Spring Is Visible

[kevin_standlee]

Pitchers and catchers are reporting to Giants Spring Training camp in Arizona. Soon we will have baseball again!

On the other hand, there have now been fresh mudslides along I-80 in the Sierra Nevada. I'm glad the hill waited until today to fail rather than falling down on me as I was driving through Baxter yesterday.

On the gripping hand, the water level is down in Lake Oroville, water is no longer flowing through the damaged emergency spillway. The immediate crisis is past without a catastrophic failure of the emergency spillway that would have sent a "30 foot high wall of water" down the Feather River, but they still need to release a lot of water to make room for what's coming very soon. Authorities aren't saying when they think it will be safe for people in the evacuated areas to return to their homes.

My nephew is in Sutter (which is high ground and relatively safe). Many of my relatives are in the Yuba-Sutter area. I have heard nothing from any of them. My father and stepmother live in the hills above Lake Oroville and I expect are okay. My mother lives in the Yuba County foothills far from the floodplain. In that area, the problem is more of people panicking over news stories that imply that Oroville Dam collapsed, which it did not.

Comments

[billroper]

I'm looking forward to spring training. :)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The articles I've read have mostly been clear that the danger was only from the spillways, but then they go on and talk about how big and high the dam is, which tends to spoil the reassurance.

Oroville was bad enough, but when I read that both Yuba City and Marysville were under evacuation as well, I knew chaos was afoot.

[kshandra]

We may be in the same area code this weekend, after all... As of 5pm this afternoon, the California Zephyr is cancelled between EMY and SLC through Thursday due to mudslides on the track with no estimate for clearance.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

So that's what's been holding things up! I knew that the Nevada Subdivision (Spark to Elko) was at a near-standstill, and hadn't seen an Amtrak train for several days before I left, but I wasn't sure of the details. I know the dispatcher on the Nevada Sub was complaining about a washout near Elko making trouble, and I'd seen several ballast trains in the area, but had not looked into the situation more closely.

But I'm sorry that your ride to Reno may be hosed. It's such a nice trip! If I had a place near the Fremont/Centerville train station where I could safely park the RV for weeks at at time, I would take the train more often.