For those seeing the stories on the news, the Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in the United States, yes, even taller than Hoover Dam, is having some problems.
First, the wikipedia article on the dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam
Short version, about 50 feet taller than the Hoover Dam, this earthfilled embankment dam holds up to about 134 trillion pounds of water when full. It exceeded that today, going to the emergency spillway, basically a lower place in the dam wall, for the first time since the dam opened 49 years ago. Turns out the hillside below the the spillway didn't like that too much and has quickly eroded. About 188,000 people from smallish towns in the area were evacuated. From Oroville down to Marysville and out to Gridley and many small towns on both sides of the river. Most of them went north to Chico in gridlocked traffic. Hopefully they have friends out there because otherwise they will have to settle for refugee shelters. I've heard but haven't been able to source that there aren't any rooms left to rent for the night in Chico.
I live 70 miles downriver in a reasonable town across the river from the State Capitol. Its about three miles from my house to the Capitol building. My town is surrounded by rivers and canals, the water held back by some of the best levees in the area. We maintain our side, because, ya know, surrounded by them. Still, any levee can fail for a multitude of reasons. One of the local lore type stories is that Sacramento has a stash of explosives designated to blow the levees on our side of the river if theirs start to fail. That piece of local lore has been around since we built them,. 120 years ago.
I may or may not need to evacuate, almost a certainty if the dam fails. Not so much if its just heavy flow through normal dam releases. If you want to read an article on the flood, there are many available.
Sacramento Bee gives you the basics - http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article132332499.html
Today we had as much water spilling over the dam top/emergency spillway as Niagara Falls does on an average day. If you've ever seen it, imagine that going into an already full river. All the weirs to the bypass are open. Those of us who pray are praying. The rest are going WTF OMG all over the internet.
Oh yeah, the main spillway has been damaged by a sinkhole, its been reported by various sources as 45 feet deep, 300 yards wide and 750 feet long, Here's an earlier picture when you could only fir about half a dozen football fields in it.
I'll let you know if I have to evacuate, I've already had a couple of friends in a couple of areas of higher ground offer me couch space if I need to book out. Hopefully not.
Oh, and the latest unverified rumor from normally unreliable sources is that Trump has already denied declaring the area a disaster area because we have multiple sanctuary cities and voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. I doubt it is true, more likely #CalExit propaganda. I think he's waiting to see what our Governor, Jerry Brown is going to do if this turns from a $200 million patch job on the dam and environs to a multi billion dollar flood disaster. Brown has already declared it a Disaster zone.
This is meant to be informational. If you turn it into a political Hellfire thread I'll be very disappointed in you.