Sen. Kamala Harris to visit Oroville Dam as work continues on damaged spillways
U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) will tour Lake Oroville on Thursday as crews continue to repair the reservoir’s damaged spillways.
“While touring the dam, I will be briefed on how this happened and how we can prevent this from happening again from state officials and the National Guard,” she wrote on Facebook.
Crews have been working around the clock for almost two weeks, placing rock, aggregate and cement slurry into the eroded spillways.
In a tweet Thursday morning, Harris said she was taking an aerial tour to survey the damaged spillways and repair work.
Harris’ visit comes a day after Gov. Jerry Brown met with workers at the dam’s incident command center and surveyed its flood control system.
Brown declared a state of emergency on Feb. 13, a day after more than 100,000 people were ordered to temporarily evacuate from communities downstream of Lake Oroville.
The emergency spillway at the dam, used for the first time when the lake topped its banks, had eroded dangerously, prompting fears it could collapse.
In the days following the crisis, Harris and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent a letter to President Trump, calling on him to approve an emergency declaration for counties affected by the incident, which he later did. The declaration allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide disaster relief assistance.
To help with debris removal, the California Department of Water Resources again reduced the rate of water release Thursday to 50,000 cubic feet per second from the dam’s main flood control spillway.
“The continued success of lowering reservoir levels has provided room to accommodate incoming water and lake levels will continue to fall,” the department said in a statement.
Water levels at the lake have decreased to 50 feet below maximum capacity after rising slightly a day before.
Officials said Wednesday that water was flowing into the lake faster than it was being drained from the spillway after last weekend’s storms.
By Thursday, however, water releases from the spillway once again were surpassing the inflows, state officials said.
Twitter: VeronicaRochaLA
UPDATES:
12:45 p.m.: This article was updated with new outflow numbers from the California Department of Water Resources.
This article was originally published at 10:40 a.m.
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