produce enough water. if they can continue to release the water at the rate they are now, which is over 100,000 cubic feet per second, the water coming in even with heavy rain will not equal that. this is nighttime video of the main spillway. the backup spillway, the one they re worried about clansing, the water is below that. the lake is down ten feet from its peak on sunday. it s going down four inches an hour. they re going to continue to pour this water out. they don t want to have to use the backup spillway again. the emergency spillway is used when the lake level gets to 901 feet. currently it s at 891 and it s going down. the main spillway, which is severely damaged, is still working. here s the timing of the next storm. not today. this is wednesday into thursday. this yellow is the heavier rain. this is as we go through wednesday it s fine. then it looks like it arrives around 5:00 a.m. so the middle of the night wednesday night into thursday morning is when the round of heavy
th they re trying to get it down ability 50 feet. heavy rains and snowmelt putting pressure on the dam. there s a breach in the backup spillway. you can see behind me heavy lifting with heavy equipment. they re breaking up rocks, putting them in bags and they ll go into the breach. the big fear, of course, that somehow, some way, we would have a major breach here and we would have catastrophic flooding along the feather river, and that s why these cities, oroville, yuba city, maryville, there were no soles out there, some gas stations running out of gas. some officers on the ground describing this as chaotic and frantic as these people underwent mandatory evacuations. now engineers believe they ll get a better sense of things when the sun comes up here, and they can look at the progress being made or not made on this
good morning. i m poppy harlow. i m john berman. great to see you this morning. this morning a huge evacuation under way in california. we re talking nearly 200,000 people ordered to move to safer ground. there are fears this morning about the integrity of the tallest dam in the country. the water right now is racing down the dam s spillway at twice the normal rate. this is all happening in oroville, california, 75 miles north of sacramento. our paul vercammen is there. what does this mean for all the folks, 200,000 people potentially impacted by this? where are they trying to get the water level to so everyone is safe? reporter: poppy and john, as the water level rose and began to spill over both the first spillway and a backup spillway,
north of sacramento, where we find our paul vercammen. we can t overstate the urgency here, the tallest dam and spillways aren t working correctly. reporter: poppy, if you look behind me, there is the water. you can see the spray kicking up in the distance. imagine the fury of that water right now. you can sort of get a sense for just how big and massive that water coming out of the dam might be. this is part of the strategy. they want to get as much water out of here as possible. it has gone below these damaged spillways for right now. as you said, there is now a struggle to try to get this water level low so when this next batch of rain comes, we won t have another issue with the spillway. now, let s talk about that backup spillway. it has a hole in it, and they re now act i feel trying to shore it up. among other things, they re breaking up rocks, putting them in bags, to try to address that
going. they re taking large rocks and bagging them up. those rocks will go into the hole in the backup spillway. actually two spillways that have been compromised, the dam itself is find. because of all of this, you mentioned those evacuations in yuba city, oroville. they described the scene last night as frantic chaos as the residents of these communities had to scramble out of here. they will learn a lot more about just how damaged this backup spillway is when the sun comes up. they ll be looking at it closely and trying to decide what more needs to be done. there is another storm on the horizon that does have officials concerned. they hope this storm will be a cold storm, one of the last ones was warmer and that was a two-headed monster because not only did all that runoff come down, but it also melted a lot of snow and that helped to fill up this ves voir behind the