What if California's dams fail?

Was hoping to hear more about other dams, the article focuses on Oroville. Lake Berryessa for instance is a concrete dam, much more like hoover than Oroville. It was built before they realized there was a nearby active fault, the Green Valley Fault.

Lake Oroville (in the NYT article) is the 14th largest lake in California, Berryessa is #11. Lake Oroville does hold twice as much water when full though

The big concern is that Winters was flattened by an earthquake in 1892 and the same size quake at a fault near lake Berryessa, which is only 7 miles from the winters, would breach the dam. I've heard it discussed several times in geology circles, there's even a simulation of the result. It goes poorly for winters (7,000 people or so) and Davis (65,000 people). Here's the simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEJEHnKrueo

Practical engineering has a good detailed walkthrough of what happened at Oroville dam from an engineering perspective: https://youtu.be/jxNM4DGBRMU

I recently read "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of water issues in the west and California in particular.

A great portion of the book is devoted to dams. The gist of it is that many dams of questionable utility were constructed throughout the 20th century due to pork barrel politics and the unstoppable bureaucratic engines of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corp of Engineers. Like much infrastructure built in the US, not much concern was given to ongoing maintenance and so the book predicts that this will be a larger concern as time goes on.

Hopefully close calls like Oroville will bring more attention to this issue before a larger disaster happens.

The spillway reconstruction was expensive and time-consuming, but at least it didn't fail that time. The issue was a lack of investment in remediation repairs and improvements, and a lack of planning for extreme event flows.

In the long term, California is unprepared and fucked in terms of dwindling water supply and damaging storms and forest fires from climate change. That's why I left.