Feather River flood fears cause evacuation in Yuba City. Were 180,000 human lives put at risk to sa

Last week, the main spillway at Oroville Dam began to fail about halfway down the concrete structure. Apparently the material underneath the spillway had failed and the concrete began to crack and chip out. Upon seeing the failure, the DWR shut down the spillway to see what had happened. The experts decided the spillway was going to continue to breakup, but to attempt to quantify the predicted damage, the spillway was activated again for a test. I feel the need to point out here that the watershed was experiencing an "atmospheric river' event when this failure occurred and inflows were very high into an already high reservoir. The spillway test indicated that the damage that would occur to spillway would be mostly below the failure point and the likelihood of the damage continuing up the spillway and effecting the spillway gates was minimal. What was also learned was that the water rushing down the spillway would certainly continue to erode the hillside and huge amounts of mud and debris from the hillside would flow into the river below.

Now at this time, I believe the DWR began to not be so truthful with the public. For some period of time, the spillway was not running and the lake was filling at an alarming rate. The experts began to tell us that the lake would fill and begin to flow over the "emergency" spillway, which had never been used since the dam was completed 48 years ago. On Saturday, Feb 11, the lake began to flow over the emergency spillway. It was about this time that we heard of a heroic effort to remove baby salmon from the fish hatchery that lives just below the dam and spillway. We were told that the fish had been moved to an undisclosed location and would not be killed by the muddy water coming down the river from the dam. DWR continued to allow water to flow out of the 101% full lake over the emergency spillway. On Sunday, I noticed that the parking lot on the North side of the emergency spillway was covered with water and the water was flowing over the parking lot and off of the hillside. I took a double take. The parking lot appeared to be at the same level as the lip on the emergency spillway structure. Some of the water from the lake was going around the spillway structure and finding its way down a hillside where it should not be. About 4 O'clock Sunday afternoon we were told that erosion below the emergency spillway would undercut the spillway structure and the 30' concrete spillway would fail within 1 hour. People in Oroville were told to evacuate and they had 1 hour to get out. Mandatory evacuation orders followed for the rest of Butte County, Yuba County, and Sutter County. An evacuation warning order was issued for Yuba City, which initiated our evacuation to Lincoln, CA

In hind sight, I began to wonder why the spillway was stopped for such a long time when the lake was filling to and above capacity when they had said they could run the main spillway without causing damage to the dam or upper part of the structure. It just made no sense that they would let the lake rise to an overfull condition in the middle of a huge watershed runoff from the recent rains. There were also additional "atmospheric river" storms in the Pacific that were coming. Then I remembered the heroic evacuation of the salmon. Maybe it was not so much a heroic action. Maybe it was a situation that put salmon safety ahead of human safety. The only possible reason that the lake was allowed to reach the critical level and run over the emergency spillway was to allow time for them to evacuate the Salmon from the hatchery. So the fish got relocated while the lake rose to 101% capacity and the entire Feather River flood control system was put in peril. The apparent proof of this is that as soon as the fish had been moved, it was stated that the releases over the emergency were causing problematic erosion and the flow must be diverted back to the main spillway, they turned the main spillway back on at 100,000 cfs. (over twice the flow when the spillway failed) to lower the lake to accommodate the incoming storms. Since Sunday they have been in a race with the clock to get 50 feet of water out of the dam to get the lake level back to where it should be at this time of year. So when I ask myself the question, why did they let the lake get full on February 11, the only thing that makes any sense was pressure from somebody stall the releases to save the salmon from the muddy water and put the rest of us in dire peril.

Tom Tomlinson

Citizen Observer