Blame evacuation woes on ‘ignorance of the public’

Don’t take it personally, folks, but Yuba City Councilman John Buckland was disappointed.

He was disappointed in you. Your actions during the evacuation weren’t up to his standards.

Buckland offered his observations at the first council meeting after the evacuation back in February. Luckily for everyone in Yuba City, his words have been immortalized on YouTube, so drink them in.

“We knew from the 1997 event what the flood rate would look like, but the misuses of information like ‘wall of water,’ ‘it’s imminent,’ and ‘you have to get out of town quickly’ caused chaos,” he observed, soberly.

“I think one of the things that I know happened that impacted the roads and the egress routes was the fact people did not take heed. It was not their personal safety. They started to preserve property. I saw a number of cars leaving Yuba City with single occupants, multiple vehicles being taken out of families, out of just preservation of their transportation. Those items, in cases like this, should it have become more immediate for their departure, should try to consolidate their transportation and not congest roads for the mere fact of saving a car,” he observed, again soberly.

He didn’t criticize law enforcement for lack of traffic control or local government for the lack of planning for evacuation routes, of course.

Oh, but he was just warming up.

“People don’t even know, and you can read on social media today, the ignorance of the public in certain relations to the height of the dam structure and how it can be 770 feet when they’re talking about 901 feet. They don’t understand one is structure HaroldKrugeris aveteran reporterand copyeditorfor theAppealDemocrat. Call749-4774.

and one is elevation,” he said. “They don’t understand what elevation in the river means.”

Savor that comment when the trauma is still fresh: “ignorance of the public.” In a place like Yuba City, an elected official can say that, and nobody cares.

And now the pièce de résistance.

“They become panicked when for the first time in 12, 14 years, they see water crossing over the soccer fields in Marysville. I don’t know, but I grew up here. I have pretty much have seen it, and much deeper. The bathroom roofs are absolutely covered in water. A lot of the past certainly would have been beneficial for folks to realize when they’re facing danger.”

Yes, luckily for everyone, Buckland grew up here.

Your Sutter County levee man, Mike Inamine, was back in Washington this month, testifying before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He had some interesting stuff to bring up.

Inamine’s testimony came soon after the Oroville Dam incident, and he put a different spin on what the real danger was.

“This statement would be incomplete without noting the importance of the single, most important flood control structure on the Feather River: Oroville Dam. The Feather River is the discharge channel of Oroville Spillway. Dams and levees are a system, and as the ongoing crisis at Oroville Dam evolves, it is easy to forget that the primary failure mode that threatens lives and property is not necessarily dam spillway failure, but rather levee failure,” Inamine said, according to his prepared statement.

“Dam structures, even those as damaged as the Oroville spillways, are built to standards that are orders of magnitude greater than levee standards due to a variety of factors. In the last century, the devastation wrought by a single event, the levee/floodwall failures in New Orleans caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, probably killed more people than all dam failures combined.

“Before the Oroville Spillway incident initiated on Feb. 7, unimproved levees on the lower Feather River were already showing signs of distress. The loss of full functionality of both the service and emergency spillways significantly increases the likelihood that our levees, even in their vastly improved state, could experience flows and accompanying water surface elevations that exceed capacity. Under this foreseeable event, the unimproved levees protecting rural areas would be overcome, and the improved levees would be at grave risk. Again, the Corps plays a crucial role in flood operations by governing the use of flood space in the reservoir, and through their investment in the first cost of Oroville Dam. Oroville Dam has appropriately captured all of our attention at the moment, but we cannot neglect the vulnerability of our levees in the system that includes the Oroville Dam spillways.”

Oh, he went there. Oroville is big, but don’t forget about those darn levees.