Good friend of mine did large emergency job for the state in October and still has not been paid. They called to have him do more. He said no.
Maybe it will be better when California is its own country and they can print money /s
They are saying that the collapse of the spillway is a matter of hours away. Hope they are wrong, but the erosive power of rushing water are often underestimated badly. The water pouring over the emergency spillway is eroding the base of the spillway levee at the bottom of the spillway “hill”. Once enough of that is gone the pressure of the water on the other side will cause a catastrophic collapse.
Yesterday morning the flooway plains between Sacramento and Woodland, which are normally dry, looked like a raging torrent miles wide, with the water only a few feet below the railroad trestle on the other side of the causeway we were travelling on. The river channels around West Sacramento are nearly full to the top. West Sac is like New Orleans - a city built in a bowl with river channels on all sides.
That’s where the water from any Oroville dam failure would wind up, on its way to San Francisco Bay. The potential is for some nasty flooding, and another big storm is days away...
President Trump has been warning us about our infrastructure. This is the quintessential example of pennies wasted resulting in absolute catastrophe.
“communicates with the hydraulics of the principal spillway”
This is key- the principal spillway has not been maintained and developed a whole where it’s foundation had eroded away.
Just incredible negligence.
I live above the valley. Watching all the traffic going south and east out of the valley. Lots of bad reporting and it appears that the emergency spillway will hold until the water recedes in an hour or so. More to follow.
Also Here; KRCR Facebook feed. (Found on one of the other threads.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwIst1YiMdo
“Live” thread http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3524238/posts
The scandal is that California was hordeing all this water in the first place. They should have been drawing down lake levels months ago!
CA can’t seem to do a dam thing right.
Illegal dam illegals dam illegals dam.......... illegals
Calling Governor Moonbeam ... Calling Governor Moonbeam ... Calling Governor Moonbeam ...........................
A friend in Redding says they are releasing lots of extra water from Lake Shasta also. A warm rain this week could also melt the snow at higher elevations.
State of Ca. is broke. In big debt. Hanging by a thread. Tip of the iceberg.
The reinforced concrete solution is in the past now. Ignorant, criminal and filthy democrats own this one.
This part of California does not have classic bedrock as I recall.
i’m not an engineer, so maybe others with experience can comment, but isn’t it unusual there’s only 1 main spillway? other dams around here have several so that even if 1 failed, they could cut it and still keep releasing. isn’t engineering for safety about redundancy?
On our normal weekly operations call with the Bureau of Reclamation they said the Department of Water Resources (DWR) did not expect water levels to rise enough to go over the emergency spillway. Boy was DWR wrong. DWR damaged an emergency valve at the base of the dam a few years ago in a stupid experiment by Fish agencies to let cold water at the bottom of the lake flow for fish. A failure when a concrete wall broke and flooded the control room nearly was catastrophic and just before the control room flooded an engineer was able to hit the emergency control to close the valve. That has not been repaired and is not being reported. They new they were in trouble when the main spillway came apart and lots of water was coming into the lake.
The lake holds 3.5 million acre feet of water which is now full. They can’t release water faster than is coming into the lake. They are trying to stay ahead of the game and are one storm away from catastrophe.
