wasn t because whole dam would come down. but the portion of the emergency spillway would have sent a 20-foot wall of water that would have taken out hundreds of homes. that would have taken out a lot of homes and a lot of lives. i want to update people who might have just tuned in. i m speaking with adam housley who is based in our l.a. bureau. he s reporting on the ground in the oroville area in terms of what unfolded here. officials ordered 130,000 residents in the oroville dam in the northern part of the state to evacuate the area immediately. they have. because as they put it, a hazardous situation has been developing, an emergency spillway on the 50-year-old dam has become severely eroded due to heavy rainfall, and it could possibly fail unleashing
this is downstream from where that threat is going on. they have begun the night operation. basically oroville dam is one of the tallest earthen dams in the world and one of the tallest in the state. basically there has been so much water in the north state that we haven t had in a long time that it has caused the lake to go over his emergency spillway which is as lower part of earthen dam it s meant to alleviate water for a short period of time. before it many been overflowing for more than a day which has caused the some areas to deteriorate. they have the water down to the level where it s spilling over. they believe they stopped at that point and they will fry with helicopters at night to drop rocks into the area where they had some of this deterioration to hold that part
lot of cases. but that same river can cause a lot of problems. we haven t had this kinds of water since i started in television 20 years ago. we are up here now. this is one of the brijts that goes over the feather river. it s the river that would be affected by any problems with the dam it s already affected because they had to increase water outfloe. as i look down in the dark, you can see that water is pretty high. here is the levee. it s kinds of dark. we understand there is a news conference right now. can we keep you there? we ll go to the news conference right now. the folks that have been forked to evacuate as a result of the potential conditions in the emergency spillway. the governor has been closely following all of this and has been in contact with the
unfold and come to fruition throughout the night or overnight. we have crews going to the scene. adam housley will be there soon to give us an update. hundreds of cars have been spotted in wall-to-wall traffic as they were seen leaving the area on highway 99 as people streamed out of oroville away from the dam. ed the california department of water resources says it s releasing 130,000 feet per second from the heavily damaged spillway to drain the lake. it s going into the emergency spillway. and they were able to spot the hole and acted quickly in every degree of caution to make sure that 130,000 people could be evacuated. you can see that a lot of work has to be done to possibly plug that hole in. it s nightfall out there now, and obviously at 9:00 p.m. in
20 miles down river. at the present time, it s stable. but there s still an enormous rescue, still have 29 feet of water against that damaged emergency spillway. and we know that there was significant erosion below the spillway, exactly what and how dangerous it is is now in the process of being determined. the engineers are out there. you can probably see behind me, those sacks of, those big sacks, they re filled with rock. they intend to take those rocks probably by helicopter and shore up the outside of that emergency spillway. they want to take it down 50 feet below the spillway so there is no water pressure against at all. but a new storm coming on thursday. congressman, give me a sense obviously in times like this, crisis like this, our attention is focussed there in new orleans we focussed on the levies, in