My Birthday

I had a really nice birthday. It was on a Sunday which is my only complaint. On Saturday the 11th Dan made a delicious steak dinner and I had some friends over and we played games. It was really fun and nice. 

My actual birthday was great but there was a little drama at the end. I went to church and them my brothers came so we could car pool to Loralie's house. Dan had me open the present he got me.

 

My very own mumu!!! He felt like I needed my own since I borrowed my moms last summer. 

 

At Loralie's we played badminton and visited before dinner. It was Scottys birthday as well and he requested pizza and so that's what we had.

 Right after we started to eat we found out that there was an emergency in Oroville. The dam is full this year because of all the snow and for the first time in 47 years the emergency spillway was being used. As the DWR people watched it they noticed a lot of erosion was happening really fast and they feared the emergency spillway would break. So lots of Oroville was evacuated because officials believed it would break within the hour. My mom was on the evacuation list. All of a sudden we were all glued to the TV and it made for a long night.

The emergency spillway did not end up breaking but lots of damage was caused and Oroville was on careful watch for two weeks. School was canceled as officials tried to put a band aid on the dam. Here are some before, after and during pictures.

Before. The lake is so full. Such a great sight after years of drought.

 

After they started releasing water over the normal spillway some damage was seen.

 

Unfortunately there was not time to repair the damage because the lake was filling up so fast. They were forced to let water come down the spillway.

 

The water created a new path, this is not good. Even though water was being let out they couldn't keep up with how fast the lake was filling. For the first time in the history of Oroville dam the auxiliary spillway was used.

 

 

It looks pretty until you see all the erosion it is causing.

 

It completely wiped out the road. The auxiliary spillway was used for a couple of days until the water got low enough to stop flowing over the top.

After the lake got below the auxiliary spillway level they were still forced to let a lot of water out on the actual spillway because more storms were coming.

 

So much water. It is so powerful!

 

It is easy to see why so much damage was caused. Here are some pictures of the spillway now that they were able to stop the water from flowing.

 

 

 

I stole these pictures offline but it is easy to see why people are scared. There are billions of dollars of repairs that will now need to happen. The other really sad thing is that because the Feather River was so full lots of flooding happened down stream. Lots of damage was caused all over the state.

I have never watched the news as much as I did the two weeks following my birthday. It really has been a crazy situation and I don't even live there anymore.