California Ordering Inspections At Aging Dams After Crisis

California is ordering immediate spillway inspections at about 70 aging dams that it believes might not be sound enough to protect downstream communities in a flood, a state dam regulator said Wednesday. The engineering and on-site reviews are part of stepped-up inspections following February’s surprise failures of both spillways at California’s 770-foot-high (230-meter-high) Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest. Authorities ordered nearly 200,000 people to evacuate in that crisis. Since then, regulators at California’s dam-safety division began reviewing their records on the 1,250 dams they monitor, focusing on 100 big, aging dams that have people downstream, supervising engineer Daniel Meyersohn said.