You know it - this is the dam whose spillway failed during last winter's heavy rains and forced the evacuation of 180,000 people. Turns out the engineering was not good. From Next Big Future courtesy of Wirecutter:
Failed Oroville Dam Spillway designed by inexperienced grad student in the 1960s
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 the start in the 1960s. The principal designer of the spillway told the dam-safety team that he had just completed post-graduate work at the time he worked on the Oroville project decades ago, had had no previous engineering employment beyond two summer stints, and had never designed a spillway before.
Only in California. All their money goes to free stuff for the proles and nothing to developing or maintaining the infrastructure because a better highway doesn't buy you the votes to keep you in power.
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