Yuba County evacuated as Oroville spillway collapse feared

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Yuba County evacuated as Oroville spillway collapse feared

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 12, 2017 10:15 pm

Heavy traffic amid evacuation

5:59 p.m.

Aerial photos show traffic backed up along Highway 70 as people from Oroville try to escape to the north.

Flows boosted to try to avoid collapse

5:52 p.m.

Releases through the main spillway at Oroville Dam have been boosted to 100,000 cubic feet per second from 55,000 cfs in hopes of easing pressure on the emergency spillway before a failure occurs, officials said Sunday night.

Kevin Dossey, a Department of Water Resources engineer and spokesman said “it might help” to alleviate the pressure.

So far, Dossey said, the emergency spillway’s concrete lip at the top has not crumbled, although the hillside had “eroded to within several feet” of the big concrete structure.

Marysville and Yuba County ordered evacuated; officials unsure how Sacramento could be hit

Marysville, Yuba County ordered to evacuate

5:42 p.m.

Marysville police say the city and Yuba County are under mandatory evacuation orders because of the feared collapse of the emergency spillway at Lake Oroville Dam. Yolo County officials said in a tweet that they do not expect any impact.

Witnesses reported a heavy police presence in the city.

“The hazardous situation concerning the Oroville Dam auxiliary spillway is NOT expected to impact Yolo County,” the county said.

Cal OES spokesman Brad Alexander said officials were activating the state emergency operations center and could not immediately address how waterlogged Sacramento County might be affected.

“I can’t answer that right now,” Alexander said.

“It’s uncontrolled. It’s uncontrolled

‘It’s uncontrolled’

5:30 p.m.

Fearing a gush from Lake Oroville if the emergency spillway collapses, officials are releasing as much as 100,000 cubic feet per second from the main, heavily damaged spillway in a frantic effort to drain the lake below where it spills out the emergency structure when the lake reaches maximum capacity, said Kevin Dossey, an engineer and Department of Water Resources spokesman.

The levee-line downstream channels in the Feather River could hold more than 150,000 cubic feet per second, said Maury Roos, a DWR hydrologist, but he said there’s a possibility that a levee could breach from the pressure.

Roos said that below where the Feather River merges with the Yuba River, levees are rated for a capacity of around 300,000 cfs.

When asked how much water could be released should the spillway collapse, DWR spokesman Chris Orrock said, “It’s uncontrolled. It’s uncontrolled.”

Dossey said the emergency spillway was rated to handle 250,000 cubic feet per second, but it began to show weakness Sunday at a small fraction of that. Flows through the spillway peaked at 12,600 cfs at 1 a.m. Sunday and were down to 8,000 cfs by midday.

Evacuation center at Silver Dollar Fairgrounds

5:15 p.m.

An evacuation center has been established for Oroville residents at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds in Chico, according to the National Weather Service. The address is 2357 Fair St.

Butte County sheriff: “This is NOT A Drill.”

5 p.m.

The Butte County Sheriff’ Office released the following statement on Facebook:

This is an evacuation order.

Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered.

A hazardous situation is developing with the Oroville Dam auxiliary spillway. Operation of the auxiliary spillway has lead to severe erosion that could lead to a failure of the structure. Failure of the auxiliary spillway structure will result in an uncontrolled release of flood waters from Lake Oroville. In response to this developing situation, DWR is increasing water releases to 100,000 cubic feet per second.

Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered.

This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill.

Chris Orrock, a spokesman for the Department of Water Resources, told The Bee the failure happened as the bottom of the emergency spillway began to erode.

“It happened quickly,” he said.

Sutter County also put out an alert on Facebook:

We have received information about the potential for increased flows in the Feather River of as much as 100,000 cubic feet per second. We are gathering as much information as possible and will be providing additional information as soon as it is verified.

Officials warn of “imminent failure” at Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway

4:45 p.m.

Officials are warning those living downstream of Lake Oroville’s dam to evacuate because of a risk that the dam’s emergency spillway could collapse.

“They have what they expect to be an imminent failure of the axillary spillway,” said Mike Smith, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “What they’re expecting is as much as 30 vertical feet of the top of the spillway could fail and could fail within one to two hours. We don’t know how much water that means, but we do know that’s potentially 30 feet of depth of Lake Oroville.”

The Department of Water Resources, which operates the dam, said in a 4:42 p.m. Twitter post that the emergency spillway could fail within the next hour.

“Oroville residents evacuate northward,” the Tweet said.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/califo ... rylink=cpy
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Re: Yuba County evacuated as Oroville spillway collapse fear

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 13, 2017 8:43 am

NOT a drill': 188,000 evacuated, emergency declared, as California’s massive Oroville Dam threatens floods

By Samantha Schmidt and Derek Hawkins February 13 at 6:04 AM

California dam risk triggers massive evacuation Embed Share Play Video0:53
Residents below the tallest dam in the U.S., near Oroville in Northern California, were urgently ordered to evacuate Feb. 12, after a spillway appeared to be in danger of imminent collapse. (Reuters)
About 188,000 residents near Oroville, Calif. were ordered to evacuate Sunday after a hole in an emergency spillway in the Oroville Dam threatened to flood the surrounding area. Thousands clogged highways leading out of the area headed south, north and west and arteries major and minor remained jammed as midnight approached on the West Coast.

Even as they fled, however, the flow of water over the spillway halted late in the evening, stabilizing the crisis. But officials warned the damaged infrastructure could create further dangers as storms approach in the week ahead and it remained unclear when residents might be able to return to their homes.


Lake Oroville is one of California’s largest man-made lakes with 3.5 million acre-feet of water and 167 miles of shoreline, and the 770-foot-tall Oroville Dam is the nation’s tallest, about 44 feet higher than Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. The lake is the linchpin of California’s government-run water delivery system, sending water from the Sierra Nevada for agriculture in the Central Valley and for residents and businesses in Southern California.

After a record-setting drought, California has been battered by potentially record-setting rain, with the Northern California region getting 228 percent more than its normal rainfall for this time of year. The average annual rainfall of about 50 inches had already been overtaken with 68 inches in 2017 alone.

Water overflows into Calif. dam’s emergency spillway Embed Share Play Video1:11
Water started overflowing into the emergency spillway of Lake Oroville’s dam in California on Feb. 11. (The Washington Post)
There was never any danger of the dam collapsing. The problem was with the spillways, which are safety valves designed to release water in a controlled fashion, preventing water from topping over the wall of the colossal dam that retains Lake Oroville.

Earlier this week, unexpected erosion crumbled through the main spillway, sending chunks of concrete flying and creating a large hole. Then sheets of water began spilling over the dam’s emergency spillway for the first time in its nearly 50-year history.

Water from rain and snow rapidly flowed into the lake, causing it to rise to perilous levels, and sending water down the wooded hillside’s emergency spillway, carrying murky debris into the Feather River below.

“Once we have damage to a structure like that, it’s catastrophic,” Bill Croyle, acting director of the state’s Department of Water Resources, said in a 10 p.m. news conference Sunday, in reference to the erosion of the main spillway. “We determined we could not fix the hole. You don’t just throw a little bit of rock in it.”

Anticipating a possible catastrophe for the Lake Oroville area, located about 75 miles north of Sacramento and about 25 miles southeast of Chico, the Butte County Sheriff’s Office ordered evacuations, adding in a news release that this was “NOT a drill.”

But as the reservoir’s water levels lowered, the flows over the emergency spillway ceased late Sunday night.

California Governor Jerry Brown (D) issued an emergency order to boost the state’s response to the evacuation efforts and spillway crisis, which Brown called “complex and rapidly changing.” Despite the minimized threats, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said in a news conference at about 10 p.m. local time Sunday that he would not be lifting the mandatory evacuation order until water resources officials had a better grasp on the anticipated risks.

Image
Aerial view of the damaged Oroville spillway. (DWR)
The evacuation took residents by surprise.

April Torlone, 18, was at work at a Dollar General in Live Oak, Calif., Sunday evening when she received a flood emergency alert on her phone. She hurried home, she said, where she had about 10 minutes to gather some clothes and her late father’s ashes.

Torlone drove with her mother and sister to her grandmother’s house in Sacramento, arriving well after midnight. The roughly 40-mile trip took six hours, she said. Gas stations were packed and stores were running out of food. Along the way, they saw more than 30 people camped out in their cars on the side of the road, many with trunks full of belongings, Torlone said.

“I just hope everyone is safe and finds a place to stay, and that no one’s homes are damaged,” she told The Washington Post. “It’s honestly so sad.”

Shelters, churches, schools, and seven Sikh temples opened their doors in a striking display of common purpose and community. People offered to open their homes to strangers via Twitter messages. Hotels and motels out-of-harm’s-way filled up quickly, creating little communities of the suddenly displaced.


The dam itself remained structurally sound through the evening, the state Department of Water Resources (DWR) said.

In a news conference Sunday night, Honea said helicopters would be deployed to drop bags of rocks into the crevice and prevent any further erosion.

Officials doubled the flow of water out of the nearly mile-long primary spillway to 100,000 cubic feet per second, helping to reduce the lake’s levels. The normal flow is about half as much, but increased flows are common at this time of year, during peak rain season, officials said.

Croyle said that the lake would need to lower almost 50 feet to reach levels at which the system would normally operate. Croyle said that personnel were unable to access the eroded emergency spillway Sunday to do repair work. Officials aimed to continue to discharge as much water as possible ahead of upcoming storms, without adding too much pressure to the already damaged infrastructure.

“Our goal is to be able to use that infrastructure throughout this wet season,” Croyle said. Forecasts indicate that dry weather will dominate through Tuesday, but a series of Pacific storms are expected to arrive across the region Wednesday into Thursday, bringing up to 4 inches of rain to parts of the Central Valley, according to the National Weather Service.

Honea called the evacuation order a “critical and difficult decision” and said he recognized it would cause significant dislocations and traffic jams, which it did. Residents of Oroville, a town of 16,000 people, were ordered to head north toward Chico, while other nearby residents drove south toward Sacramento.

“I recognize how tough this situation is on people,” Honea said in the 10 p.m. news conference. “I recognize that we’ve had to displace a lot of people.”


The California National Guard will provide eight helicopters to assist with emergency spillway repair, Adjutant General David S. Baldwin said in a news conference. All 23,000 soldiers and airmen statewide received an alert to be “ready to go if needed,” Baldwin said. The last time such an alert was sent out to the entire California National Guard was the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which erupted after a trial jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department of the use of excessive force in the videotaped arrest and beating of Rodney King.


Officials said 250 law enforcement personnel were being deployed to patrol the evacuated areas.

Travelers reported traffic at a standstill on some routes, especially on Highway 99 between Oroville and Chico.

Nicholas Mertz, a front desk supervisor at Oxford Suites Chico, told The Post that when he started his shift at 3 p.m., Sunday, the hotel’s 184 rooms were at 54 percent occupancy, but within an hour or two, the rooms reached full capacity. What began as a normal night quickly turned into “hectic craziness, everything all at once,” Mertz said. The hotel’s five phone lines were ringing non-stop, and hundreds of guests came pouring in.

“It’s never happened that fast,” Mertz said. Larger families of five to eight people packed into rooms, without having to pay the usual fees for additional guests, Mertz said, because “in this scenario, it’s whatever you can do.”

Many guests expressed confusion and frustration, while others spoke of their fears: What would happen to the pets they left behind? Would there be looting in the evacuated neighborhoods? Would their homes still be standing when they returned?

“Not only are you just a front desk person you’re kind of like a therapist as well,” Mertz said.

Kyle Dobson, 41, said he was visiting the dam Sunday afternoon from Yuba City, Calif., and noticed that the lake was higher than he had ever seen it. He said he got a call later in the day that Oroville was being evacuated. By the time he got home, Yuba City had also been ordered to evacuate.

Dobson said he and his wife packed about a week’s worth of clothes for themselves and their four young children, and moved pictures and other belongings to the second floor of their two-story home. For now, they are staying put, but if the situation gets worse, they will drive to Sutter, Calif., to stay with family, Dobson said.

“I’ll stay up probably all night, listen to the police scanner and watch the reports come in,” he said. “The river levels — that’s what you’ve got to watch out for.”

Adriana Weidman of Marysville, Calif., said she heard about the evacuation around 5 p.m. Fearing that nearby rivers would overflow, she rushed to pack as much as she could, then got into the car with her husband and two children, she said. By 10 p.m., the family was still sitting in gridlocked traffic on the way to Colfax, Calif., about 45 miles east.


“It’s scary,” Weidman told The Post. “I’m terrified I’m not going to have a home to come home to.”

Out of an “abundance of caution,” inmates were in the process of being evacuated from the Butte County Jail Sunday night, the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook.


“We needed to get people moving quickly in order to protect the public and save lives if the worst case scenario did come to fruition,” Honea said.

The damaged primary spillway caused water flowing downstream to become muddy and brown with debris earlier this week, threatening the lives of millions of baby Chinook salmon in the Feather River Hatchery below. In a rescue operation, officials with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife successfully moved about 5 million Chinook salmon to a nearby annex, the department said on Facebook.

The other 3 million baby salmon will remain at the main hatchery, where staff and engineers have rigged a system of pumps, pipes and generators and a sediment pond in the hopes of filtering the water enough to support the fish.

Ironically, the state’s five years of drought caused Lake Oroville’s water levels to plunge to a low of 33 percent of capacity, according to the Los Angeles Times. The lake became a poster child for the drought. In a dramatic shift, Northern California witnessed an extraordinarily rainy winter this year that caused waters to rise to their highest levels in decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... 990ed672b7
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Yuba County evacuated as Oroville spillway collapse fear

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Feb 13, 2017 5:47 pm

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