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.
Engineers have known that Oroville’s backup spillway was unreliable
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Hidden Waterways: Bassett Creek
Bassett Creek, a meandering waterway separating North Minneapolis from the rest of the city, was ignored, piped, and hidden from the landscape over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The creek’s main stem begins downstream of Medicine Lake. The North Branch and the Sweeney Lake Branch join it in the 1.7-mile long tunnel that runs through Minneapolis (Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission, n.d.). Unlike many of the other water features in Minneapolis such as the Chain of Lakes and Minnehaha Creek, Bassett Creek was not seen as an amenity…