Water could pour over an emergency spillway at Lake Oroville for the first time ever, a last-ditch alternative that California officials said they had been hoping to avoid.
The California Department of Water Resources said that the reservoir’s emergency spillway likely will be used, perhaps, as soon as early Saturday.
Earlier this week, chunks of concrete flew off the nearly mile-long spillway, creating a 200-foot-long, 30-foot-deep hole. Engineers don’t know what caused the cave-in that is expected to keep growing until it reaches bedrock.
The department does not expect the discharge from the reservoir to exceed the capacity of any channel downstream as the water flows through the Feather River, into the Sacramento River and on to the San Francisco Bay.
Officials say Oroville Dam itself is sound and there is no imminent threat to the public.
Located about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco, Oroville Lake is one of the largest man-made lakes in California and the 770-foot-tall Oroville Dam is the nation’s tallest.
The lake is a central piece of California’s government-run water delivery network, supplying water for agriculture in the Central Valley and residents and businesses in Southern California.
(AP)
