*** Butte Co. SAR Battles Western California Floods *** Subject: Butte Co. SAR fight Western California Floods Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 15:57:13 -0800 From: Mike Larish To: sar-l-d@islandnet.com Parts of California are finally starting to dry out from the massive flooding has been occuring here since just after Christmas. Northern California was hit first with large amounts of rain and snowmelt (snow level was averaging 8,500 feet last week). Butte County SAR went on 24 hour operations on Monday, December 30 and didn't stand down until Saturday, January 4 1997. Over that week period, Butte County Sheriff's SAR, in cooperation with local fire agencies, National Guard, law enforcement, and EMS, responded to dozens of rescues and evacuated thousands of residence. Thousands of manhours were spent by SAR during the week-long disaster providing emergency services. We had both our helicopters in the air averaging more than 10 hours a day providing rescue services and flood watch. I definitely got a fair amount of chopper time last week. In the hardest hit areas of our county, hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed, approximately 9 bridges were washed away, the majority of roadways in and out of the county were closed or destroyed and more. In fact, many of our main highways and county roads are expected to be closed for months (up to 7 months in the worst case) before they're repaired and reopened. At one point, Lake Oroville, one of the largest reseviors in California, had 400,000 CFS coming in with the dam only able to let out 160,000 CFS (which was causing the rivers down stream of the dam to flood). We were actually warned that if we had another storm like we had about 12 hours before come through, they expected so much water that water could conceivably go not only over the emergency spillway but over the dam head itself. Being an earthen dam, they bluntly told us that they weren't sure what would happen. It was conceivable that a catastropic failure of the dam might take place. Of course, that sent the pucker factor up a bit. With that in mind, they started considering the ramifications of the evacuation of the entire Sacramento Valley in northern California. (170 mile stretch north/south by 60 miles wide - approx. population (my guess only) nearing a million people. Thankfully, that storm that was supposed to hit us went south by about 50 miles. That was enough to take the stress off of our area. Unfortunately, between what Oroville Dam and Shasta Dam were letting out and what the storm dumped south of us, massive flooding started occuring in Yuba, Sutter, Colusa, Sacramento and San Juaquin counties below us. Many of those parts are still under water. From a pure flooding point of view, they got hit much worse than we did primarily because they had numerous leve breaks up and down the valley. Anyway, figured I'd fill people in on our little party out here. It's definitely been interesting... Didn't get a whole lot of sleep last week. I'm still catching up... Mike -- Michael Larish aka Mike nomad@ecst.csuchico.edu Butte Co. Sheriff Search & Rescue (Lt. Training) Butte Co. Sheriff Communications Reserve (Sgt.) Swift Water Rescue Instructor Butte Co. Drowning Accident Rescue Team (DART) EMT/Rescue Diver/Tech. Rescue Calif. Department of Forestry (CDF) Comm Reserve --------------------------------