This is a stupid question mostly because I don’t know where to ask it. Also it seems like an obvious thing but I’ve never read any news mentioning ……
I was just reading an article going over recent flooding catastrophes and one thing that stood out was a dam adding to the high water by having to release water while the flooding was still happening.
But can’t dam operators see a storm forecast and start drinking, er draining, ahead of time? It’s seems like you could make a big difference in controlling flooding with just a day or two pregaming. That can’t be profound, so why does it never seem to be mentioned? It could be a significant factor on many floods, a critical use for NWS data, forecasts, warnings, so where are the news mentions?
For an example of when a dam is teetering upon catastrophic failure, with operators stuck between a rock and a hard place, see the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis
This was covered in a Plainly Difficult video on YouTube, as well as other channels like Practical Engineering (also on YT).
Essentially, in that situation, in anticipation of heavy rainfall, the operators were discharging water until they found the main spillway was becoming damaged (uncovering shoddy work from decades ago). But the amount of rain meant that using the never-tested emergency spillway might actually damage the dam foundations. So in the end, they had no choice but to use the main spillway, as the less worse of two awful choices.
Known only after the fact, 2017 was a particularly wet year in California, coming after years of drought conditions. So holding onto water within the reservoir wasn’t imprudent. But a flaw in the main spillway, and lack of testing of the backup, made a bad situation worse, turning into a full blown emergency for the people living below the tallest dam in the USA.
So they were relying on 47 year old charts, not updated for climate change, to guide their operations. That seems mighty suspicious