Oroville Dam spillway damage forces more than 130,000 evacuations

OROVILLE - At least 130,000 people downriver from Lake Oroville were asked to evacuate after authorities warned an emergency spillway in the country’s tallest dam was in danger of failing Sunday and unleashing uncontrolled flood waters on towns below.

About 30 miles southeast of Chico, Lake Oroville is one of California’s largest man-made lakes.

The evacuation was ordered Sunday afternoon over concerns the 770-foot-tall Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway could fail. Over five hours later, hundreds of cars carrying panicked and angry people were sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“The police came and told us to evacuate,” said Kaysi Levias who was with her husband, Greg, at a gas station as they attempted to flee.

Officials warned residents that the spillway could fail within an hour.

“I’m just shocked,” Greg Levias said. “Pretty mad.”

“Not giving us more warning,” said Kaysi, finishing his sentence.

“We’ve never been through this before,” said Kaysi Levias. “We have two boys and our dog. All the stuff we could fit in the trunk - clothes and blankets.”

What they couldn’t fit they piled as high as they could in their downstairs Yuba City apartment and joined the line of traffic attempting to leave the city where they had moved just three weeks ago.

The cities of Oroville, Gridley, Live Oak, Marysville, Wheatland, Yuba City, Plumas Lake, and Olivehurst were all under evacuation orders.

The evacuation order went out around 4 p.m. after engineers spotted a hole that was eroding back toward the top of the spillway.

The erosion at the head of the emergency spillway threatens to undermine the concrete weir and allow large, uncontrolled releases of water from Lake Oroville, the California Department of Water Resources said. Those potential flows could overwhelm the Feather River and other downstream waterways, channels and levees.

Officials said Oroville Lake levels had decreased by Sunday night as they let water flow from its heavily damaged main spillway Water was no longer going over the emergency spillway late Sunday, but officials said the evacuation orders would stand until more information was analyzed.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said engineers with the Department of Water Resources informed him shortly after 6 p.m. that the erosion on the emergency spillway at the Oroville Dam was not advancing as fast as they thought.

“Unfortunately they couldn’t advise me or tell me specifically how much time that would take so we had to make the very difficult and critical decision to initiate the evacuation of the Orville area and all locations south of that,” he said.

“We needed to get people moving quickly to save lives if the worst case scenario came into fruition.”

Honea said there is a plan to plug the hole by using helicopters to drop rocks into the crevasse.

Water began flowing over the emergency spillway Saturday for the first time in its nearly 50-year history after heavy rainfall. Officials earlier Sunday stressed the dam itself was structurally sound and said there was no threat to the public.

Residents of Oroville, a town of 16,000 people, were advised to head north toward Chico, the Butte County Sheriff’s office said.

The Yuba County Office of Emergency Services asked residents in the valley floor, including Marysville, a city of 12,000 people, to evacuate and take routes to the east, south, or west and avoid traveling north toward Oroville.

The California Department of Water Resources said it is releasing as much as 100,000 cubic feet per second from the main, heavily damaged spillway to try to drain the lake.