Evacuees might not return until spillway repaired
he did not know if anything had gone wrong and was unaware of a 2005 report that recommended fortifying the earthen emergency spillway with concrete for just such an event. The spillway had never been used in the dam’s nearly 50 years of operation, and it was not near capacity when it began to fail.
“I’m not sure anything went wrong,” Bill Croyle said. “This was a new, never-having-happened-before event.”
Croyle and the local sheriff sought to reassure the public that downstream communities were safe until water began spilling over the lake’s edge Sunday.
The Department of Water Resources said conditions were stable at noon and then tweeted an evacuation order at 4:45 p.m. warning of a possible failure within the hour, saying “this is not a drill.”
Chaos ensued as anxious residents rushed to pack up their families and abandon several communities in Butte, Yuba and Sutter Counties. The mostly flat northern Central Valley is known mainly for its sprawling agriculture industry, which is fed by dammed-up rivers that spill down from the Sierra Nevada foothills nearby.
It took some people seven hours to travel to evacuation centers that should have been an hour away, said Chico Councilman Andrew Coolidge, who visited with evacuees in packed shelters in his city.
Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea insisted the evacuation had been accomplished in a “fairly timely fashion” and a “fairly orderly manner.”
Patrick Miner of Live Oak said he and his family in a caravan of four cars returned home after driving back roads for two hours and feared they would run out of gas. They didn’t bother trying to fuel up because lines were hours long at gas pumps.
“People were just panicking, honking and yelling at each other,” he said. “I just got nervous and decided to hunker down. It was pretty scary.”