Backup Spillway News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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. curren...

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 ...

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 wa...

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 thi...

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 hor...