jubilantOn the other hand, there have now been fresh mudslides along I-80 in the Sierra Nevada. I'm glad the hill waited until today to fail rather than falling down on me as I was driving through Baxter yesterday.
On the gripping hand, the water level is down in Lake Oroville, water is no longer flowing through the damaged emergency spillway. The immediate crisis is past without a catastrophic failure of the emergency spillway that would have sent a "30 foot high wall of water" down the Feather River, but they still need to release a lot of water to make room for what's coming very soon. Authorities aren't saying when they think it will be safe for people in the evacuated areas to return to their homes.
My nephew is in Sutter (which is high ground and relatively safe). Many of my relatives are in the Yuba-Sutter area. I have heard nothing from any of them. My father and stepmother live in the hills above Lake Oroville and I expect are okay. My mother lives in the Yuba County foothills far from the floodplain. In that area, the problem is more of people panicking over news stories that imply that Oroville Dam collapsed, which it did not.