Oroville – Would You Trust Them?

Oroville – Would You Trust Them?

 by John Schroeder

Yesterday, officials lifted the evacuation order downstream of the Oroville Dam, but kept in place an “Evacuation Warning.”

Authorities lifted mandatory evacuation orders Tuesday for communities below the Oroville Dam.

At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea announced the order had been changed to an evacuation warning after he said the risk of flooding had been reduced.

“We have concluded it is safe to reduce the emergency evacuation order to an evacuation warning,” said Honea, who had made the initial call Sunday to evacuate a large swath of three counties below the imperiled dam.

At the time, residents were told the spillway to the dam could collapse within an hour.

So, the people that said “nothing to see here,” for a week or so and then spun on a dime and gave nearly 200,000 people an hour to get out of the way are now saying evacuees can come back, but they may have to leave instantly again.  Would you trust them?  Needless to say, those going back are on pins and needles.  Well, at least the officials have gone from declarative statements to hedging their bets – which generally means they have not got a clue.  I’m just praying the rain that is forecast for the next few days ends up not being much.

On the one hand, the fact that the federal government agrees this is already a disaster is a good thing, on the other hand is the fact that that is the only national story on this I could find this morning.  Let’s imagine for just one minute a disaster of some sort at a Trump branded property that resulted in the dislocation of 200,000 people.  I’m pretty sure the national press would be all over that like flies on a cadaver.  But when the Democrat regime in the blessed and sacred California messes up on a nearly unprecedented level, the national press is silent.  Please, tell me again there is no media bias.

And in a final note, California water politics are complicated beyond measure – always have been.  The overwhelming plethora of agencies and authorities and bureaus and boards and districts have battled each other for more than a century now.  I have a feeling it is about to get much worse than it ever has been.  The finger pointing is now beginning in earnest, and it will only increase in volume and frequency.  Just a sample:

Ron Stork, policy director of Friends of the River, said state water officials told him privately at the time that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and other water contractors that buy Oroville’s water did not want to pay the additional costs. “I felt a little disrespected and damn disappointed that they didn’t listen to me, particularly in the last week,” Stork told me Monday.

Metropolitan general manager Jeffrey Kightlinger, in the Los Angeles Times, claimed his agency “did not say it was a cost issue.” The water district deferred to state and federal officials, he said, who determined the emergency spillway met guidelines that “talk about how you don’t put a lot of funding and concrete, etc. into emergency spillways because presumably they will rarely if ever be used.”

And thus accountability for this catastrophe will be avoided as everybody stands in a circle and points to either side of themselves, and sometimes at the other side of the circle.

This last election was, for the rest of the nation, a “throw the bums out” election.  So fed up has the nation been with the garbage that had swirled around it for about a decade that they just decided to throw a bomb in the mess and clean up.  California, for whatever cockamamie reason decided to stay the course.  Hillary’s much ballyhooed “popular vote win,” came virtually entirely from the Golden State – which now should probably be called the “Mud State.”

Somehow the severity of this mess has got to be communicated to the people of this once great state.  We need leadership of extraordinary fortitude, and exceptional will among the populace.  Even if we can achieve the most necessary electoral victories, unseating and redirecting the entrenched bureaucracy will make what President Trump is trying to do in Washington look puny.  Some say Chernobyl, a disaster of such incredible magnitude that even the Soviet propaganda machine could not hide it from their populace, was the straw that broke the back of the Soviet Union.  Here’s hoping history really does repeat itself without this disaster becoming even worse.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/oroville-would-you-trust-them/?pr=y