This movie was much better when it was called Chinatown. Water is a big deal in California. Not sure where this actually is, but most of the super productive fruit and nut orchards in California are totally dependent on shuffling water around to keep them from turning into desert. If it bursts it could actually be a big deal for the agricultural output of California this year. I recommend that you immediately start buying Frozen Concentrated OJ futures options from the Duke Brothers.
The dam isn't bursting - the primary spillway had a sinkhole damaged the structure in the middle of the slide (imagine the world's largest water slide, then make it 300 feet wide). Once that fails, there's also a secondary spillway. The dam itself is built into the bedrock and just at like 90% capacity due to heavy rain buildup.
It's inaccurate, or fake news, but mostly not the whole story. The title is click-bait and the body is different. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-failure/index.html Anyhow, this wasn't discovered at 3pm local time. This has been known for like 5 days. There's still a secondary spill way so the dam itself isn't the problem. The hole in the primary spillway has caused water to leak out the sides of the slide, so it's causing unforeseen problems. Once the water stops flowing down the spillway, they can work on plugging that hole. And yes, it looks pretty cool from the sky.
Another example of fake news. Damn is not "bursting". Water just being released using secondary spillway.
I have friends who are from nearby there. They've been talking about this for days. It's the first time the emergency spillway has ever been used. Just last year the lake was at historically low levels. Now the entire town has to evacuate. :O
I think you are underselling it a bit. From the wiki article Although engineers had hoped that using the damaged spillway could drain the lake enough to avoid use of the emergency spillway,[26] they were forced to reduce its discharge from 65,000 cu ft/s (1,800 m3/s) to 55,000 cu ft/s (1,600 m3/s) due to potential damage to power lines.[27][28] However, once the lake rose to the level of the emergency spillway, an uncontrolled overflow that topped out at 12,600 cu ft/s (360 m3/s)[30][31] began, and water flowed directly onto the hillside below the concrete crest of the emergency spillway. On February 12, 2017, evacuation was ordered for those in low-lying levels of Oroville, due to an anticipated failure of the auxiliary spillway.[32] A failure of the concrete top of the spillway would allow up to 30 vertical feet of Lake Oroville through the gap in an uncontrolled deluge. The flow over the main spillway was increased to 100,000 cubic feet per second (2,800 m3/s) to try to slow the erosion of the emergency spillway.[33] So 5 days ago there was no threat to public safety. now they are evacing 100K people.
I agree that it's serious. Oh crap, is there another hole? Lol. I didn't realize both spillways had holes in them. Let's hope they hold up.
Evacuation of 130,000 people seems like a pretty big deal. Hopefully it won't be as bad as anticipated.
