T
he full story of what happened at Oroville Dam this February has hardly begun to be told. How and why the dam’s main spillway failed, whether state and federal officials and independent consultants were complacent about the potential dangers of an emergency spillway system that proved to be vulnerable to erosion, whether the episode reveals wider inspection and oversight problems at dams throughout the state — the digging into all those questions and many more will be going on for a while.
What we know now, a month after workers discovered a huge hole had opened up in the main spillway just as managers needed to ramp up releases to accommodate a torrent of storm-fed runoff, is that we’ve witnessed an epic spectacle of destruction.
Someone out in the Twitterverse quoted a poem to me after looking at some images of the spillway, the obliteration of which was only fully visible Monday after the Department of Water Resources halted flows down the broken structure.
The poem is “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, a brief reflection on the human delusion of omnipotence and immortality. Here’s the text:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
No, I wouldn’t call Oroville Dam “a colossal wreck.” But I can’t help but be impressed by how quickly an unexpected event featuring nature and a key piece of infrastructure can puncture our illusion of control.
Below: A Department of Water Resources gallery of photographs taken between Feb. 27 and March 6, 2017, showing Oroville Dam’s main spillway before and after flows were halted, the work to assess the structure and crews clearing debris from the river channel Click on an image to open the collection as a slideshow.
