Tear down this dam?
Thousands living downstream from its desperate cascading water releases are evacuating their homes in Hollywood disaster-film fashion. Something premodern and apocalyptic like this was not supposed to have happened in a postmodern California of Google, Hollywood, and Napa Valley wineries.
California’s politicians and pundits in recent years of drought swore the state was entering a cycle of permanent drought (and thus saw no need to start construction on a single dam to store the rain and snow that supposedly would not return). Instead, they warned of the “settled science” of climate change and the need for permanent conservation and restrictions—even as near record storms this year have pushed California’s snow and rain levels in many places to over 200 percent of normal, well beyond the ability of our now ossified water projects to store the deluge that heads out to sea.
Oroville, along with its twin Shasta dam, anchors California's vast water transfer system, the largest and most ingeniously designed in the world. But Oroville’s half-century-old and now damaged spillways were in dire need of maintenance, especially given that auxiliary dams in the region envisioned to alleviate the pressure on Oroville were long ago cancelled. Indeed, the entire California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project were never finished, even as California’s population more than doubled.
After the early 1980s, the state’s politicians and courts decided that dams, as one critic put it, were “a relic of the Industrial Age, a brute-force solution to water scarcity.” They forget that they had been a staple of civilization since the Mycenaean Greeks built them to ward off flood and drought.
The cracks on the face of Oroville Dam remind us that we have abused and caricatured what we inherited. In penance we might do better to listen to the wisdom of the past rather than to parrot the ignorance of the present.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/319428-tear-down-this-dam
