Just watched the press conference on Oroville Dam

[rainbow4321]

Evacuation numbers now at 130,000...hotels are full, the area's Air Force base has been opened as one of the shelters (other area shelters are filling up fast or already full). Parts of Highway 70 are closed down. Local officials says that they need to get 50 more feet of water off in prep for the upcoming storms this week to prevent worse problems.


And..on a side note..why the hell am I having to watch Fox News for this presser...no coverage on CNN or MSNBC. I realize it's the weekend but are there no 3rd or 4th stringers in their newsroom to go on the air??? Yeah, I could go online and watch it some where else but sometimes I just wanna do it the old fashioned way and watch it on TV!

They are even catching hell for it on Twitter:

#OrovilleDam CNN=anthony bourdain
MSNBC= lockup (raw)
FOX=oroville dam evacuation

[Jim Beard]

1. I agree with you. This has happened before with CNN. There was some huge event....

and everyone at CNN was asleep.

[Retrograde]

2. Western events seem to get less coverage

than those in the Eastern Time Zone (except for glitzy things like awards shows that become excuses for exercising those expense accounts), and Oroville is far from any of the glamorous parts of the state to begin with

[politicat]

3. Because fox has local stations, so easy coordination. CNN & MSNBC don't.

I agree, but that's why local news remains important.

[Hortensis]

4. Fox's TV signal is also stronger in our rural area than the

Last edited Mon Feb 13, 2017, 04:56 AM - Edit history (1)

ABC and CBS affiliates. It's the one station we can always get, dammit. And no accident, I'm sure.

When I checked on the damn last, though (lived for a while as a child in the Oroville area), the word was no lives were in danger at that time. If that were the case, it'd of course have a lot to do with what resources the big networks allocated.

Not a big loss for people who turn on "the news" for news. They're obviously comfortable with not much more than weather, traffic, endless commercials, and the nightly shocking-enough-to-make-the-cut disaster; and if they ever get tired of that, those print media that still do investigative journalism are there for them.

[Hekate]

5. I'm in SoCal/Central Coast and it's been frustrating. The national news, what there was of it, ...

...kept referencing SoCal, which confused the hell out of me. Finally tonight I dragged out a Rand McNally Atlas and looked it up with a magnifying glass. As I always thought, it's in Northern California, considerably above both San Francisco and Sacramento, inland. The maps on tv were all closeups of the little towns surrounding the dam -- no point of reference for someone who has not lived there. I couldn't spot US 5 on the tv maps, which is a major reference point.

This is extremely serious and ultimately could affect the whole state one way or another, but CNN and MSNBC are not helping much, and our local news has proven to be barely adequate.

[Cha]

6. Thank you for the update, rainbow.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. Hotels can't begin to accomodate refugees.

Even in a country like ours.

Some years ago, on Thanksgiving Day, the power started being a bit intermittent. We made reservations at a nearby hotel, just in case. As it turned out, power returned, and we were able to cancel those reservations, and have a lovely Thanksgiving dinner.

But I often think about that, and our ability to plan ahead, which not everyone has. Plus, a simple power outage isn't remotely like the Oroville Dam situation. We weren't facing something life threatening, merely something a bit inconvenient.

I do hope all in the path of the Oroville Dam are safe.

[NBachers]

8. I hate Fox News, but our local San Francisco Fox affiliate, KTVU Channel 2, has excellent local news

I don't even consider it part of the Fox News Damage Empire.

That said, our local broadcast stations have been giving great coverage. I've found myself gravitating a bit more toward local over-the-air stations lately.

[mr_lebowski]

9. Lived just upstream in Quincy CA in the early 1970's as a kid ... very familiar w/the area

Quincy is just up the 70, aka the Feather River Highway (one of the most beautiful drives in the world, I might add) from Oroville by 45 miles or so ... what's going on at Oroville Dam?

All the wetness over the past year have it really full, and in danger of overflowing or something? I gotta say, after the photo's of the drought impact in Cali we were seeing 2 years ago, it's sorta welcome news to hear it's near capacity again ... shit was getting DIRE in the reservoirs of No. Cal for a while there.

That said, man, there's a lot of folks below that damn .... Yuba City, Marysville, and of course Oroville itself ... the flatness of the region though should help, even a major breach should spread out pretty far/wide and not be terribly deep except for really near the dam itself, IIRC.

Just remembered my Cousin is at school at Chico, but I'm pretty sure that while Chico's near Oroville, it's not downstream from the Dam.

In any case, stay safe everyone!

[leftyladyfrommo]

10. Just saw 190,000. On NBC. nt

[pinboy3niner]

11. On Twitter: "Sikh Temples offering food and shelter ... open to ALL evacuated people"

Shivpreet Singh ‏@shivpreetsingh · 4h4 hours ago

Sikh Temples offering food and shelter ... open to ALL evacuated people #OrovilleDam #OrovilleSpillway ... Please share