By Samuel Chamberlain | Fox News
Officials in Northern California released water down the reconstructed spillway of the nation’s tallest dam on Tuesday, more than two years after it crumbled during heavy rains and forced thousands of homes to be evacuated over fears of catastrophic flooding.
Water flowed down the spillway and into the Feather River; storms this week and melting snowpack are expected to swell the lake behind Oroville Dam in the Sierra Nevada foothills, said Molly White, principal engineer with the California Department of Water Resources.
The spring storms follow a very wet winter that coated the mountains with thick snowpack; experts say this has left Califonia drought-free for the first time since December 2011. State experts determined Tuesday that the snowpack is at 162 percent of normal levels, a threefold increase over the same measurement last year.
The dam’s main spillway “was designed and constructed using 21st-century engineering practices and under the oversight and guidance from state and federal regulators and independent experts,” Joel Ledesma, deputy director of the department’s State Water Project, said in a statement.
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