities attempted to repair erosion of the dam’s emergency spillway, which would release “catastrophic” flood waters if it collapsed. We are talking “catastrophic” here! There is no public record of the dam, the tallest in the U.S., receiving any of the federal money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was intended for repairs to infrastructure around the nation. Other projects that received money from the stimulus package were...

California is in a crisis. Actually, California has many crises taking place, including a crisis of leadership The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.—Dwight D. Eisenhower California is in a crisis. Actually, California has many crises taking place, including a crisis of leadership. This lack of leadership has led to glaring misplaced priorities, and now, a crisis of tremendous proportions of aging and severely damaged infrastructure.