But only if the dam breaks. And what are the odds of that? Rather good I’d say.
But the crisis at Lake Oroville won’t abate any time soon. Northern California is on pace for its wettest winter ever, and Croyle said an estimated 2.8 million acre-feet of snow blankets the Sierra above the dam. Depending on how quickly that melts, it will put additional strain on Oroville Dam in the months to come.
“Our next 60 to 90 days will be critical, how we route this (snow) runoff through this reservoir,” Croyle said. “There’s a lot of snow up there.”
The below videos will give you a better view of the situation than the news reports will give you.
Thanks to LG at Chief IO for the first video.
This one is from The Sacramento Bee.
If I was to hazard a guess on the spillway problem, based on repairs in prior years I’d say bad concrete. Not enough cement (a standard contractor cheat)?, Not enough rebar? Something else?
Someone probably knows – from tests done on the repaired sections.
Comments
One response to “Oroville Dam May Flood Sacramento”
Much of the climate in California runs between years of drought and inundation. And we find over and over again that the water control infrastructure that exists can’t handle the extremes of either.
You’d think they would have figured it out by now and built up the control and storage structures to handle predictable extremes, but then you realize these are the same kinds of people who made Enron possible. Incompetent corrupt fools with too much power. And gorbal worming, or climactic spare change or carbona emissions or cow farts or planetary bad vibes, man or something.