OROVILLE, CA – Months after Butte County’s Oroville Dam threatened to spill what Curbed San Francisco described as a three-story wall of water, inciting an emergency situation and calls for evacuation of local populations by Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea, the case is finally closed. Investigative officials have now attributed several factors from various parties as the potential culprit.

Last week, the six-person team of geologists and engineers, assigned by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials and the United States Society of Dams, released a 584-page report in which they lay blame to and call action from state bodies, outline the integrity of the structure from the beginning of the building stages, and ask for additional community education efforts on the site. Also in the report, the team demands obvious repair of longstanding problems and asks for updated safety inspections.

“The Oroville Dam spillway incident was caused by a long-term systemic failure of the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), regulatory and general industry practices to recognize and address inherent spillway design and construction weaknesses, poor bedrock quality, and deteriorated service spillway chute conditions,” the panel wrote.

While the dam itself wouldn’t have failed at the time of the threat, the reservoir was full from the heavy rains California was experiencing at the time, the source reports. And while emergency spillways were included in the design to channel the excess water from the reservoir, these spillways were badly damaged and in the process of collapsing.

“In many of these inspections, the spillway chute was observed only from the deck of the spillway headgate structure,” the panel wrote on the state of disarray of the emergency spillways. “The chute could not safely be inspected at close distance due to water on the gates, wetness of the chute surface, steepness of the chute, or other considerations. There may have been an option to work with in-house DWR safety engineers to develop alternative methods to safely perform inspections under those conditions, but these options were not exercised.”

Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States, with a reservoir capacity of roughly 3.5 million acre feet and generating enough electricity to power 737,000 homes per year. With a dam this large and affecting so many in the surrounding area, the panel concluded that systemic problems must be addressed in order to truly ensure this disaster, or the threat of, does not happen again, and advised all to adhere to this wake-up call.

“The incident cannot reasonably be blamed mainly on any one individual, group, or organization,” the panel asserts. “The fact that this incident happened to the owner of the tallest dam in the United States, under regulation of a federal agency, with repeated evaluation by reputable outside consultants, in a state with a leading dam safety regulatory program, is a wake-up call for everyone.”

For more information, read the full Independent Forensic Team report here.

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