“Department of Water Resources spokesman Kevin Dossey told the Sacramento Bee the emergency spillway was rated to handle 250,000 cubic feet per second, but it began to show weakness Sunday at a small fraction of that. Flows through the spillway peaked at 12,600 cubic feet per second at 1 a.m. Sunday and were down to 8,000 cubic feet per second by midday.”
No an engineer here, but it sounds like they now do not have the design controls that were built into the dam.
“weakness” evident of 5% of the design flow. Usually with good design margins, things will work at 1.5X to 2X of rated capacity. Here we have potential failure at 5% of rated capacity. That is very odd.
It’s wonderful that we are building a useless high-speed choo-choo and ignoring our basic water infrastructure. State heads better roll over this (starting with moonbeam) even if the situation gets no worse.
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The geology there was not the best place for a dam.
The dam was originally built there to keep people from picking up gold nuggets from the bottom of the Feather River.
(not a joke)