BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- It will probably never happen, but, just in case, county and city officials have developed a new emergency plan which the Board of Supervisors got a look at Tuesday morning.

In addition, the board received an update from the Army Corps of Engineers, which had good news, bad news and a time table for when all the work could be done.

"It's a very, very complicated problem," said Ron Rose of the Corps.

And you could call that a major under statement when describing the solution to the Lake Isabella Dam, where there have been discussions about building a new dam entirely, although that's highly unlikely due to its cost. The Corps has virtually wrapped up its studying and found 46 potential failures of both the main and auxiliary dams, 18 of which are considered significant.

It sounds ominous, with the Kern Canyon Fault running beneath, but at just 18-percent of capacity a failure remains unlikely. In fact, the dam has prevented 15 major floods in the last 50 plus years including the most recent rainflood in 2003. In other words there was so much rain or snowmelt that if not for the dam, the levee capacity in the Bakersfield area would not be able to withstand the water.

As for the solution to the dam's weaknesses, that as Rose said remains very complicated.

"Any fix you may do for seepage you have to come and fix for seismic and you may have to take out and destroy the seepage fix so (to do the seismic fix), we've really got get that right," Rose said before the board Tuesday morning.

The Corps begins that process of "getting it right" with a meeting of international experts next week in Sacramento, followed by a December workshop.

An environmental impact study could then be completed by as early as January 2012 with the design determined two to three years later. That puts the solution construction at around 2014.

While the corps works to fix the dam, city and county emergency officials continue to prepare for the worst as they were briefed on the Dam Failure Evacuation Plan at the Emergency Operations Center on Panorama Drive on Tuesday afternoon, just as the board was Tuesday morning.

It's a plan that addresses the worst case scenario of dam failure, which requires full capacity of the reservoir and sudden and complete failure. That worst case scenario calls for the evacuation of more than a 250,000 people in the metro Bakersfield area in just hours.

Its a plan Robert Olson & Associates has consulted on for the last 18 months.

"It'll never be perfect," said Robert Olson. "But i'm very, very, very confident that this plan will allow the safe evacuation of tens of thousands of people."

A daunting task, but one that could help avert disaster on the large or small scale.

"If we can do this, we can do anything," said Emergency Services Manager Georgianna Armstrong. "While this might not be our most likely disaster, the impacts of this would be so severe we have to be prepared."

And Olson says, based on his work, the county and city are well prepared.

"About 20 years ago I worked on an evacuation plan for Egypt given the potential failure of the Aswan Dam," Olson said. "And I just wish we had the resources and the commitment that we've been able to apply to this plan."

And its a plan that requires public participation and preparedness to be effective.

"Our evacuation plan is contingent on people leaving early on in the process before the water gets there," Armstrong said after making the presentation to the Board of Supervisors. "And if you receive a recommended evacuation order you should go."

The best way the public can prepare is to be register with ReadyKern as soon as possible, that's the reverse 9-1-1 system in the county. You can visit readykern.com or call 211 to sign up.