Anyone downstream of the Oroville dam

[Pete Mack]

hope you're doing OK. For now, anything catastrophic looks delayed til Wednesday--if ever. But it looks very, very grave.

[bio_hazard]

It's pretty alarming. I work west of Sacramento (not near the impact area), but close enough that we are getting the requests for aid. In addition to housing people, concern about pets and animals belonging to people who are going to hotels and shelters that can't take animals.

There's another big dam (Lake Berryessa) that may crest it's spillway, but that one is better designed so I haven't seen anything suggesting worry to the structural integrity of the whole dam.

There's plenty of other damage in northern California too- flooding and mudslides.

edit: apparently they were successful in dropping the water level far enough to rescind the evacuation order, although with a warning that it could be re-issued. Rain starts up again tomorrow night.

[Pete Mack]

It's really alarming. It was also pretty shocking just how lackadaisical the plans were before Saturday afternoon when things kicked into high gear. The end of the evac should not be considered an all clear by any measure. It's more of a grace period to get your stuff together in case the worst does happen. The engineers on site are not at all confident the main spillway will hold, and the emergency spillway cannot possibly be used for full flow without a whole lot of excavation, not just patching. They are probably able to handle a short surge, but not complete closure of the main spillway. They really need to get the power plant running ASAP to take the median river flow day to day, and save the spillway for when there's no choice.

A whole lot more here:

https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-spillway-failure.t8381/

Edit: the evacuation isn't over. It's now a voluntary evac, which means, in angband terms, quick loot your vault and GTFO.
Here's a simple schematic

[SIZE="6"]########################
[b][COLOR="RoyalBlue"]E[/COLOR][/b].....[COLOR="brown"]pppp[/COLOR]@[COLOR="darkblue"]ppppppppp[/COLOR]
#########################
[/SIZE]

[Carnivean]

Watch John Oliver point out how politics is allowing infrastructure maintenance to fall to the point where this is entirely predictable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8

[bio_hazard]

Welp, just had a student come in in tears because she did crappy on her exam because she was helping her parents move out of the flood zone.