An Independent Forensic Team has published a 584-page report on the catastrophic destruction of the Oroville dam spillway last winter. The report summary states the catastrophe was the result of long-running systemic failures at both the State and Federal levels.
The entire report makes for fascinating (and scary) reading, but there is one part that really stands out:
A contributing factor to DWR’s overconfidence and complacency was a somewhat widespread belief within DWR that the SWP was designed by the “best of the best” – a belief passed on through two generations to the current generation, and possibly increasingly mythologized by each generation. While it is true that DWR recruited nationally to hire qualified engineers and geologists from other organizations, it is unlikely that DWR was able to fill all of its key engineering and geology positions with the “best” people, given the rapidity with which DWR needed to scale up its organization during the 1960s.
The most relevant possible illustration of this aspect is that, as reported to the IFT in an interview, the principal designer for the Oroville spillways 1) was hired directly from a university post-graduate program, with prior engineering employment experience limited to one or two summers for a consulting firm, 2) had no prior professional experience designing spillways, but had received instruction on spillway design in university coursework on hydraulic structures, and 3) likely did not consult technical references regarding spillway chute design, and instead relied on notes from his university coursework in hydraulic structures. If this information is accurate, the IFT finds it striking that such an inexperienced engineer was given the responsibility of designing the spillways of what is still the tallest dam in the US.
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