I live a couple hours from there. The dam is intact, the reserve spillways are what's causing the problem. California is inundated with landslides, flooding and now this, due to the huge amounts of rain we've had this year. This state is very large, with a huge population, so naturally structures aren't maintained as we'd hope. We are all so used to disasters of one kind or another somewhere in our state, it's not so alarming unless you are right in the disaster. They've evacuated people in the low lying areas who could be affected by the water flows and flooding, especially since more rain is on it's way. Last year it was fires and evacuations. This year it's the flooding and dams.

This story Reminded me of the Johnstown, PA flood of 1889 that I just read a book about. Over 2,000 people dies when the dam burst suddenly after decades of neglect in maintaining the dam.

I live in Northern California, several counties away from the Oroville dam.

Two days before the evacuation, a spokesman for the Department of Water Resouces said in a tv interview that he had the best dam experts and the best dam engineers monitoring the dam, and felt confident that the emergency spillway would perform exactly as it should.

Oops.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/02/14/why_didn_t_anyone_fix_the...

Seems like it may have been the Feds who nixed a fix in 2005 or so, under G.W.'s administration...

"The larger question is why engineers were sure that letting 450,000 cubic feet per second of water flow down an earthen hillside would not cause damaging erosion. (That was what the emergency spillway was built for—in reality, a far smaller quantity of water surged over the lip and down the hillside.) In 2005, environmental groups argued this exact situation might occur, and urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to force the state to "armor" the hillside with concrete or other reinforcements.

That didn't happen. Ron Stork, the policy director of Friends of the River, an environmental group that brought the original complaint, told the San Jose Mercury News that he was told that contractors (the entities that buy water from the massive State Water Project, of which Lake Oroville is the keystone) did not want to pay for the improvements.

Jeffrey Kightlinger, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the water utility for Los Angeles and its environs, said the issue was not cost but federal guidelines, the Los Angeles Times reported. In those guidelines, he said Monday, "they talk about how you don’t put a lot of funding and concrete, etc. into emergency spillways because presumably they will rarely if ever be used.” That rare moment, it turns out, would've been right now."

I am in Southern Cali close to the beaches. We have received a lot of rain which was needed. Like others have said there is always one kind of issue in this area. Fire, Flooding, landslides etc. The biggest issue in my area are the damn pothole. When there is a puddles you can't see them and many people are popping their tires.