Oroville Dam
From Freepedia
Oroville Dam is on the Feather River above the city of Oroville in Butte County, California. It creates Lake Oroville, generates electricity, and provides drinking and irrigation water for Central and Southern California. The dam, lake and other facilities are part of the California State Water Project. The fish ladder and fish hatchery are an interesting place to view the salmon migration in September and October
Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States and is in the top twenty in the world for dam height and volume of dam materials. It is an earth-fill dam, stands 770 feet (235 m) tall, is 7,600 feet (2,317 m) long and holds 3,537,577 acre-feet (4.364 km³) of water. Construction started in 1957 and was completed in 1968.
It was not known until 1975, when a magnitude 5.7 earthquake occurred near Oroville, that the dam sits atop an active faultline.
See Reservoirs and dams in California
External links
- Maps and aerial photos
- Street map from Google Local or Yahoo! Maps
- Topographic map from TopoZone
- Aerial image or topographic map from TerraServer-USA
- Satellite image from Google Local or Microsoft Virtual Earth
