The Lake Oroville spillway saga is the story without end.

We’ve been covering it for more than a month. It started when a hole in the spillway started growing on Feb. 7, followed by the evacuation of about 180,000 people on Feb. 12 when water started pouring into the never-used ravine that the state euphemistically called an “emergency spillway.”

The dates are so ingrained in my head, I don’t even need to look them up. The story has been on the front page every day since Feb. 7. Many times, the Lake Oroville crisis was the entire front page, followed by more pages inside.

Our reporters and photographers have worked hard to cover many different angles. The photos have been incredible. The stories have been frequently stupefying.

Those reporters and photographers have done it frequently in spite of, not with the help of, the state Department of Water Resources.

The DWR manages the lake, which is the cornerstone in the State Water Project. Though DWR is a state agency, its allegiance seems to be to water and power customers first, the taxpaying public second.

When this story (and the spillway) broke, DWR first tried to manage it from its offices in Sacramento rather than on the ground in Oroville. It was clumsy. The problem was treated almost whimsically. Watch the first press conference if DWR hasn’t deleted it.

After that, there were too many assurances that everything would be fine. The potential danger was downplayed.

The best thing DWR did was hand over responsibility for public safety to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Kory Honea was serious, not jocular, and it was clear he had the locals’ interests at heart.

DWR held daily press conferences, which were remarkably devoid of specifics. Nobody would venture a theory about why the spillway broke, how the fixes would be engineered, how much money it would all cost, how many people were working and who would pay the bills — though we know all of those discussions were happening.

Those are very general questions, the first to come up at news conferences that always ran out of time. Forget specifics. How much does it cost per hour to run just one of those excavators, or those helicopters? What companies have been hired to do the work? Why do you say a turbine is down for “routine maintenance” when it hasn’t run in years? Can you provide us with a copy of the permits that you say allow you to fill in a pond with rocks that has fish and turtles in it? Specifics would lead to non-answers, or the promise to get the answers later.

Then there’s access. Seeing the problem with our own eyes has been difficult. Our reporters and photographers have not been allowed to view the work from atop the dam since Feb. 7. We are stopped at the overlook and told it’s unsafe to cross the dam, even though our people have hardhats and reflective vests, and even though photographers from DWR are allowed to go anywhere.

Those DWR photos are remarkable, but mostly because they’re getting to shoot something nobody else is allowed to shoot, and fly drones where nobody else is allowed to fly.

The problem with that? The DWR is, through its photos, only showing us (and you) what they want you to see. Makes me wonder what they aren’t showing us.

Would you like DWR to write stories for the newspaper about the crisis? Of course not. That’s why we don’t want the only photos to be from them, either. That’s why our photographers will do everything possible to get their own shots, including trying to get closer than people with an inflated sense of power want us to be.

Nobody who has dealt with DWR over the years, least of all us, is surprised by any of this. The folks who work for DWR in Oroville are good people because they live among us. They answer phone calls and answer questions. But it seems they are all muzzled now, deferring to people from Sacramento.

That’s bad for the public. And though DWR doesn’t realize it, it’s bad for the state agency too.

Editor David Little’s column appears each Sunday. Contact him at 896-7793 or dlittle@chicoer.com.