Oroville Dam

Oroville Dam, earth-fill dam on the Feather River, California, U.S. Completed by the state of California in 1968, it is the highest dam in the United States and one of the highest embankment dams in the world. The first and key unit of the Feather River project, which serves extensive areas in central and southern California hundreds of miles distant, Oroville Dam provides irrigation water, flood control, and some three billion kilowatt-hours of power.

The dam, 235 metres (770 feet) high and 2,109 metres (6,920 feet) long at its crest, has a volume of about 59,635,000 cubic metres (78,000,000 cubic yards) and forms a reservoir of some 4,300,000,000 cubic metres (3,500,000 acre-feet) capacity. The dam impounds Lake Oroville, the second largest constructed lake in California.

In February 2017, following a period of heavy rain, both the main spillway and then the emergency spillway of the dam threatened to fail because of erosion. The high water level of the dam’s reservoir meant that operation of the spillways could not be stopped for their repair, and the damage intensified, leading to the evacuation of about 188,000 people downstream. The evacuation order was rescinded once the water level dropped and the deterioration stabilized. The main and emergency spillways were repaired that summer and then reconstructed with additional safety features in 2018.

In August 2021 the dam’s hydroelectric power plant was taken offline for the first time ever because of historic drought conditions and record low water levels in Lake Oroville.