The confounding statements from the state Department of Water Resources about the Lake Oroville spillway crisis just keep coming.

The disaster has been a public-relations nightmare from the beginning, but DWR keeps making matters worse with its words and actions.

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Oroville Dam: DWR says cost of crisis tops $100M; spillway gates reopened As the repair bill for the crumbling spillway and the emergency response approached $200 million last week, DWR acting Director Bill Croyle — who has exhibited a troublesome tendency to downplay the incident since it started Feb. 7 — used an inappropriate analogy when asked at a press conference whether the crisis could have been prevented and who was responsible.

“This happened. Stuff happens,” he said. “So, you get a flat tire on your car, you run your car out of oil. I mean, these things happen. We’re going to get into how this happened, why this happened.”

Well. First, it’s a good idea to top off your oil when it’s low and change tires when they are worn, so something like the crumbling of a spillway shouldn’t be treated as an inevitability by the agency that supposedly manages it.

If that’s the case, a lot of people living downstream of dams in California have good reason to worry.

Second, now would be a good time to study the how and why, not later. The state is obviously trying to craft some permanent fixes on the dam right now. It seems it would want such answers quickly.

Another confounding stance by DWR came when this newspaper told the agency we had photos taken weeks before the spillway started to fall apart that showed possible damage to it in the very area where it started to crumble.

You’d think DWR and its engineers would want to investigate the photos. They didn’t ask to see them.

Instead, they emailed a cover-your-tail statement saying the dam was “frequently inspected by multiple state and federal agencies” and that later a “panel of independent experts” would investigate the cause of the spillway failure.

Hmmm. Perhaps those independent experts will want to look at the smoking-gun photos.

The day after that blockbuster article and photos appeared workers, scaffolding, lights and equipment were set up on the spillway itself. That scene caught our eyes. Why? Because in the previous day’s article, we asked whether DWR inspections included people actually walking on the huge spillway to examine the cracks and chasms. DWR said it couldn’t conduct an on-the-spillway inspection when water was behind the gates at the top of the spillway. That was called “typical DWR safety protocol.”

So the typical protocol is invoked when they don’t want to do the work, but ignored once they are embarrassed?

None of this engenders public confidence in DWR’s ability to adequately handle such a crisis.