In the aftermath, some state officials tried to explain to other state officials that the Oroville incident was merely one of the opening acts of a perilous ongoing drama.

Eventually, the prisoners wound up in Alameda County, in the Santa Rita Jail, where they stayed for days. The lower-risk evacuees were put, unshackled, in regular school buses. They saved their limited stockpile of handcuffs and waist chains for the most violent prisoners even so, on one of the high-security buses, the inmates tried to kick the door open. They had 578 inmates in custody, far more than could fit in Butte County’s prison buses and vans, so they commandeered anything that had wheels. As the citizens of Oroville jammed the roads out of town, the Sheriff’s Department started to evacuate the jail. The rain, however, didn’t.Īs the crisis deepened, all hell broke loose in Butte County. officials closed the gates at the top of the spillway to prevent any more of its concrete slabs from being lost in what an independent forensic report prepared after the incident described as “a sudden, explosive failure.” The flow of water stopped. They weren’t good at communicating externally.” Honea sent his undersheriff up to the dam headquarters to figure out what was going on. “They were a siloed organization, steeped in bureaucracy. was intentionally keeping information from me,” Honea told me.

Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, which includes the dam and the town it is named for, first heard that something was wrong from Dino Corbin, a local radio personality, who called him at his office: “Are you aware there’s a hole in the spillway?” Around the same time, one of the sheriff’s dispatchers received a confusing message from California’s Department of Water Resources, which owns the dam, saying it was conducting a “routine inspection” after reports of an incident. Comes now The New York Times with a truly terrifying story of what happens when the climate crisis collides with the nation's deteriorating infrastructure. As regulars here at the shebeen know, water in its many manifestations is one of the tin drums we bang on loudly in relation to the climate crisis.

Nytimes watching