The CDEC website is down since about twelve hours ago, so we have no reliable absolute number on the water elevation at the dam, but we can say for sure that it has been rising once again the past three days, after the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) reversed the couple of weeks of high-volume outflow through the Hyatt Power Plant that allowed the dam to drop a couple feet from the recent high-water mark at around 895.3' down to 893.31'.
The outflow levels at Hyatt have been cut from the 10-12,000 CFS level, inexplicably back to around 4-5,000 CFS. This has resulted in about an 8" elevation gain, and when the CDEC site went down yesterday, some of the largest hourly increases in weeks were being reported. This puts us at less than 100,000 AF of emergency storage capacity, and less than 7' from overtopping the emergency spillway again--which, by the way, is weeping pretty severely, has new visible cracks on it's top face, and leaks badly at a horizontal seam that runs the length of the 1400' structure when the water level is where it is now.
(Image courtesy of redding.com.)
Also, yesterday, two large rigs were seen injecting grout into an area just to the left (looking down) of the gate house structure where the downhill edge of the bridge road--an area about 30' x'10'--near the bridge had been sagging and threatening to collapse. DWR has also announced they are going to be building a new road across the main spillway below the base of the entire structure, which, obviously, will be unusable with the spillway in operation, and that they will give up use of the bridge immediately in front of the gate house, as it is in THAT BAD OF A CONDITION that they are willing to abandon access across the dam altogether when the spillway is in use.
But everything is "just fine" at Oroville Dam, according to the operators.
Uh huh.
(Image courtesy of boingboing.net.)
There was also what appeared to be some unauthorized blasting caught on camera yesterday down near where the new road is going in...
But hey, blasting in close proximity to 54-year old dam with DEMONSTRABLE FAULTS and cracks everywhere isn't anything to be concerned about, right?