[weambulance]

Apparently the Lake Oroville dam in California might fail at any minute. They're trying to lower the water level in hopes of buying time to do something about the problem but it might be too little, too late.

Threat of Oroville spillway collapse prompts evacuations for Marysville and Yuba, Butte and Sutter counties

That's a live-updated story so it doesn't lend itself well to quoting.

Emergency: California’s Oroville Dam Spillway Near Failure, Evacuations Ordered (Breitbart)

Quote:

The California Department of Water Resources issued a sudden evacuation order shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday for residents near the Oroville Dam in northern California, warning that the dam’s emergency spillway would fail in the next 60 minutes.

The Oroville Dam is the highest in the nation.

An emergency alert issued on Facebook stated:

EMERGENCY EVACUATION ORDER ISSUED: Officials are anticipating a failure of the Auxiliary Spillway at Oroville Dam within the next 60 minutes. Residents of Oroville should evacuate in a northward direction, toward Chico. Other cities should follow the orders of their local law enforcement.

The emergency spillway, which is unpaved, was activated on Saturday morning to relieve the flow down the dam’s normal spillway, where a major hole appeared in recent days and began to widen. The height of the lake, once drained by drought and now swollen by recent rains and snow melt, had reached 901 feet above sea level when the emergency spillway was opened.

Aux spillway at Oroville Dam expected to fail within hour. Oroville under mandatory evacuations, could have downstream effects in Sacramento pic.twitter.com/DmHOrwQFRC

— Sacramento Fire (@SacFirePIO) February 13, 2017

As Breitbart News reported in continuing coverage of the crisis, officials initially assured the public that evacuations would not be necessary, because the damage to the normal spillway appeared limited. They repeated those assurances on Saturday as the emergency spillway was used for the first time since the dam’s construction in 1968.

Now, however, local ABC News affiliate KRCR reports that state officials warn the emergency spillway could suffer a structural failure. It is not clear whether that would lead to a structural failure of the dam itself, which would be a major ecological and economic disaster.

The Sacramento Bee quoted California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesperson Mike Smith: “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.”

Authorities said Sunday afternoon that they had increased the flow down the normal spillway to 100,000 cubic feet per second, despite the damage, to relieve pressure on the emergency spillway.

The Feather River flows south into the Sacramento River. Flooding could potentially affect the Sacramento River and surrounding areas.

Update: A flash flood warning has been issued for significant parts of Butte County. The Butte County Sheriff has issued a warning: “This is NOT a drill.”

Update (6:53 p.m. PDT): Officials speaking at a press conference indicated that releases from the normal spillway had reduced some of the erosion to the emergency spillway and lowered the level of the lake. They were optimistic that the expected failure of the emergency spillway might be averted. They explained that they had evacuated the region out of an abundance of caution.

Even if the dam holds up, as it hopefully will, I'm sure it's not going to be a weekend repair job. It probably took years of neglect to get to this point, as such large structures rarely fail overnight unless they were incorrectly engineered or constructed to begin with. The dam has been around since the mid 60s and took 5 years to build.

I wonder if CA will still be so hot to threaten secession or become a sanctuary state now that they're asking President Trump for emergency federal funds over the January rains and faced with this new problem.