WASHINGTON Oroville Dam exposes rift between conservative town, coastal liberals

Steps away from his house, hundreds of contractors are struggling to repair the Oroville Dam before the spring rains arrive in earnest. A stream of semi-trailers unloads chunks of rocks, which backhoes then load onto large dump trucks to deliver to weak spots on the other side of the dam. Helicopters chatter overhead every 90 seconds, lifting in even more rocks to shore up the dam’s top. Diesel engines rumble day and night, contractors bark orders and neighbors wander by to take a look.
Every bedroom window in Hofeling's house looks out over the dam, at what is now a staging area. Contractors told him this repair effort could last weeks.
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The mere threat of a dam failure last week was enough to temporarily evacuate about 200,000 people living downstream. And a collapse could cause death and devastation in both the short- and long-term: This reservoir stores water to irrigate downstream farms and provide drinking water for Los Angeles.
Residents here in Oroville, Marysville and Yuba City are now living with the fresh knowledge that maybe this dam isn’t as safe as they thought. That fact that the water benefits people hundreds of miles away from this danger is reverberating around these conservative communities that see little common ground with the far more liberal Californians on the coast and in Silicon Valley.
This isn’t just idle talk: One of the first signs heading into Oroville, population 16,000, urges residents to support seceding from California to create a new state of Jefferson. Here in inland California, Gov. Jerry Brown’s name evokes disgust, and President Donald Trump is seen as the one who really cares. Here, residents distrust a state government they think is all-too-eager to help undocumented immigrants and build a bullet train to serve the rich coastal elites, leaving them with little.
“I bet that if they put this effort into building it right the first time, they wouldn’t have to do all of this,” Hofeling, 66, says as a backhoe drops rocks into a dump truck, shaking the ground.
It’s a refrain voiced time and again in Oroville and the surrounding towns: The liberal, more populated parts of California suck up all the political attention and public dollars, leaving little for the men and women who help grow the nation’s food, fruits and nuts. That dichotomy has bred a mistrust of state government and a healthy skepticism of federal officials, Trump excepted.
How is it, the people here ask, that state and federal officials didn’t seem to have the money to properly fix the dam’s problems when they were first identified, but have seemingly untold millions available when the crisis finally arrived.
To understand the situation, you have to look more carefully at California’s voting tallies. Statewide, Hillary Clinton clobbered Trump, winning 61% of the popular vote and 4.2 million more votes than Trump. On one hand, this is a state that utterly rejected Trump. On the other hand, because California is so big, there’s wide variation in political affiliations.
Eldon Hofeling watches contractors load rocks being used to repair the Oroville Dam. The work ... more
Trevor Hughes/USA TODAY
The farmers and ranchers of Butte County, surrounding Oroville, live vastly different lives than the millionaires strolling Santa Monica’s beaches or riding the Google buses to Mountain View or the Facebook coaches to Menlo Park. Butte County favored Trump in the election 46% to 42%, despite the presence of the more urban and traditionally more liberal Chico within its boundaries. Downstream neighbor Yuba County, home of Yuba City and Marysville, is perhaps a more accurate barometer: It went for Trump at nearly 58%.
In this part of the state, Brown is the bad guy for picking fights with the president over immigration, climate change and national priorities. Trump, in turn, called California “out of control” and suggested he might try to withhold federal funding, particularly over whether the more liberal coastal cities were acting as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants.
“As you know, I’m very much opposed to sanctuary cities. They breed crime. There’s a lot of problems,” Trump told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. “If we have to, we’ll defund. We give tremendous amounts of money to California. California in many ways is out of control, as you know.”
Brown, for his part, has lauded Trump for promising to repair the nation’s roads, bridges and dams, but has also promised to use the state’s scientists, lawyers and resources to fight the president’s “alternative facts.”
The bad blood has flowed downstream, from the retired homebuilder who trusts Trump over the locally managed state Division of Water Resources, to the traffic flagger who laughs that liberal environmentalists aren’t worried about rare fish when their own homes are endangered, to the evacuee who refuses to return home or be quoted by name because she doesn’t trust what the government will do with the information.
A rainbow arches above the Feather River where it crosses beneath power lines beneath the Oroville ... more
Trevor Hughes/USA TODAY
Everyone here, it seems, has a reason to distrust some level of the government. Nowhere was that more evident than when a video showing a National Guard soldier giving out wrong information about the state of the dam and evacuation began ricocheting around social media hours after the evacuation order was lifted. What he said contradicted the official line from dam managers, and the public seemed ready to accept his version over theirs, especially as some Californians already believed dam managers had covered up the extent of repair work conducted in 2009.
Dam managers say they’re making good progress on repairing the damage caused when the reservoir overtopped its emergency spillway, scouring away trees, dirt and boulders. Managers had feared the emergency spillway could collapse, sending a wall of water downstream. That threat has eased, and workers are now shoring up the spillway and removing debris from below the dam.
Still, social media has been filled with rampant rumors and speculation that government officials were misstating the risk for some political gain, and there’s skepticism bordering on paranoia that the “real story” isn’t being told by the media or the government.
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“We have this longstanding history in our country, based on the idea that people control the government, not the other way around,” said Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea, who ordered the evacuation and then spent days defending it against critics on both sides of the aisle.
Wading into that political tension are the state and federal emergency-management agencies trying to help.
“Basically, they’re like don’t mess with us. We don’t need you…until we need you,” said Craig Fugate, the head of FEMA under President Obama. “You have to understand that level of mistrust. It’s not personal.”
Fugate said the political dynamic in California mirrors that of many states, from his native Florida to the urban-rural divide of Washington state. The Oroville Dam’s potential failure could have been the first major test of the relationship between Trump and outspoken critic Brown, who after opposing the president asked him to declare a disaster in Oroville.