Today I learned about the existence of the Oroville Dam, which is the tallest dam of the US. The dam is located in California and is used to produce or store energy, while also protecting the areas down the stream of the Feather River. The dam experienced a spillway failure in 2017, where the spillway was damaged during a heavy rain season, which required the operators to continue to use the damaged spillway for weeks in order to control prevent worse. As part of this operation it multiple problems with the general construction of the regular and the emergency spillway construction turned up and exposed multiple failures in the engineering and construction of the dam. The good news is, that it was still possible to prevent any major damage from people down the stream an no breach of the dam took place.

I came across this when watching a video about the spillway failure made by the YouTube channel “Practical Engineering”, which discusses the analyses of the spillway failure in detail.