We have no beef with what emergency officials did on Sunday in ordering an evacuation of Marysville, Oroville, Yuba City and surrounding communities as a precaution given the problems occurring at the spillway at Lake Oroville Dam. Better safe than sorry. And a 30-foot wall of water can bring a lot of sorrow. Our concern is more about what happened 11 years earlier when the concerns about the spillway were first raised by environmental groups during the process to relicense the hydroelectric dam. The groups, including the Sierra Club and Friends of the River, had urged federal regulators to require the California Department of Water Resources to build a concrete spillway rather than run the risk of potentially catastrophic problems if the water from the reservoir began flowing down the earthen hillside.
Given that Oroville Dam is the tallest in the nation at 770-feet high, it makes no sense to have its last line of defense being an undeveloped hillside. But federal regulators would have nothing of it. The hillside and spillway could handle billions of gallons of water before problems developed, they said. Besides, they said, it’s unlikely the spillway would ever be needed anyway. They were right — for about the first 50 years. But on Sunday, they were proven wrong, and 200,000 people had to be evacuated. Although those residents have now been allowed to return, there’s no going back to old ways. That darn dam needs to be fixed.
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