Oroville Spillway - Personal Reflections on a Global Dam Safety Incident

This paper presents the Oroville Dam Spillway incident, response, and recovery through the personal reflections of the author, as a member of a large, single-focus team with a goal to recover from a significant event and restore a functional service spillway in less than 8 months to a fully functional project within two years. Driven by the hydrologic cycle of northern California, the Oroville Spillway incident that started on February 7, 2017, needed to have a functional service spillway by November 1, 2017, to allow the project to pass flows, as needed, during the following flood control season. Restoration of complete project spillway capacity, including the Emergency Spillway, was needed within a two-year period. The author presents first-hand experiences from the initial global television emergency broadcast of a developing situation at Oroville Dam to construction in record-breaking heat, to repair two damaged spillways and restore the functioning capacity spillways at the tallest dam in the United States of America. The author worked with hundreds of engineers, scientists, managers and construction professionals on one of the greatest stories of recovery in the history of dam engineering.