Dating to the late 1960s, this silent 8mm home movie shows some aspects of the construction of the Lake Oroville Dam. A title card at the 3 minute mark indicates the date as March, 1967 and another set of cards are dated March and April 1968, so one can imagine the film was shot roughly in that period. The film begins with shots of the massive earthen embankment being worked on by bulldozers and graders (:34). At 1:13 wildlife is shown in the Feather River. At 1:45 the base of a spillway is shown. At 1:58 are more views of the construction site. Wells are seen as well as earthmoving equipment. ) The embankment was finally topped out on October 6, 1967, with the last of 155 million tons (140.6 million t) of material that took over 40,000 train trips to transport.One of these trains is visible at the 3:58 mark. At 4:29 a sign explains the Oroville Dam project. At 5:51 a highway bridge is shown, likely the North Fork Feather River Bridge. At 6;12 it is now 1968, and the project is completed. At 3:08 the new Bidwell Bar Suspension Bridge is shown. At the time of its completion, it was the 3rd highest bridge in the world after the Royal Gorge suspension and Glen Canyon Dam arch bridges.
Oroville Dam is an earthfill embankment dam on the Feather River east of the city of Oroville, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of the Sacramento Valley. At 770 feet (235 m) high, it is the tallest dam in the U.S and serves mainly for water supply, hydroelectricity generation and flood control. The dam impounds Lake Oroville, the second largest man-made lake in the state of California, capable of storing more than 3.5 million acre feet (1.1 trillion US gallons; 4.3 trillion litres)
Built by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), Oroville Dam is one of the key features of the California State Water Project (SWP), one of two major projects passed that set up California’s statewide water system. Construction was initiated in 1961, and despite numerous difficulties encountered during its construction, including multiple floods and a major train wreck on the rail line used to transport materials to the dam site, the embankment was topped out in 1967 and the entire project was ready for use in 1968. The dam began to generate electricity shortly afterwards with completion of the Edward Hyatt Pump-Generating Plant, then the country’s largest underground power station.
Since its completion in 1968, the Oroville Dam has allocated the flow of the Feather River from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into the State Water Project’s California Aqueduct, which provides a major supply of water for irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley as well as municipal and industrial water supplies to coastal Southern California, and has prevented large amounts of flood damage to the area — more than $1.3 billion between the years of 1987 and 1999. The dam has confined fish migration up the Feather River and the controlled flow of the river as a result of the Oroville Dam has affected riparian habitat. Multiple attempts at trying to counter the dam’s impacts on fish migration have included the construction of a salmon/steelhead fish incubator on the river, which began shortly after the dam was completed.
In February 2017, the main and emergency spillways threatened to fail, leading to the evacuation of 188,000 people living near the dam. After deterioration of the main spillway largely stabilized and the water level of the dam’s reservoir dropped below the top of the emergency spillway, the evacuation order was lifted. he government has planned for 2018, the demolishment and reconstruction of the spillway which was undamaged by the flood but also has been identified as structurally defective. In addition, crews are working to extend a cutoff wall under the emergency spillway to prevent erosion should that structure be used again in the future.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
