NEW MELONES SPILLWAY ACT

1) The Congress of the United States finds that the spillway of the New Melones Dam in California may have been constructed by design to handle only 40% of the flows experienced in the Great Flood of January 1862 and thus poses a risk of catastrophic dam failure with death and destruction some 200 times as bad as the 1889 Johnstown Flood, and therefore enacts the New Melones Spillway Act:

2) The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are instructed without delay to examine contemporary newspaper accounts in such journals as the Sacramento Daily Union regarding flooding at Knight's Ferry, California, conduct on-site measurements, and calculate the flows of the Stanislaus River at that time and place, and if those flows are calculated to exceed 128,000 cubic feet per second, to thereafter adjust the capacity of the New Melones Dam Spillway to handle those larger flows.

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