They said it: The high-stakes stress of running a dam

“A dam engineer’s life is like a soldier’s life. It’s 99% boredom and 1% terror.”

— Jeffrey Mount, professor emeritus at UC Davis and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s water center, on state operators of Oroville Dam, California’s second-largest reservoir, opening the spillway gates last week and releasing billions of gallons of water down the massive concrete spillway to avoid potential flooding.