I spoke to Scott Cahill, the dam safety guy, today, about the Oroville Dam Spillway situation. Not so good.

I am banned from a GLP forum discussing this. I had posted a link from UC Berkeley. Here is the link
[link to alumni.berkeley.edu (secure)]

Greetings all.

Scott Cahill is at Watershed Services of Ohio, along with his wife who is also an expert in dam safety. He has three decades of dam safety teaching and experience under his belt.

[link to www.linkedin.com (secure)]

The phone number is online, so I called to ask about the spillway. I never expected a call back, but within a few hours he and his wife called me back. I asked him several questions and we spoke for over half an hour.

I want to add my general impression of the man. He is very gracious and kind and answered every question, and is not by any means a "doomer", but a realistic sounding person who wants to hope for the best and cares about lives below a troubled dam. He said I could repeat anything he said- ie, not worried about a lawsuit- but there are some things I won't repeat in case I didn't remember the exact details perfectly and I don't want to misquote him.

He gave me the disclaimer that he has not been out on the dam this spring, nor party to DWR secret information. He does have some CA contacts inc. engineers who have told him things the past couple years, but are afraid to go public because they will lose their jobs.

The new billion dollar spillway has failed. Too much water is coming up from underneath. They bolted it down to the underlying rock, but it had been bolted down in 2017 and we saw what happened. They are afraid to use it now lest a slab be pushed up from the water pressure. They are hoping that there is no more major rain, and the Hyatt Power Plant discharge (approx 10,000 cfs) can handle the snow melt enough to not make the spillway necessary this year.

The new emergency spillway would fail from erosion cutback, same as last time. No question. They need excess water to go down the primary spillway, not the emergency spillway.

I asked him, if the 2017 "canyon" did not cut back to the lake, and the spillway failed again this year, could it cut back to the lake this time? He said maybe.

He said the information about the underlying rock and all the geology has been made a national security item, so the public is not to be told anything. I asked about grouting the voids. He said that if the rains stop and they don't need to use the spillway, they could take maybe six months and try to grout all the voids where the water is moving underneath. I asked if they could definitely seal the places where water is moving and he said maybe.

Lots of maybes with this dam.

He told me that some years ago he was asked to be on a panel to assess the California dams. He did his investigation, wrote up a report of all the problems, and made recommendations. This what he does- dam safety. The panel report finally came out and they had eliminated every single thing he had written, and basically said the dams were fine.

I asked why- I mean, it is just so wrong- and he said CA is bankrupt and they don't want to face all the work that needs to be done on their dams.

Cahill said that in 2017 when the spillway broke and carved that nasty canyon in the hill, it was visually awful but not a threat to the dam itself. However, the gates are the big threat. He said they should not have tried to fix the spillway yet but made the gates the top priority the last two years. (all sorts of cracks).

I asked about Juan Brown ( Blancolirio). He said Juan was a good guy who started out reporting on the dam and flying his plane over, but he is a pilot and not a dam safety person. Juan is pretty much the same as DWR now when it comes to what you will hear presented. Cahill wasn't critical or bitter, (he knows they say nasty things about him at the Blancolirio site), but Juan believes what DWR says and DWR is not honest.

He then told me some possible insider knowledge about conflicts of interest and shady business dealings within the CA govt structure as it relates to dams. No surprise, and I think I'll let it go at that.

He said a hundred thousand people may have to die in a dam failure before CA does what has to be done.

He talked about the loss of Oroville dam to Central Valley agriculture and the S CA water supply. It would be disastrous.

He made a big effort to contact responsible persons and agencies about his concerns but nobody official writes or calls back.

If you pray to the Lord, you can pray for mercy that it doesn't rain and that when the water levels drop they can grout all the voids so well that there are no more water leaks. And that they fix the gates. Or else accept that this dam may fail and pray the people below can get out safely. I can't tell you how to pray, but it is not a good situation.

Thanks for reading.