According to this, they operated at 160K cfs in 1997.
http://www.chicoer.com/article/NA/20170218/LOCAL1/170219704
“The weather this year, as bad as it seems, was much worse in 1997. There was a one-week period where everything was flooded.
People were being evacuated in Tehama, Hamilton City, Durham, Yuba City and Marysville. Butte Creek cut a new channel in the canyon. Highway 70 above Lake Oroville was badly damaged. No valley communities were spared. Roads, bridges and a section of railroad were washed away. It was relentless.
The inflow to Lake Oroville on New Year’s Day was 328,000 cubic-feet per second. By comparison, the peak inflow to Lake Oroville this month was 190,000 cfs.
The outflow in 1997 was 160,000 cfs. The peak last week was in the neighborhood of 110,000 cfs.
The difference, of course, is that in 1997 the spillway wasn’t broken.”
IMO, it wasn’t an engineering failure. It was a lack of proper preventive maintenance that caused the problem. Most concrete highway paving would last much longer than it does, if joint maintenance were done adequately.
But guess what gets cut when money’s tight? Maintenance. Governments never, ever cut payroll, they cut projects or material.
There’s never money to maintain, but endless funds to fix stuff once a catastrophe occurs.
So more along the lines that maybe due to lack of proper preventive maintenance, the constant battering of hot/cold expansion/contraction pressure on the concrete over about 50 years caused the failure.
You know, it’s interesting about preventive maintenance (PM) and government. My experience is that it is sometimes hard to get a private enterprise to diligently perform PM especially if the thing needing PM is somewhat peripheral to the purpose of the company.
Same but worse in government because no one in government really owns anything. It’s all someones else’s money (so nobody cares that much about waste) and the assets belong to “government” but no one in particular. Hence things like run-down “projects” neighborhoods, post offices and DMV buildings and equipment. One of the federal government’s few valid activities is military for defense. I would say that the feds are best at maintaining those assets because maintaining the military is a main constitutional purpose of the feds. Even then, they have their problems.
I don’t see how a project like the Orville Dam could become a profitable enterprise for some company to take over and run. If so, at least someone would have a sense of ownership.