OROVILLE — Five years after the Oroville Dam spillway crisis, DWR has completed the structural rebuild of the main and emergency spillways and says it backs the spillways’ safety.
The rebuilt Oroville Dam spillways are seen from a plane on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022 above Oroville, California. Yarbrough provided some of the numbers behind the main spillway which consists of a chute with 612 slabs and 204 wall placements, 13 million pounds of reinforcing steel and more than half a million cubic yards of concrete. The main spillway can handle up to 270,000 cubic feet of flow per second.
While questions of the spillway’s infrastructure have been answered, at least by DWR, other conclusions remain up in the air as the litigation process between Butte County and DWR continues. The case became complicated as DWR sought to move the hearings to Sacramento where a judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that DWR was not considered an individual person based on the legal terminology, Ramsey said.