AGENDA 21 RADIO

BY PAUL PRESTON 10:42 PM PST

Sources close to state officials have learned the State of California is opening the State Fair Grounds in Sacramento for as many as 20,000 displaced people from a possible dam breach at the damaged Oroville Dam.

Officials with the Department of Water Resources learned of massive damage to the main spillway at the dam over 10 days ago. The progressive damage caused by drought ending rain filled Lake Oroville the reservoir behind the dam and the water crested and began to go over the emergency spillway last Saturday.

The emergency spillway had never been used since the dam was finished in 1968. Despite pleas from citizens and environmental groups to improve the emergency spillway by covering the soil in front of the spillway with concrete the state has ignored these pleas. Now the spillway is damaged and is danger of failing. At 2:38 pm today people at the dam reported to Agenda 21 Radio there was a 30% chance the spillway could fail “rightnow”.. A failure of the emergency spill way would cause a wave of water to go down a canyon to the Feather River which in turn would cover the area between Oroville and Sacramento.

From the Sac Bee February 15, 2017

Last week, as winter storms pummeled Northern California, Department of Water Resources engineers discovered a jagged crater in the lower section of the main spillway, a 3,000-foot span that acts as the dam’s primary flood-control outlet. Fearing the spillway would further erode and become inoperable, dam operators stopped the flows for a time, then gradually reactivated releases.

With runoff still rushing in from the snow-packed mountains above the dam, lake levels climbed, and early Saturday, water overtopped the emergency spillway for the first time in the dam’s 48-year history. Unlike the main spillway, which is lined in concrete and controlled via release gates, the emergency spillway dumps water in uncontrolled sheets over a 1,700-foot concrete lip onto a steep, wooded hillside.

Just more than 24 hours later, another problem emerged: The hillside below the emergency spillway’s lip was showing serious erosion, raising fears the structure would collapse and release a crush of water, inundating hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses along the Feather River basin in Butte, Yuba and Sutter counties.

That triggered emergency evacuation orders that sent 180,000 residents fleeing for safety Sunday evening.