Of chicago and the south side cultural sent, thank you for having us. [ applause ] thanks for joining us tonight, happy friday. Nice to have you with us. Look at this awesome picture from 1968. I love every single thing about this picture. This is the Central Middle School band from orville, california. This is the majorettes part of the band and they are marching through downtown orville, california, on may 1, 1968. This picture is perfec and this picture the property of the California Department of Water Resources. The reason the California Department of Water Resources had a photographer on site taking pictures that day of the majorettes in orville is because that day the governor of california and his wife came too orville, california, to tour a really big awesome new piece of Water Structure the california
governor at the time was Ronald Reagan. He and his wife nancy went to orville for the dedication of the brand new orville dam. It looks kind of fun. They got to go inside the da
broken sinkhole concrete gutter and see how long it holds. it started off as a 300 foot long gash, it s kept on spreading and spreading, look. they say presumably it will split down to the bed rook. but what are you going to do? they have to keep running water down that thing. they don t have a choice so they re running the destroyed spillway. they re running it to complete failure. hope for the best, the best option. pray for dry days. this happened to be the drinking water source for more than 20 million people in the state of california. now, the dam itself, they say the dam itself is safe. the dam they say is built into bedrock, even if that whole hillside gets scoured out, continues to get blown apart, they say the dam will hold, they re confident of that, that s good, because it s almost an 800 foot tall dam, tallest
literally big deal it was. what a large deal it was until i saw this one particular picture and at first glance it looks like the same old picture of that hole in the middle of the spillway until you realize that the tiny little yellow dot there is a full grown man and that shows you the scale of this thing. that s people inside there. that s how big that hole started out as. and that s okay, now i get it. that s the massive size of the undertaking it is going to be to fix this thing when it s over even if they somehow avoid catastrophic flooding or danger to the dam itself through this crisis. s like in king kong where you know you re dealing with a big ape, you know he s big, that s the pl of the movie, then you see him on the empire state building and you re like, oh! that s how big he is! so we will keep an eye on this tallest dam in the country and its travails through tonight and into the weekend.
tried to make that happen? is part of the reason we got this new president because his campaign worked with a foreign government to influence the outcome of our election, to make that outcome happen? if so, it feels to me like that s not a sinkhole. that s not a busted spillway or eroded hillside. to me that feels like blowing the dam.
lake fills up and overfills and overtops that dam, if that happens, the water doesn t run down the tidy little purpose built concrete shute into the feather river below, if it overtops the dam, instead for the first time in the history of this dam, where the water goes is what they call down the emergency spillway which is not really a spillway at all, it just means the water just comes down the hill. and if all that water runs down the hill at force it will at some point bring the hillside down with it into the feather river and eventually into the sacramento river and into the delta and out to the san francisco bay. there s the possibility that an uncontrolled flow could flood downstream towns all along the way. so this is a heck of a choice, right? you either shut down the water down that spillway, let the dam get overtopped and run instead down the hillside all the way downstream and see what happens to california or you keep thundering water down that