Mercury News Editorial: Oroville Dam is a model of how not to address a flooding problem

This editorial is from the Mercury News in San Jose:

Transparency should always be a public agency's default position, because problems always arise when it isn't.

A case in point is how the state Department of Water Resources has handled Lake Oroville for years. It continues despite considerable public and political pressure since the spillway collapse.

Two developments last week perfectly illustrate the point. One involves awarding a nine-figure bid to a company to fix the spillway without any detail about what the company is actually doing. The other involves an independent review of what went wrong, which takes on added weight because the promised review by the government is nonexistent so far.

The independent analysis was released this week by Robert Bea, a founder of UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and a nationally recognized expert, who reviewed what went wrong in high-profile disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. He blames DWR for the Oroville disaster. Bea determined the spillway collapse was “developed and propagated by DWR during the gated spillway design, construction and maintenance activities.” Bea said when he saw roughly 180,000 people downstream from the dam being forced into a “terrifying evacuation” on Feb. 12, “I was just shaking my head because it was a trauma that didn't have to happen.”

The short answer: Many things went wrong, both in design and building of the spillway, as well as maintenance over the ensuing years.

Given the state's track record, Bea's report may be the best explanation we get. The federal government has ordered the Department of Water Resources to oversee an examination by independent dam safety experts. A water resources spokesman assures us that is being worked on and will be released to the public. There's no timetable. Based on Department of Water Resources' performance so far, we aren't holding our breath. We'll hope for the best but expect the usual.

We saw more of that with the bidding process for spillway repairs. The Department of Water Resources named the three companies that bid on the project and the amount of their bids. It then announced late Monday that the huge Fortune 500 company Kiewit was awarded the $275 million-plus contract.

What exactly is Kiewit doing? We don't know. DWR refused to release details because it “could cause a security risk if released.”

The project is vaguely described by DWR as “the complete recovery or replacement of the spillway.” Note the word “or.” It could be that DWR doesn't know what it's doing yet because its own study isn't complete. How can DWR design a fix if it doesn't know what went wrong?

That's a troubling $275 million question that DWR doesn't want to answer for the people paying the bill - which would be taxpayers.