by Bob Walsh
More than 40 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit this past Wednesday over the debacle at the Oroville Dam last year. The state could be on the hook for several hundred million dollars if this suit is all successful.
This lawsuit asserts that the Dept. of Water Resources had harbored "a culture of corruption and harassment" resulting in a compromise of the safety of the structure and led to the near-disaster a year ago.
Farmers and manufacturers as far south as Yolo County (across the river from Sacramento) joined in the suit.
The plaintiffs have already filed claims against the state with the Dept. of General Services. Those claims were rejected, a necessary precursor to the lawsuit.
The actual direct costs of the spillway failure are now about $870 million and will without a doubt rise when the rest of the spillway repair is done later this year. The whole problem could have been avoided by spending another $1.2 million ($9 million in current dollars) back in 1965 to do the job right, but the DWR couldn't be bothered to listen to the people who were actually doing the work who told them, repeatedly, that the substrata under the spillway was unstable.
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