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
there. i will tell you going forward they ll spend $725 million on this fixing the emergency spillway and the main spillway. reporter: the main spillway is being used to lower the water level another 50 feet at least. take a look at drone video taken by state water officials as they look to boost capacity ahead of the next round of wet weather moving in on thursday. not to mention future storms and the snow runoff come spring. nearly 190,000 evacuees and hotels and shelters are wondering when they will get to go home. county sheriff said there is no longer an imminent threat of that emergency spillway collapsing. they want to boost capacity ahead of the next round of wetw. until that spill way is shored up and being structurally sound, melissa, mandatory evacuation order will remain in effect.
that sinkhole happen? was there somebody that overlooked the safety of that spillway and then there s the question about the emergency spillway not having a concrete apron all the downhill side. why didn t that take place in the years past. congressman, obviously you ve got 150,000 of your constituents who are not at home tonight, people not knowing how long this is going to go on. it s a scary situation. it s a human health and safety situation and quickly i imagine for many families already becoming a serious economic situation when we look at this as an infrastructure problem, it boggles my mind to think how expensive this is going to be to get it fixed. i understand that governor jerry brown has put in an initial request for an emergency declaration from the white house. do you have any comment on that or any expectations in terms of whether or not california will be able to just handle this and whether families will be able to handle this economically? well, it s certainly a
so it flows, you know, nicely and calmly into the feather river below, eventually into the sacramento river out into the san francisco bay. but last week, the water coming down that spillway started looking crazy, right, shooting up and sideways and these churning plumes. when they shut off the water to look at what was wrong, they discovered this massive sinkhole in this spillway and it was growing. how big is this hole in the spillway? it s this big. that s people. those little yellow specks there are people inspecting the damage. but they have to keep running water down that spillway even if the water makes that hole worse, even if the water erodes more of that spillway because, as i said, the lake is full. even pumping as much water as fast as they could down that dam and spillway was not enough as of this weekend. and on saturday, for the first time in the 50-year history of that dam, they started pouring water over the dam s emergency
emergency spillway and continuing the erosion. looking at some of that today in the light of day, yeah, it was really serious last night. fortunately, when they were able to open the main spillway gates, they began to lower the reservoir level because the river water coming into the reservoir was about half of what they were able to expel down the main spillway. so it s stabilized. but nonetheless so they did make the right call last night. now, the next call will be, can this thing be patched up sufficient to withstand the storms that are clearly out ahead of us, one coming up later this week and even more as we move into march and early april, which are the heavy storm times here in the state. so we ve got a lot of let s call it tight time ahead of us. what happened before and why did