Partial view of the dam’s emergency spillway (left) next to its main service spillway (right) (2008) Photo: Martin Alfaro

As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours.

Over the last week, Murphy’s Law has been on overdrive in Northern California as Oroville dam suffered a series of mishaps, resulting from poor planning, lack of maintenance, and lack of heeding warnings years ago on the part of the state bureaucracy known as the California Department of Water Resources. The result was a badly broken regular spillway, a damaged “emergency spillway” (if you could even call it that, since they had to do emergency prep for two days to even make it usable) and finally, a several county evacuation downstream of about 180,000 people because DWR officials feared the “emergency spillway” would breach.

Given the attention paid to this worldwide, in technical parlance, it would be safe to say the…