Just because nature allows a delay of many years while officials dither over a catastrophe in the making doesn’t make that disaster any easier to handle when it finally strikes. This is one major lesson of the Oroville Dam spillway crisis that saw the sudden evacuation of almost 200,000 people from their homes due to the threat of the dam’s emergency spillway crumbling under the force of millions of gallons of fast-moving water.
Late last month, a list of infrastructure projects purportedly prioritized by the Trump administration sparked headlines across the country. Several of the projects aim to swell water supplies in the West, including a controversial plan to capture groundwater beneath California’s Cadiz Valley, a venture to pipe water out of an aquifer in New Mexico, and a proposed desalination plant perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, in Huntington Beach, California. The nearly $1 billion desalination plant could be operating as soon as 2020, according to Poseidon Water, the company behind the project.
Lake Oroville will partially reopen on Thursday, nearly two weeks after more than 180,000 Northern California residents evacuated their homes and the lake area closed due to fears that the emergency spillway at Oroville Dam could fail. California State Parks closed the state recreation area, with the exception of the visitor center and north and south forebays, on Feb. 13 to avoid any interference as crews worked to strengthen the dam’s emergency spillway and remove debris from below the main spillway. Campgrounds were also closed to accommodate other agencies involved in the spillway work.
Now that we can take a breath and look back over the past week and a half, clearly there are moments that never will be forgotten. We know that the Oroville Dam spillway incident will be among the biggest news events of 2017, and we’ve only started the recognition and acknowledgements for jobs well done by emergency personnel and responders. Plenty of folks from the sheriff on down to county officials and staff, city personnel, and residents themselves have a lot to be proud of what’s happened since the Feb. 12 evacuations started.
The Department of Water Resources plans to remove at least some of the debris at the bottom of the Oroville Dam spillway and study the structure, but just aren’t sure when they’ll have a chance to do that. The workers can’t just move into the Diversion Pool and pull out the concrete, mud and other debris that went into the water after the spillway broke Feb. 7 because water is still flowing at around 60,000 cubic feet per second and they’ll need heavy equipment to get the work done.
Larry Bowen ducked beneath the large white portico to escape the freshly falling rain, the first droplets of a thick storm that would pour down over Northern California later that night. He and his wife, Robin, came to this hillside outpost to look out at the Oroville Dam, like hundreds of others in recent days who were suddenly all too aware of infrastructure, spillways and reservoir levels.
A federal appeals court has upheld a decision by federal officials to release water from a Northern California dam to prevent a possible salmon die-off. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Tuesday the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had the authority to release the additional water from Lewiston Dam in 2013 to help migrating winter-run salmon in the lower Klamath River. The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the court rejected a lawsuit by Westlands Water District, a major water supplier to Central Valley farmers.
Last week I was a guest on an “inspection” trip of the Colorado River Aqueduct, the engineering marvel that delivers up to 1 billion gallons (3.8 billion liters) of water daily to Southern California from the Colorado River hundreds of miles to the east. Organized by the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California, these inspections are a relic of an old piece of administrative code. Today they’ve become a well-choreographed public relations effort – right down to the framed MWD mission statement on the walls of the bedrooms provided to guests.
With the reservoir and all water district canals brimming, there is a great effort to move water into underground aquifer recharge ponds, said David Nixon, general manager of the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District in Kern County. “Absolutely, we tried to get every acre foot of water in this district we possibly can,” he said. “With that water at this time of year, before it’s needed by agriculture, it’s all about water storage and rebuilding that underground aquifer. “We have about 1500 acres of recharge ponds that we can use to refill the underground aquifer,” Nixon said.
For the second day in a row, a torrent of water on Sunday flowed over the Anderson Reservoir spillway, marking a phenomenon that hadn’t happened for 11 years until this weekend. The Morgan Hill reservoir hovered around 101.4 percent of its maximum capacity as of Sunday afternoon, but that number could rise as an impending storm barrels toward the Bay Area.
