I think the good people of Butte County, Calif. have officially retired the "between a rock and a hard place" description for the rest of this year.
Butte County is the home of Oroville. Those poor people lurched from one disaster to another in 2017. It began with a mass evacuation of their homes when the Oroville Dam threatened to fail during torrential rains and was capped off, when residents were once again forced out of their homes by a forest fire. I’m hopeful, for the rest of this year.
The first evacuation began, like the original evacuation in the Bible, with rain. The reservoir behind the dam began to fill and water was released down the steepest spillway in the nation. "Experts" had warned the state for years the spillway wasn’t strong enough to withstand sustained water impact, but bureaucrats knew better.
Until the water began to flow. Sure enough the spillway started to fail and the area was evacuated. Fortunately, the entire dam didn’t collapse. But when residents returned to their homes they learned the same state that assured them the dam was fail-safe now intended to blow up the spillway with "controlled" explosions and repair the dam.
You can read the whole sorry saga by clicking (in chronological order) here, here, here, here and here.
Resident’s latest tribulation began the same way the first did; with a cloud. Only this time it was smoke.
A forest fire called the Wall Fire (evidently California has so many conflagrations officials have to give them names in order to keep track) began moving toward the town as it rapidly engulfed 5,600 acres and approached the city limits.
Resident Peggie Adamson watched trees explode as the fire roared closer to her home. Then she did the Oroville Hop. As she told The Sacramento Bee, "We’ve been through enough here in Oroville. When they give out a warning to evacuate, we evacuate."
Once again the order was accompanied by sound effects. During the flood it was thunder and lightening. This time Adamson said, "It had to have been a couple of miles away, but we could still see it clear as day . . . I could hear propane tanks exploding, it sounded like bombs going off."
The evacuation order only covered 4,000, instead of the nearly 100,000 during the flood, but that doesn’t make it any easier for the affected.
Fortunately, once again there was no loss of life, only damage to property and peace of mind.
So here’s hoping this is the last of the excitement for Oroville residents for say the rest of the decade. I think they would probably welcome a few years of boredom, don’t you?
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.