OROVILLE, California—It was not 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.
“It was just pandemonium outside,” said Kurt Richter, a rice farmer living in Yuba City, who headed toward nearby Colusa, a town about 50 miles southwest of the dam in a two-car caravan with his wife and child, as the sudden evacuation order prompted chaos in the area. Richter described people driving on the shoulders, medians and the wrong side of the road.
The sudden chaos offers a dramatic reversal for this small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, which had been deeply affected by more than five years of drought and is now overwhelmed by winter storms.
A few years ago, “you couldn’t even see the lake,” said Jesse Hollis, a floor and tile contractor who grew up in Oroville. “It was empty.” He added, “Nobody thought that this was going to happen.”
Richter added, “We go from hard-core conservation mode—curtailments, restrictions, all these regulations that are imposed on us, justifiably so—and now we’ve got more water than we can physically manage.”
“There’s an element of human danger that’s hanging over our head for who knows how long,” he said. “We’ve got another huge storm system that’s coming this week.”
Since October, Northern California has been pounded by unrelenting rain and snow. The storms have replenished severely depleted water reserves, blanketed the Sierra Nevada in snow and turned brown hills to green across the state. But they have also wreaked havoc and raised questions about whether the state could have done more to prevent a break. Rivers unable to contain the runoff from the mountains have repeatedly burst their banks, flooding homes.
The latest trouble started last week, after heavy rainfall rapidly lifted Lake Oroville, built into a canyon about 70 miles north of Sacramento.
As water was drained through two spillways over the weekend, officials became concerned that one was poised to collapse. If that happened, they said, it could unleash a 30-foot wall of water into the Feather River that would tear through several cities in the valley below.
Last Sunday emergency officials issued urgent warnings: Evacuate now or risk everything. Thousands heeded the call, streaming away out of town in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Gov. Jerry Brown has requested that the White House make an emergency declaration for Yuba, Butte and Sutter counties. By Monday, the area remained precarious with more storms set to hit later in the week. Evacuation orders remained in place. “This is still a dynamic situation,” said Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, which contains Oroville.
In Oroville there were a few signs of life. There was light traffic. A handful of gas stations and restaurants were open. Charles Smith, an ironworker in town, said his neighborhood was high enough to avoid the danger. His neighbors, however, were not so sure. “When I woke up this morning, we were the only people there,” said Smith, 36.
Water has since stopped flowing over the auxiliary spillway, allowing crews to assess the damage there. Water was flowing at the rate of 100,000 cubic feet per minute over the main spillway, which has a hole of its own but is not worsening.
There is no damage to the dam itself—which, at 770 feet, is the tallest in the country and a critical piece of the state’s water system. Saturday was the first time the emergency spillway came into use since the dam was completed in 1968.
On Monday helicopters were bringing in large rocks and other building materials for engineers to use to shore up the damage. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had activated coordination centers in response to the situation at the dam.
Pentagon officials in Washington said they were closely watching the looming crisis. Capt. Jeff Davis, a Defense Department spokesman, said on Monday all 23,000 California National Guard members had been put on alert. Those troops report to Brown. Davis also said the Pentagon was prepared to send emergency aircraft, reconnaissance equipment, water rescue units, medical supplies and tents, if needed.
The emergency spillway, like many others, is made largely of earth, with only a concrete weir, or sill, at the top. Water spilling over it cascades down an earthen hillside that is easily eroded. Environmental groups, including Friends of the River, a California-wide organization, requested in 2005 that the state cover the hillside with concrete. The request was rejected.
“They didn’t think they would ever need it, and they were confident that erosion was not going to be a problem,” said Ron Stork of Friends of the River. “Both of those have now been demonstrated to be inaccurate assessments.”
At a news conference on Monday, Bill Croyle, the acting director of the California Department of Water Resources, said he was not familiar with that request and that the use of the emergency spillway—and the resulting erosion—was a “new, never-happened-before event.”
In Colusa evacuees found a place to rest at the fairgrounds. Roughly 200 people stayed in the parking lot or in exhibition halls opened up for the night.
The crisis has highlighted social issues that plague this area, which has historically suffered from high rates of unemployment and poverty. The region also has a very visible homeless population.
In Marysville and Yuba City, organizations rushed to evacuate the many homeless people. John Nicoletti, a former county supervisor and staff member with Habitat for Humanity, said local officials and nonprofit organizations pooled resources to bus those who did not have cars.
Miguel Vazquez, 41, who works in an auto paint and body shop, was worried about the prospect of losing work for a few days in Yuba City. He said residents, especially farmworkers and others reliant on the agricultural economy, were concerned.
“A couple of years ago everybody needs water,” Vazquez said. “Now there’s extra water.”
Some residents without transportation evacuated on foot. William Wright, 35, said it took him 12 hours to walk from Yuba City to the fairgrounds in Colusa.
“It makes no sense to sit there below a dam when it’s in question,” Wright said.
Image credits: Jim Wilson/The New York Times