Thousands Evacuated Near Troubled Dam
This is not a drill. Nearly 200,000 people living below the Oroville dam in Northern California were ordered to evacuate after a week in which engineers scrambled to deal with a structural failure in the reservoir’s emergency spillway. A crack had appeared shortly after the dam reached its 3.5 million acre-feet capacity last Tuesday, and officials who issued the warning said they expected the spillway to fail within an hour. It didn’t — last minute efforts to plug the hole paid off — but officials caution that the situation is still unpredictable.
