Dam report cause for alarm
Arecently completed review of last year’s Oroville Dam crisis does not inspire confidence in California’s vast water infrastructure or those managing it. The experts who conducted the postmortem detail a neartragedy of errors, starting more than a half-century ago with flaws in the dam’s design, continuing through potentially counterproductive repairs, and culminating with the mismanaged emergency that forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 downstream residents.
The independent forensic team’s criticism falls most heavily on the state agency responsible for the nation’s tallest dam, the Department of Water Resources, described at different points as complacent, overconfident, balkanized, insular, and misguided. That got the attention of Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, which announced the appointment of the department’s fourth director in just over a year and created a new high-level position responsible for dam safety.
The outgoing director, Grant Davis, said in a statement that that the agency was already making Oroville and other dams safer and was taking the report “very seriously.” But he had also asked federal regulators to relicense the dam for another 50 years two weeks before the report was finished. Lawmakers representing the Sacramento Valley communities at ground zero, including Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale (Butte County), state Sen. Jim Nielsen, RGerber (Tehama County), and Assemblyman Jim Gallagher, R-Nicolaus (Sutter County), had urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take the time to analyze the report as well as the state’s response before it issues another license.
“With a catastrophe of this nature,” LaMalfa wrote FERC in July, “it doesn’t make sense to continue with the licensing process until all the facts are known, identified and fixed.”
The report, requested by federal officials, certainly deserves their careful consideration. It traces the weaknesses of the spillway at the center of the emergency partly to a faulty design by an inexperienced engineer. Cracks in the spillway were noted within the first year of operations, but officials soon redefined such problems as routine, addressing them over the decades with a series of patches that the reviewers deem “ineffective and possibly detrimental.”
When the spillway began to disintegrate under the force of releases after last winter’s extraordinary rains, even though it was a small fraction of the volume the concrete chute supposedly could handle, officials went against the advice of technical staff and allowed releases over an untested emergency spillway, the forensic team found. That compounded the risk to the dam and necessitated the evacuation.
The reviewers blame the long, complex series of miscues behind the crisis partly on procedural, regulatory and cultural shortcomings that afflict dam operations nationwide. But they also find much wrong with the Department of Water Resources in particular, including undue confidence in the unassailability of its infrastructure and expertise, bureaucratic infighting and isolation, and misplaced priorities that sometimes allowed safety concerns to take a backseat to delivering water to farmers and cities, generating power and controlling costs.
Department officials have argued that last year’s emergency should be kept separate from the dam’s license to generate hydroelectric power, which has been under consideration for more than a decade. But given the reviewers’ determination that the near-disaster was rooted in a “long-term systemic failure” of the department and its regulators, no long-term license should be issued without a close examination of the report and assurances that the state’s response will be equal to its conclusions.