Nearly 190,000 People Are Evacuating Over "Imminent Failure" of California's Oroville Dam's

Feb. 16, 2017 - PRLog -- The crisis over the potential Oroville Dam failure is just another reminder about how dependent on and how vulnerable to loss or damage to our critical infrastructure.

The Oroville Dam is part of California's massive, byzantine State Water Project, which moves millions of gallons of water to Los Angeles.

The dam itself remains intact but both the spillways are damaged and there are very real fears that the collapse of the overflow channel could unleash torrents of water into Feather River before flooding Oroville and other towns downstream.

Fire incident commander Kevin Lawson warned: "What we are looking at is an approximately 30ft wall of water coming out of the lake."

Unusually high rain and snow levels further upstream caused water levels in the dam to rise by 50ft in a matter of days and forced operators to use the spillways to reduce the pressure and stop overflow of the dam itself. The water pressure then caused damage to the spillway 45 feet deep, 300 feet wide, and 500 feet long.

It's hoped that the using an auxiliary spillway that had never been used (https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/07/engineers-assess-spi...) will give them time to repair the spillway but that's no easy task.

It must be hoped that the situation will be resolved successfully but what is clear that with over 188,000 people being evacuated from their homes and businesses, the disruption to people's lives and businesses is enormous, even without the worst-case scenario.

Natural disasters whether caused by climate change or not, man-made disasters and terrorism can, do and will occur and we must be prepared to prevent, respond and mitigate against them.

The new Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience North America (http://ciprna-expo.com/) event in Florida on December 5-7, 2017 follows the unique format of previous successful events held in Europe and Asia, with a unique conference program set-up, providing enhanced opportunities for discussions between the physical infrastructure and cyber security professionals, who need to work together to mitigate threats.

Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience North America will bring together leading stakeholders from industry, operators, agencies and governments to collaborate on securing North America.

The event is supported by the Chief DISA/DoDIN Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Program in the USA and the International Association of Critical Infrastructure Protection Professionals.

Call for Papers – deadline April 30^th

The Conference Advisory Committee is currently accepting abstracts for consideration for inclusion in the conference program. The deadline for submitting abstracts is April 30^th and further details and how to submit an abstract can be found at www.ciprna-expo.com.