Damaged spillway threatens Northern California towns

A huge Northern California reservoir, held in place by a massive dam, has always been central to the life of the towns around it.

Now the lake that has brought them holiday fireworks and salmon festivals could bring disaster.

Nearly 200,000 people, who evacuated Sunday over fears that a damaged spillway at Lake Oroville could fail and unleash a wall of water, have to stay away indefinitely while officials race to repair it before more rains arrive Thursday.

Evacuees felt strange on Monday to see their beloved lake associated with urgent voices on the national news.

“Never in our lives did we think anything like this would have happened,” said Brannan Ramirez, who has lived in Oroville, a town of about 16,000 people, for about five years.

The gold-rush town in the Si- erra Nevada foothills some 70 miles northeast of Sacramento is nestled near the foot of the dam, which at 770 feet is the nation’s largest. Houses and churches are perched on tree-lined streets near the Feather River. Old, ornate Victorian homes sit alongside smaller bungalows.

Cities and towns further down the Feather River also are in danger. Yuba City, population 65,000, is the biggest city evacuated. The city has the largest dried-fruit processing plant in the world and one of the largest populations of Sikhs outside of India.

The region is largely rural and its politics dominated by rice growers and other agricultural interests, including orchard operators. The region is dogged by the high unemployment rates endemic to farming communities. There are large pock- ets of poverty and swaths of sparsely populated forests, popular with anglers, campers and backpackers.

For now, it’s all at the mercy of the reservoir that usually sustains it, and provides water for much of the state. “If anything, we would have thought that the dam would have been constructed better,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez said it was “extremely frustrating” when he heard reports that emerged Monday of complaints about the potential danger that came from environmentalists and government officials a dozen years ago.

Those warnings described the very scenario that was threatening to unfold, though they were dismissed state and federal regulators who expressed confidence that the dam and its spillways could withstand serious storms. /