JFB
Hunter
Big dam in CA has been damaged during their recent rain storms
http://imgur.com/gallery/xHfxx
http://imgur.com/gallery/xHfxx
CA rains and US largest dam
- Thread starter JFB
- Start date
An Godzilla isn't helping by putting his big feet in the hole. 
:roll:
:roll:cleardatum
Single-Sixer
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2013
- Messages
- 297
holy chet!! i did get a giggle looking at the emergency spillway, and the "approximate path" of the discharge. 
Merle1948
Buckeye
JFB said:
If I lived there I would be long gone!!! :shock:
..and yet, with all this, we get the below from our water board....
https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2017/02/09/droughts-not-over-yet-state-water-board-urges-more-conservation/
...only in Commiefornia.
https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2017/02/09/droughts-not-over-yet-state-water-board-urges-more-conservation/
...only in Commiefornia.
CA never seems to be at an "average condition". It's always a drought or a flood or a mudslide or a wildfire.
Did anyone ever wonder if some areas of the state were simply not suitable for habitation?
Did anyone ever wonder if some areas of the state were simply not suitable for habitation?
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coach
Hunter
Don't forget earthquakes.
exavid
Hunter
I wonder if they don't find out it wasn't a failure of the concrete but a loss of support underneath it from erosion. Seems there would have to have been some evidence on the surface of the substrate eroding.
Rick Courtright
Hawkeye
coach said:Don't forget earthquakes.
Hi,
You guys are catching on: despite the complaints of ignorant transplants out here who think it was better "at home" but won't do us the favor of going back there, we DO have FOUR seasons! Earthquake, flood, fire and... riot!
Someone made some serious money selling THAT T-shirt...
Rick C
Holy Mackerel, Andy! :shock: (Woosh, right over the younger generation's heads.)
Rancher Will
Blackhawk
If the water finally goes over the dam or the dam breaks, the folks in Blackfoot, Idaho can give you some advice. Their dam broke a few years ago with disastrous results.
Cholo said:
:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :lol: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
Rancher Will said:
I doubt this will cause any dam break but they might have to use the "emergency spillway". Both the regular spillway and the emergency one are built onto the side of a hill. They would have to erode through an entire hill to compromise the lake, which I doubt will happen. The actual dam is to the right of the spillway as you look at it in all these pictures. The emergency spillway is to the left.
Jimbo357mag
Hawkeye
It's going to be a really big clean-up and repair job. :shock:
Merle1948
Buckeye
redhawker said:Rancher Will said:
I doubt this will cause any dam break but they might have to use the "emergency spillway". Both the regular spillway and the emergency one are built onto the side of a hill. They would have to erode through an entire hill to compromise the lake, which I doubt will happen. The actual dam is to the right of the spillway as you look at it in all these pictures. The emergency spillway is to the left.
just saw a report that the emergency spillway was operating - for the first time ever. :shock:
I get a grin out of the official comments that they "might have to use" the emergency spillway . . . as if they had a choice. If the water gets so high, it's going over that spillway regardless of what the officials want.
Pat-inCO
Hawkeye
Rick Courtright said:
PRICELESS!
RSIno1
Hunter
We in SoCal know about it already.Rancher Will said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_Hills_Dam_disaster
Sin6Sec63451022
Single-Sixer
Your main spillway is pretty much non functional. Years ago you built an emergency spillway in case your main spillway becomes nonfunctionable. Now you don't want to use your emergency spillway to get you past the emergency because of erosion problems. So you continue to use the main spillway, wiping it out and sending all kinds of crap down the hill into the river. Bureaucracy at its finest!
The town of Oroville and others downstream on the Feather River are under evacuation orders as we speak. Officials are very fearful that the emergency spillway will give way before the night is through (Sunday night).
Not good, not good at all.
Not good, not good at all.
GunnyGene
Hawkeye
Every dam will eventually fail, every volcano will eventually erupt, and so on. The planet will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and shake us off like a bad case of fleas. People are generally too short sighted to understand that.
CGDustDevil
Buckeye
Friends of ours up there said this thing has been causing concerns for 12 years, but the repairwork was deemed un-needed and expensive. Apparently there was an 'inspection' yesterday afternoon and they said no cause for concern. Four or so hours later they determine the failure is imminent.
Kinda started sounding like a re-run of the St. Francis Dam in 1928... That didn't work out very well either for 450 or so people who were washed out to sea after they were told the dam was safe a few hours before it collapsed.
Kinda started sounding like a re-run of the St. Francis Dam in 1928... That didn't work out very well either for 450 or so people who were washed out to sea after they were told the dam was safe a few hours before it collapsed.
ProfessorWes
Hawkeye
I actually made a post on this over in the Politics forum, because of Sacramento's failure to adequately maintain CA's dams, then deleted it because I'm not sure it was in good taste under the circumstances.
Still, for decades we've heard the eco-weenies calling the shots in California demanding rivers be "returned to their natural state," and they've actually demolished a bunch of dams and drained lakes in the face of severe drought downstate. And the state government preferred to spend money on "forward-looking" things like bullet trains to Fresno than on stuff like dam and road maintenance. Well, those bills are now coming due with a vengeance. And from some of the things I've read, Oroville is far from the only dam in CA suffering the effects of deferred maintenance.
I really hope people downstream of this thing are going to be OK. Still, whether the dam holds or not, it's past time for California's beleaguered residents to march on Sacramento with pitchforks and torches.
Still, for decades we've heard the eco-weenies calling the shots in California demanding rivers be "returned to their natural state," and they've actually demolished a bunch of dams and drained lakes in the face of severe drought downstate. And the state government preferred to spend money on "forward-looking" things like bullet trains to Fresno than on stuff like dam and road maintenance. Well, those bills are now coming due with a vengeance. And from some of the things I've read, Oroville is far from the only dam in CA suffering the effects of deferred maintenance.
I really hope people downstream of this thing are going to be OK. Still, whether the dam holds or not, it's past time for California's beleaguered residents to march on Sacramento with pitchforks and torches.
ProfessorWes
Hawkeye
Sin6Sec63451022 said:
I'm also wondering whose bright idea it was to run power lines across the emergency spillway, too. Which appears to have been as poorly maintained as the main spillway.
http://www.sondrakistan.com/2017/02/11/todazed-ca-facepalm-73/
Reportedly, to keep the power lines from ending up in the Feather River, "PG&E is removing them and replacing them. Somehow."
caryc
Hawkeye
Cholo said:
AS I remember it, it was Holy Mackel, Andy.
Don't forget "I tell ya what I gonna do!" My favorite.
The title of the thread through me off. I think it is the tallest, not the largest. :wink: Regardless, the potential for disaster is there. As a side note, my late Uncle was a heavy equipment operator on that dam project...
Rick Courtright
Hawkeye
Hi,
There are some interesting videos here on what's happened and is still happening. There will be plenty of time to point fingers and such after this is over, when we can hope the powers that be will reevaluate the real costs of not maintaining infrastructure which, frankly, looks to be under-engineered for the job it needs to do even from the start. But for now, let's just look at what's going on as we watch:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article132787074.html
For example, let's watch the first video with water coming down the regular spillway. That flow is roughly 100,000 cfs (cubic feet per second) and is about HALF of what it was flowing before they slowed it down to reduce further damage. Now let's get out our cheapo $3 calculators from Wally's (don't need no half million dollar studies here!) and do some simple arithmetic. There are roughly 7.5 gal of water per cubic foot, weighing about 8 lbs/gal, which we're gonna multiply by 100,000. Check me, but if I didn't slip a zero, we're talking SIX MILLION POUNDS PER SECOND of water weight going past any given point in that spillway! To try to put that into some kind of perspective we can relate to in everyday life, that's 75 fully loaded 18 wheelers PER SECOND. The scale of this event is pretty hard to get one's head around.
Now, if we can find an earlier picture of the hole in the spillway, it looks like the concrete's maybe only two to three feet thick. Perhaps that's because of a bad camera angle, but considering the force and weight of that water, I'm gonna guess whatever it was is only about a quarter as thick as it should be, and some serious engineering's gonna have to be done to give it a far more stable underlayment than it has once repairs begin. It will be interesting to see what transpires in that department in the next few years.
Also, one of the videos shows the damage from erosion once they started letting water come over the (untested?!?) emergency spillway. Whoever designed that certainly didn't do his homework as well as he probably should have, either as an engineer or an historian. One can look back to the 1850s or so when monitors (huge hose nozzles if you wish) were used in California's gold fields for hydraulic mining (they're actually still in use some places in the world) to get a tiny view of what water can do. Huge mountainsides were destroyed by them in the quest for gold. It's hard to make comparisons, but if we suggest for scale the regular spillway's a 3/4" garden hose at full blast, the emergency spillway's at least a 6" fire supply hose, and those monitors little more than children's squirt guns (MAYBE Super Soakers on their best day!) Those of you who've seen pictures from that time may be able to comprehend the damage better. Here's a drawing of one of those monitors at work:
And this photo's roughly 150 years after the fact:
Mention was made of the power lines. I might be inclined to go a little easy on the engineers there: it looks like they come from a power generating station at the foot of the dam, and the lines have to get out of there some way! Add that the guys designing the power lines probably placed a little (if now misguided?) faith in the idea the guys doing the concrete and such actually did their jobs properly!
All in all, I hope this event proves to be a good classroom/case study for the people who will be charged with repairing the damage, while at the same time serving as a reminder that Mother Nature's got more power in her little finger than all of us on the planet today do, combined!
Rick C
There are some interesting videos here on what's happened and is still happening. There will be plenty of time to point fingers and such after this is over, when we can hope the powers that be will reevaluate the real costs of not maintaining infrastructure which, frankly, looks to be under-engineered for the job it needs to do even from the start. But for now, let's just look at what's going on as we watch:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article132787074.html
For example, let's watch the first video with water coming down the regular spillway. That flow is roughly 100,000 cfs (cubic feet per second) and is about HALF of what it was flowing before they slowed it down to reduce further damage. Now let's get out our cheapo $3 calculators from Wally's (don't need no half million dollar studies here!) and do some simple arithmetic. There are roughly 7.5 gal of water per cubic foot, weighing about 8 lbs/gal, which we're gonna multiply by 100,000. Check me, but if I didn't slip a zero, we're talking SIX MILLION POUNDS PER SECOND of water weight going past any given point in that spillway! To try to put that into some kind of perspective we can relate to in everyday life, that's 75 fully loaded 18 wheelers PER SECOND. The scale of this event is pretty hard to get one's head around.
Now, if we can find an earlier picture of the hole in the spillway, it looks like the concrete's maybe only two to three feet thick. Perhaps that's because of a bad camera angle, but considering the force and weight of that water, I'm gonna guess whatever it was is only about a quarter as thick as it should be, and some serious engineering's gonna have to be done to give it a far more stable underlayment than it has once repairs begin. It will be interesting to see what transpires in that department in the next few years.
Also, one of the videos shows the damage from erosion once they started letting water come over the (untested?!?) emergency spillway. Whoever designed that certainly didn't do his homework as well as he probably should have, either as an engineer or an historian. One can look back to the 1850s or so when monitors (huge hose nozzles if you wish) were used in California's gold fields for hydraulic mining (they're actually still in use some places in the world) to get a tiny view of what water can do. Huge mountainsides were destroyed by them in the quest for gold. It's hard to make comparisons, but if we suggest for scale the regular spillway's a 3/4" garden hose at full blast, the emergency spillway's at least a 6" fire supply hose, and those monitors little more than children's squirt guns (MAYBE Super Soakers on their best day!) Those of you who've seen pictures from that time may be able to comprehend the damage better. Here's a drawing of one of those monitors at work:
And this photo's roughly 150 years after the fact:
Mention was made of the power lines. I might be inclined to go a little easy on the engineers there: it looks like they come from a power generating station at the foot of the dam, and the lines have to get out of there some way! Add that the guys designing the power lines probably placed a little (if now misguided?) faith in the idea the guys doing the concrete and such actually did their jobs properly!
All in all, I hope this event proves to be a good classroom/case study for the people who will be charged with repairing the damage, while at the same time serving as a reminder that Mother Nature's got more power in her little finger than all of us on the planet today do, combined!
Rick C
