Tag Archives: Oroville Dam

When it comes, change happens swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.

I've witnessed this time and time again since co-founding Peak Prosperity. And pretty much every time, I notice that the vast majority of people — including many of the the watchful and preparation-minded folks who read this site — are caught by surprise.

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Remember the crisis earlier this year at the Oroville Dam? 

The overflow from California's winter of heavy rain threatened to overpower our country's tallest dam. A cascading failure of the dam's main gates, its primarily spillway AND its emergency spillway had the world watching hour by hour to see if a catastrophic breach was going to occur.

Fortunately, the rains stopped long enough for the situation to be brought under control. The dam remains in place and repair crews have been working all spring and summer.

But should we breathe easy at this point? Not at all, says dam safety expert Scott Cahill. 

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The main lesson from Oroville — or Fukushima, or Katrina —  is that governments do a poor job of relating accurate information to their citizens when big threats are involved. Part of that is likely due to a desire to avoid stoking fear. Part probably due to politics and bureaucracy. And part probably due to plain old incompetence.

Regardless of the cause, it means that the public — even the vigilant ones — suffer information deficits when it matters most. Simply put, the authorities do not share all the facts necessary for making informed decisions.

Which brings us to one of the truly great risks we’re facing today. One with much more destructive potential than a single failed dam but, like Oroville, one the authorities are desperate to keep us in the dark about.

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To make sense of the fast-developing situation at California's Oroville Dam, Chris spoke today with Scott Cahill, an expert with 40 years of experience on large construction and development projects on hundreds of dams, many of them earthen embankment ones like the dam at Oroville. Scott has authored numerous white papers on dam management, he's a FEMA trainer for dam safety, and is the current owner of Watershed Services of Ohio which specializes in dam projects across the eastern US. Suffice it to say, he knows his "dam" stuff.

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This is a running commentary on the rapidly developing Oroville dam situation. Because the story developed so rapidly, there wasn’t time to write a complete report.

I’ll have a tidy summary at some point, but first we have to scour and assemble the information.

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