Lake Oroville Dam, located in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, gets major inflows from the Sierras and will be tested again in the spring when the snowpack begins to melt. The state's snowpack in the central Sierras region where Oroville is located sits at
183 percent of normal.
Cal Fire Capt. Dan Olson, a spokesman for the Oroville incident, said Wednesday morning: "We have crews working 24 hours a day. We're moving around 1,200 tons of rock an hour on the ground and it's being placed as a means of back-filling the erosion that occurred the other day. We also are using two helicopters to swing in bags of rock."