In Shadow Of California Dam, Water Turns From Wish To Woe

It wasn’t so long ago that residents here had to drag their houseboats into a dusty field from the barren banks of Lake Oroville, which had almost no water left to keep them afloat. Now after weeks of rain, that dusty field is swelling with water and nearly 200,000 people had to evacuate the area when the state’s second-largest reservoir developed a hole in its auxiliary spillway and threatened to catastrophically flood nearby towns.