Author: Erin Elizabeth

On Sunday at least 188,000 people were evacuated from several Northern California counties due to damage at the Oroville Dam (which provides flood control for the region and is located about 75 miles north of Sacramento). At this time the nation’s tallest dam remains intact but the emergency spillway (one of two spillways), which helps to ensure that the water does not rush over the top of the dam when the levels are high, has begun to erode. Therefore, cities and counties near Lake Oroville had a mandatory evacuation due to fears it could endanger those communities living downstream....

Millions of gallons of untreated wastewater and stormwater began dumping into Puget Sound Thursday after high tides and heavy rains overwhelmed a King County wastewater-treatment center in Seattle. (Emily Eng / The Seattle Times) Flooding at West Point Treatment Plant in Magnolia’s Discovery Park caused damage that apparently fried an electrical circuit and triggered a system shutdown, a spokesman said. That has caused the county to operate the facility much of Thursday in “emergency bypass mode” — dumping untreated effluent directly into Puget Sound. Officials were still calculating how much untreated wastewater had flowed into Puget Sound. Doug Williams,...