WEAPONIZING THE OROVILLE DAM JUNE 16-17, 2023

On February 7, 2017 the Oroville Dam Spillway in Oroville, CA started to come apart as a raging California winter storm pounded the Oroville are and the Feather River water shed area for days. On February 7, DWR employees noticed an unusual flow pattern. This halted spillway outflow, and DWR brought engineers onto the spillway to inspect its integrity. The engineers found a large area of concrete and foundation erosion. Ultimately the main spillway failed and emergency spillway was pressed into action but by February 12, 2017 after several hours of overtopping the soil beneath the emergency spillway started to erode and "head cut" back toward the spillway's og weir. The Sheriff of Butte County Kory L. Honea ordered the main spillway gates reopened. After 4 hours at over 50,000 csf flows over the damaged main spillway the water stopped overtopping the og weir of the emergency spillway. A crisis was averted which could have seen over 2 million people affected with massive numbers of deaths and injuries. Farming would have ended as the inundation of the largest rice producing area in the world would have occurred.