Naturally enough, the minute I finally gave up on driving up and down the main drag of Oroville trying to find the dam, and decided to head out of town to the next stop, I find ten or eleven signs pointing the way to it. For all its size, it’s oddly unimpressive — I think because it’s basically a huge earth berm; it winds up just looking like an unusually-placed hillside. Big vertical walls of concrete are much more startling-looking.
The Oroville Dam (for real this time)
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.