Abundance of info spills from Oroville Dam visitors center

The Oroville Dam from the visitors center. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Water. It’s the one thing no one can live without.

The visitors center at Lake Oroville State Recreation Area is a wealth of information about California water, as well as the history of this area, and why the Feather River was dammed.

Flood control and water conveyance are why the dam was built in the 1960s. California had experienced catastrophic flooding in 1955, including deaths along the Feather River.

Learning about the fish hatchery at the Oroville Dam visitors center. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

One day last month a group of OLLI students toured the facility; with Christy from the Department of Water Resources as our guide. She dispensed a ton of information—like how 27 million people and 750,000 acres of farmland are the beneficiaries of this water from Northern California. The water reaches these various entities through a series of more than 700 miles of pipes, canals and reservoirs.

The water flows down Feather River to the Sacramento River into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The Lassen Volcanic National Park area is where the headwaters are of the Feather River. The Feather has various arms, but that is where the main source is.

Oroville is the second largest reservoir in the state and is part of the State Water Project. Shasta is the largest reservoir and is part of the federal system.

The Hyatt Powerplant takes water from Lake Oroville. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

The Hyatt Powerplant was described as being like having two straws sucking water into the turbines to generate power that is sent to the grid.

The dam is 1.3 miles long, 770 feet tall and made from dirt that was hauled in from about seven miles away. It was sediment left over from the gold mining days. This is the tallest earthen dam in the United States.

The main spillway was built with 509,600 cubic yards of concrete. That’s enough concrete to build a 5.5 food wide sidewalk from Oroville to Amarillo, Texas. The spillway has 55,000 feet of drain pipe. Stacked vertically it would stretch more than 10 miles high. The width of the main spillway is 178.75 feet, which is the equivalent of a 12-lane freeway with a center divider.