The Senate’s top environment committee will hold a hearing later this week on a major California dam break that forced nearly 200,000 people to flee their homes earlier this month.
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The recent events at the Oroville dam in California, together with ice jam flooding on other major waterways and other flooding events, has forced the Environment and Public Works Committee to take up the status of U.S. dam, levee and other flood control infrastructure, a committee aide said Monday.
The new chairman of the committee, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, has made infrastructure development a top issue for the panel this Congress, in light of President Trump’s focus on infrastructure and job development.
Dams, levees and other pieces of the nation’s waterways are expected to be a big part of that development moving forward. The hearing will be held Wednesday, where a number of senior state and federal officials will testify.
Lieutenant General Todd Semonite, the Army Corps of Engineers’ commanding general and chief of engineers, will testify at the hearing together with state and local officials from western states, including California.
The California dam incident at Lake Oroville, the tallest dam in the country, occurred after a gigantic concrete ramp it uses to relieve pressure on the dam began to crumble.
The situation stemmed from the record amounts of rainfall the Golden State has received this month, which has strained the state’s water infrastructure. The Oroville situation caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes although in the end a major disaster was avoided.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, because of the dam’s electrical generation capacity and public safety relevance, has called for an investigation into the causes of the damage in order to avert a similar incident from occurring again.
Lauren Bisnett, a spokeswoman for California’s Department of Water Resources, said water has stopped flowing from a makeshift water relief ramp on Monday. Workers began scrambling to remove between 500,000 and 1 million cubic yards of debris blocking the hydro-electric power plant that was shutdown amid the emergency.
Democratic senators from California called on President Trump to declare the Oroville incident a federal disaster and issue assistance and federal funding. Trump approved the assistance last week.
