A fleet of cars, pickup trucks and motor homes crept its way north in twilight, past rivers swollen with brown, muddy water, and away from from America’s tallest dam, where state officials desperately fought to keep the frothing waters from breaking through bulwarks and flooding into towns.
That was the dramatic scene on Sunday night. By late Monday afternoon, tens of thousands of people had relocated from the at risk zone in northern California, 60 miles north of the state capital of Sacramento.
By late afternoon Monday, the caravan of evacuees has splintered, with many of those unable to find refuge with friends or families transplanted to Chico, a small town further north and on higher ground.
In Oroville, emergency crews raced against approaching storms to repair the spillway wall and local police blocked roads to keep people away from the area. At a press conference, Butte County sheriff Kory Honea said there was no timeline for getting people home, leaving residents to stew in uncertainty over their future at a Chico fairgrounds transformed into a temporary shelter.
Denise Stucky and her husband had slept in their car, in a parking lot outside the evacuation center, while her son and mother took off to stay with friends. The lifelong Oroville resident was angry and frustrated with water officials and the sheriff’s department. “We had been packed for four stinking days,” she said, saying that from her home, half a mile away from the damaged spillway, “you could hear the water roaring”.
Stucky said that she had lost faith in officials over their failure to prevent the damage and their management of the spillway. “I honestly think someone screwed up and people are going to lose jobs over this,” she said. “I don’t think you can ever believe anybody saying the damn is structurally sound, not after everything they’ve said and what’s happened.”
Former contractor Cliff Sather, 62, was more forgiving, saying the dam’s overflow system was built poorly from the start in the late 1960s. “I think they’re feeling shaky, and if I were them, I’d be feeling shaky too.”
His escape from Oroville was surreal, he said.
It began when a policeman pounded on the door, ordering the household to leave. His roommate immediately started piling his flat-screen TV, computer and other valuables into Sather’s truck.
Sather then drove to his roommate’s brother, made a winding course back through the desolate town for his dog, and then hit the traffic-jammed freeway, where people were in such a panic that some drivers physically tried to nudge each other forward with their cars.
Sather pulled off to a hill above Oroville, and they sat to look out over the lights of the town. Sather told other who had gathered on the hilltop they would know if the floods had come: “When the streetlight start going out, like a domino effect”.
The Red Cross said that at least 870 people had registered at the Chico evacuation center, and dozens more had chosen to remain with their cars in the lot outside rather than hunt for a cot.
An animal shelter worker said that there were about 120 dogs registered, as well as three cows, a rabbit and a miniature horse – dozens of other pets waited with their owners, in cages, crates, cars and on leashes.
Many people left with little more than their pets. More than a dozen other evacuees said they had been given only 30 minutes to flee, responding either to a police officer’s knocked on their door, a text from the sheriff’s department or, in the town of Biggs, the sound of a siren.
Bill Maines, 60, said the town’s sirens have been almost entirely silent since 1997, the last year of flooding. At first, he and his daughter thought Sunday’s evacuation order, which they initially received via text, was not especially urgent.
“We started getting our things together, thinking, ‘oh, it’s nothing’, and then the sirens went off,” he said. “Two blasts, the second one, once you heard it, it was time to hit the streets.”
He caught a glimpse of the spillover on TV. “When I saw the water falling over hard, I knew we were in trouble then,” he said. Maines, his daughter, son-in-law and dogs, drove to Chico through back road, hoping to pass over the Cherokee creek, a canal that could stall a flood. “As soon as we made the canal, then I was at ease.”
He glanced at his cigarette, laughing: “I’m missing a lung but I’m smoking because I’m nervous.”
Though the evacuation has disrupted his family’s life, Maines felt no ill will toward officials. “Imagine if you were making decisions, sitting in a boardroom or on that dam watching the water fall? You got to go with the flow.” He waited a beat. “Pun!”
Many of the evacuees were stoical, despite fears about a lack of medicine.
Though they didn’t have much more than the clothes on their back, Thomas Hickey, 84, and Irene Powe, 85, said they were impressed by the work of volunteers and authorities. “I’m a scrounger,” Hickey said. “We’ll be just fine.”
Crystal Larson, a 33-year-old rest home manager, said that the agencies had been extremely helpful with her 12 patients from Oroville, even as two had to have EMS treatment and one went to hospital.
For others, though, the brave face occasionally faltered. “We do what we can do, I guess,” said Linda McDonough, a 57-year-old who was hoping to self-administer dialysis at the shelter on Monday night. But recalling how her family only had about 20 minutes to flee, even though officials had worried about the dam since Tuesday, McDonough vented about one local official: “That stupid son of a bitch – pardon my language.”
An 80-year-old named John, who declined to give his last name, had taken to pacing outside a shelter, saying the exercise was preferable to being cooped up with so many of his Oroville neighbors. “I’m just praying my home, my shop, are still there,” he said.
