Engineers have known that Oroville’s backup spillway was unreliable
The near catastrophe at Oroville Dam draws attention to the complicated processes and myriad stakeholders involved in managing the tallest dam in the United States.
Over thousands of years the Mississippi River deposited fresh water, nutrients, and sediment through a vast American territory to form one of the world’s grandest deltas. Today, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands—a critical ecosystem in this delta and a place we call “America’s Wetland”—is dying.