How Close Oroville Dam Came to Failing in 2017

In February 2017, the tallest dam in America nearly failed, and 188,000 people had hours to get out. But here's what almost nobody understood at the time: the dam itself never failed at all. What nearly drowned the towns below was a strip of concrete beside it, and a warning that had been sitting in plain sight for fifty years. This is the story of the Oroville Dam crisis: how a cracked spillway, a flawed design from the 1960s, and a hillside nobody had ever tested brought Northern California within feet of catastrophe, and how it ended with zero deaths through a combination of hard engineering decisions and luck. I'm a hydropower engineer, and Oroville isn't an abstract case study to me. I was working on this dam when the crisis hit. In this episode I walk through the full story: the construction of the tallest dam in the United States, the 1965 train disaster during its building, the design flaws baked into the spillway, the day-by-day timeline of the 2017 emergency, and what the independent investigation concluded about how an entire profession missed the warning signs. Chapters: 00:00 Cold open 01:51 History 04:26 The Layout 06:40 Construction 07:51 Train Collision 10:28 What Went Wrong 13:50 The Dam Talks Back 16:11 The Hole 19:36 Emergency Spillway 21:19 The Evacuation 23:29 The Investigation 26:00 Conclusion 28:26 Next Time Footage and photographs of the Oroville spillway incident were created by the California Department of Water Resources. Use of these works is in accordance with the California Public Records Act. Sources and Further Reading: Independent Forensic Team Report on the Oroville Dam Spillway Incident (2018): https://water.ca.gov/Programs/State-W... If you found this useful, subscribe for more deep dives into the engineering of major dams and hydropower. Next time: Kakhovka, and two deliberate dam disasters on one river. #OrovilleDam #engineering #hydropower #damfailure #civilengineering