Nearly 200,000 Californians living near the nation’s tallest dam were allowed to return to their homes Tuesday after authorities lifted an evacuation order put in place amid fears that a damaged spillway could cause catastrophic flooding.
“We have concluded it is safe to reduce the emergency-evacuation order to an evacuation warning,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told residents living below the Oroville Dam.
He cautioned that those returning to their homes “have to be vigilant,” saying “there is the prospect that we will issue another evacuation order . . . if the situation changes.”
Sunday afternoon, residents were ordered to immediately pack up and head to higher ground as officials became concerned that a hole in the dam’s emergency spillway could cause it to collapse, unleashing a 30-foot wall of water on downstream communities.
But since then, workers have managed to lower the water level in the reservoir using the dam’s main spillway, which sustained damage last week due to erosion. The dam itself hasn’t been compromised, engineers said.
Authorities said Tuesday that water is rushing out of the lake at a “reasonable and sustainable” pace and a series of storms expected to roll in later this week shouldn’t cause it to overflow, the LA Times reported.
Workers have also been repairing the emergency spillway, which has a hole in it, by dropping boulders into the gap.
“Over the last two days the lake level has dropped 12 feet below the top of the auxiliary spillway and no longer has water flowing over the top,” the Butte County sheriff’s Office wrote in a statement.
An inspection also “revealed that the integrity of the emergency spillway was not compromised by the erosion.”
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said President Trump was “keeping a close eye” on the emergency.
“The situation is a textbook example of why we need to pursue a major infrastructure package in Congress,” Spicer said.
With Post Wires