It seems to me unfair to accuse the builders of the dam or the engineers of poor quality.

Even today, when prudent and reasonable recommendations are made to improve the emergency spillway so as to prevent future problems or even catastrophe, the federal regulators rejected the proposal.  IOW we're facing today the same bureaucratic obstacles that the builders and engineers faced in 1967.

Notice that the main dam is not said to be threatened, even if it is an earthen dam which is not made of concrete, but dirt. It may not be in danger, but I can't imagine why all those people who live in Oroville don't mind being under its shadow every day.

BTW who knows where Oroville gets its name?

The Feather River was one of the principal claim sites in the California Gold Rush. Things haven't changed all that much in the upper regions of the river which has 3 forks. It's quite reasonable to expect that significant quantities of gold dust is coming into Lake Oroville by way of these inlets, just as it did in 1849.

Maybe Lake Oroville could pay for its own dam repairs.

Forecasters tell Northern Californians: Be prepared to flee!

Northern California residents were urged to prepare to evacuate as flooding was said to be possible for areas that haven’t seen flooding in many years.

The National Weather Service issued this precaution Monday morning: “Be prepared to evacuate if flooding should affect your area. Gather a 'go bag' with important items like medications and hard to replace docuмents. Do not forget to plan for you pets and animals. Please never drive across flooded waters and roadways, especially flowing water.  Most people who are killed or injured during floods are attempting to drive through flooded waters.  Turn around, don`t drown!”

High winds with gusts up to 40 mph were forecast for Monday and Tuesday.

High water conditions were forecast to continue on the lower San Joaquin River system for the next several days. Very heavy precipitation moving into the area early was expected to continue into Tuesday. Renewed rises will develop on the Cosumnes River as inflows increase with incoming storm systems, the Weather Service said.

A flood warning was in effect for urban areas and small streams until 4 p.m. Thursday in Colusa, Yolo, Sutter, Solano, Plumas, Alpine, Place, Shasta, Lassen, Amado, Tulumne, Sacramento, Lake, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, El Dorado, Calaveras, Tehama, Butte, Glenn, Sierra, Yuba and Nevada counties.

The Weather Service said an “intense Atmospheric River type storm had arrived over Northern California. “Our entire region has saturated soils and many flooded areas already. This (storm) will enhance the impact of heavy rains. Additional stress will be placed on levees, rivers, creeks and streams.”

Voted for 1,  That Dam is going to collapse even though is built to standards
of the 1960's.
They said that "God could not sink the Titanic" until is was sunk by a
iceberg in 1912.

http://www.chieftain.com/news/national/forecasters-tell-northern-californians-be-prepared-to-flee/article_a119b1c0-7fa6-5034-93af-d1767ae2ed60.html
   

A flood warning was in effect for urban areas and small streams until 4 p.m. Thursday in Colusa, Yolo, Sutter, Solano, Plumas, Alpine,  Place , Shasta, Lassen,  Amado ,  Tulumne , Sacramento, Lake, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, El Dorado, Calaveras, Tehama, Butte, Glenn, Sierra, Yuba and Nevada counties. [....]
This article originally ran on <http://curated.tncontentexchange.com/>

The Pueblo Chieftain and TN News Service combination would be more credible if it hadn't failed to correctly spell the names of 3 counties in the list (13%) quoted above, i.e.: Placer, Amador, Tuolumne.  So instead, I wonder: Who are these anonymous clowns?   They have no credible excuses.  Any draft article that lists out-of-state county-names should scream to an editor: Check the [expletives deleted] spellings!  If that's too challenging, then what details that are not trivially checked did they also get wrong?

Seeing as how I'm not getting paid to do the work that the news sources ought  to have done themselves, I'm simply going from memory as faded by 2 decades of absence.  Only a minority of the 23 counties named are in the path of potential dam-burst flood-waters; others listed will receive run-off from the western slope of the Sierra(s) (and maybe also the western foothills) that's farther north or south, and so never flows into Lake Oroville.  But what with my topographic map(s) covering the Sacramento Valley being in storage, I'm not going to try to present my own list of counties at risk from that dam.

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Note *: "Forecasters tell Northern Californians: Be prepared to flee!  By TN News Service Feb 20, 2017 Updated Feb 21, 2017". Via The Pueblo Chieftain: <http://www.chieftain.com/news/national/forecasters-tell-northern-californians-be-prepared-to-flee/article_a119b1c0-7fa6-5034-93af-d1767ae2ed60.html>

Lake Berryessa's Spiraling Floodwaters Mesmerizes the Locals

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/science/lake-berryessa-spillway-california-glory.html

The dam itself is not in danger of failing, as I understand it.  The danger is that the emergency spillway (which is nothing more than a hillside), because of the amount of water going over it, could erode away allowing a gigantic amount of water out of the lake and downstream.

Warning: profanity here.

This is what it's like to be caught in actively increasing floodwater on a mountain highway.

What can we do? If we get out of the car we'll be killed. Look at that camper over there, he's going to go over the edge.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/embed/MHZK9s5iDIs[/youtube]

The liberals are saying the drought isn't over.

They don't want to lose the revenues from penalties.

I forgot to mention, in the previous post above, the late in the video they talk about fissures and caving that has occurred inside the emergency spillway zone, and that's why they've made all air traffic prohibited there. They don't want any drones or helicopters flying over the spillway because they don't want pictures of the holes exposed by the lowered water level of the dam. These holes are in the dam wall below the emergency spillway on the lake side (not on the Oroville side).  So Governor Moonbeam is doing double duty on political damage control by hiding the fact that he was present there himself and hiding the fact that serious damage to the dam has occurred, damage that will be very difficult to repair if we keep getting rainstorms in the next two months.

Apparently they've named the current storm system in the Pacific "Lucifer."

The video opens with rare footage in the first minute, from the Indonesia tsunami showing dozens of people getting crushed with a huge wall of sea water, which then smashes several buildings to small sticks before your eyes.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/embed/CchbMVgu8e8[/youtube]

At minute 8:30 they show a fire truck falling into a sinkhole, a few days ago.
The two cars lost in a Sherman Oaks sinkhole (caused by leaking sewer pipes, thus nicknamed "stinkhole") is shown at minute 13. The man who escaped the second vehicle is an actor who was in a recent TV show. He called in to KFI AM 640 just yesterday to explain the situation to Tim Conway Jr., show host. (Son of Tim Conway of Mchale's Navy and Carol Burnett Show) They gave him a link on the station website for his GoFundMe page to recover losses when his car was totaled.

Mandatory evacuations minute 18.

Funny:  We need rain, but maybe one day;  it has to stop after a week or two;  when it's not saturated it comes again, that's what we need. We need a lot of water. (Minute 19:50)