THIS JUST IN … Oroville Dam, Friday noon: Water to flow down damaged spillway today; Spill event to last five to six days

Flows out of the Hyatt Power Plant are at 12,900 cfs.
We’re modeling and forecasting that twice a day, rerunning our reservoir models and looking at what that might do to reservoir elevations, and that will impact when we start stepping down the reservoir from 50,000 to 40,000 and if there’s some other steps as we go down to ultimately zero about a week from now.” “The Hyatt Power Plant is running right now at 12,900, so as we step up our flows on the spillway today, we’ll start backing off on the Hyatt Power Plant.
The idea is to make sure nothing moves around while we go through this spill event.
If we have a mild cool spring, early summer, then our models suggest we can get away two spills, including this spill today, so the operation of the Hyatt Power Plant is very helpful, to not only get water out of the reservoir, but help balance downstream water conditions within the flood control system.” “In other words, with Hyatt operating, we’ll have about 13,000 cfs, any water that we can spill out of the spillway or come out of the Thermalito afterbay will help minimize these large elevation changes within the river system all the way down the system.” “We do have flood operations.
So we expect that with the 50,000 cfs, again we’ll be balancing those flows today between Hyatt Power House going to 0, discharges from the Thermalito Afterbay, and then ultimately the spill off the spillway all through the number of hours midday today.” “We expect water levels within the Feather River to move up between 10 and 15 feet depending upon the geometry within that flood control system, so an important message today is please stay out of the flood control system.
At some point, we won’t be able to get additional water over the spillway, so again that water has to come through that Hyatt Power Plant.” “The work on the emergency spillway is almost done.
So this week, a number of drill rigs have been mobilized to the site to start collecting the geotechnical information that they need to start vetting out all the information they need to kind of fine tune the corrective actions or the mitigation actions that are needed to reinforce and repair the flood control spillway and the emergency spillway.” “There are some no regrets projects that we’re moving fast on.
We need to make sure the resources are available to do one or more options.
We’re doing two because if there’s a critical flaw in any of that – schedule, resource needs, or just the design, then we can off that and choose the other option.” The latest pictures from the Department of Water Resources … Erosion control measures and dredging continues along the diversion pool below the Lake Oroville flood control spillway on March 15, 2017.
Kelly M. Grow/ California Department of Water Resources The latest video from Department of Water Resources … ——————————————– Sign up for daily email service and you’ll always be one of the first to know!

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