Former Oroville chief of police reflects on past
The base of the Oroville Dam spillway in 1986, where floodwaters from the lake empty into the river at the bottom of the dam. Former Oroville Police Chief Gary Grant said the force of the water rendered the road on the other side impassable.
This aerial view shows the town of Marysville, California, during the 1986 flood. (Photos courtesy of Gary Grant)
Water rushes down the Oroville Dam’s spillway during the 1986 flooding event.
For the last week, the small city of Oroville, California, has found itself in the national limelight, as heavy rain and snowmelt created fears of a failure at the nation’s tallest dam and forced evacuations in Oroville and other towns below.
The concerns that the Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway could give way and release a wall of water into the Sacramento Valley have mostly subsided in the days since. But in the Flathead Valley, the headlines brought back vivid memories for Kalispell resident Gary Grant, who found himself near the center of a similar situation as Oroville’s chief of police in 1986.
“When I got up that morning, it was barely raining, and the next thing I know, we’re about to flood,” Grant recalled.
After leaving the Oroville Police Department, Grant moved to the Flathead and has worked in the real estate industry for the past two decades. But at that time, he was just four months into a new job after working as a police officer in a college town in Southern California.
“All the snow up from Donner Pass, all the way down starts melting,” he said. “If they get rain and the weather changes, what happens is it floods the lake. And once it starts going over the spillway, they’ve lost control.”
During the 1986 flood, he said Oroville was largely spared from the rising waters. Grant still has aerial photos he captured of the surrounding, inundated farmland and the town of Marysville, to the south, which bore the brunt of the flooding.
Grant said the town was hit by about 25 feet of floodwaters — “All you could see were the roofs,” he said.
The crisis that gripped the valley this month was the first time the dam’s emergency spillway had been used since it opened in 1968, according to the Los Angeles Times.
But Grant said at one point he tried driving his patrol car along the road running perpendicular to the base of the spillway, as water from Lake Oroville cascaded down and blasted back up and across the road.
“I just nosed into it and it felt like hammers beating on the car,” Grant remembered with a laugh.
Most of his work during the days of the 1986 flood were limited to contingency planning, he said, coordinating with the county sheriff’s office, the highway patrol and the state’s water resources agency that was monitoring the situation above the valley.
“I remember going down toward [U.S. Interstate] 70 and the water started coming up from the manhole covers from the pressure,” he said. “What fooled us, you look outside and it’s no big deal. But it was. It’s the combination of snowmelt and rain.”
He added, “It was three, four days of holding your breath and hoping.”
Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.