Posted on 03/23/2017 7:48:58 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Oroville dam has largely faded out of the news in the past few weeks but the crisis is not over yet. A report on the safety of the dam concluded: “A very significant risk would be incurred if the Gated Spillway is not operational by November 1.” November 1 is the start of the next rainy season. From the Associated Press:
Officials with the state Department of Water Resources, which operates the dam, fear a huge rupture that opened in the main spillway could expand to cripple the flood gates that send out controlled releases of water and keep water from spilling over uncontrollably.
In a statement, spokeswoman Maggie Macias said the agency’s objective is to have a fully functional spillway before the start of the next storm season.
“We’ll be working round-the-clock through spring, summer and fall to make that happen,” she said.
In case you’ve forgotten what the main spillway looks like, here it is:
Note the size of the helicopter in this image for scale:
So California has about 7 months to shore up all of this damage and repair the spillway in time for the next rainy season. And there is concern that repairing the visible damage will not be enough. Inspectors found water was leaking between the apparently undamaged sections of concrete, meaning even the sections of the spillway that look salvageable may need to be replaced or repaired before it can be used safely. The cost to repair all of this damage is expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
The report also says the emergency spillway should not be used under any circumstance and needs to be redesigned. If you recall, authorities briefly allowed water to flow over the emergency spillway last month and then saw evidence the ground below it was in danger of undermining the concrete. Though the Oroville dam itself was never in danger, 188,000 people were evacuated over concern the spillway could fail catastrophically, sending a wall of water into downstream cities and towns.
They’re in deep do dah.
But at least they’ll have a nice train.
Seven months???? They won’t even get the environmental paperwork down by then.
Californians may have to do without champagne and caviar for a while since daddy deep-pockets isn’t on the throne any longer.
Get a gold mining co to come in and bust all the rock out from the end of the damaged portion down to the river.
They will have that done in two to three months.
The Oroville Dam situation provides one aspect of this failure. We are dealing with repairs that could have been made ten years earlier at much less expense. Lack of judgement on the part of liberals has resulted in a situation where we must now spend many tens of millions by November or face the distinct possibility of wiping out a fairly large part of the state. Even if we spend the money, the weather may not cooperate by waiting until November or we may fail to get our money's worth for the repair costs.
Either way we are entering an era wherein the government's resources will be very limited at a time when demands on government will be serious and non-negotiable. It is the youth of our nation which will have to pay for these errors. The upside is that this will create a smarter generation with a deep conviction that "there ain't no free lunch".
I think I’d look at where the water wants to go, and line that with concrete instead of trying to put back the structure that didn’t work.
original long thread with lots of great info towards the end from people in the know
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3524221/posts
they won’t fix it until it rains again
No problem, the global warming crowd has said California is in a big drought.
The only way that will happen is if they start writing checks to contractors with lots of zeros; they don't let an EPA weenie within 20 miles of the site; and they write-off that entire valley for the first mile or so down stream of the dam - no questions asked. Then turn the contractors loose and they can make it happen - as long as Cali's loony left government doesn't "help" too much. (ie. any)
In other words, ain't gonna happen. I predict they'll screw around with environmental stuff for weeks, maybe several months. They'll come up with a complicated design that coupled with various constraints imposed won't even begin to be ready by November. Instead, they'll fumble along, and then along in October sometime they'll push the panic button and blow millions on emergency measures and wreak more havoc through the rainy season. They may, may be done by November - of 2018.
I have an alternate solution. Abandon the dam. Send all the illegal Mexican aliens in and around LA back to Mexico, and tell LA there will be no more water coming from the Oroville dam source. Open floodgates slowly and allow the lake to empty out slowly. Then allow the Feather River to flow naturally through the former Lake Oroville, as it did for thousands of years before the dam. Environmentalists will be happy with this solution. So will taxpayers.
There is no lack of money in the system, it's just already been embezzled by decades of city employees and politicians who continually told themselves that pension funds will earn more money than they ever have, never repaying any of the losses and assuming some future economic boom will rescue them from this looming issue. That's just one of the major water users from Oroville Dam, and one of the bodies who vetoed extensive maintenance on the spillway that failed.
And while it's complicated, the damaged main spillway never was in danger of failing, a 50 foot tall emergency spillway wall was in danger of toppling due to undercutting from a waterflow of about 20% of the designed operation flow, so it just draped and hit the ground right in front of the spillway skirt. Of course, this was explicitly explained in the dam's operating manual, but the state had just re-declared a drought emergency which called for keeping as much water as possible in Oroville...
A very stupid and nearly deadly plan that was immediately thrown out as soon as sane people arrived and pointed at the manual on how to operate the dam.
The main reason to repair the main spillway is less any fears that a compromising event might happen and much more a case that the bedrock pathways that have been cut into the rock was causing a dramatic increase in sediment being sent downstream, cutting off maximum capacity of the Feather River from 405,000 cfps to only 365,000 - a mark it has reached several times and likely would result in many of the levees downstream of Oroville being topped.
High speed rail fund
Sacremento, CA
I would mention that while the land where my home is built has not been flooded since the 1880s, it has come close a few times, and it is mostly due to good water management at Oroville that it hasn't been flooded. You might want to re-think the plan if you take me up on the offer.
The repairs at Oroville will cost less than the High Speed Rail’s marketing budget over the next 10 years...
High Speed Rail Spillway - Gov Moonbeam will rush to fund it.
They have a single option, rebuild the spillway in the same configuration it was before. Any other option would require a new permit for the dam, and considering it hasn’t even gotten the old permit renewed due to environmental lawsuits, that’s not going to happen.
Rebuilding the spillway isn’t that huge of a challenge, just a matter of logistics - incidentally, one which has already been solved when they built the spillway in the first place. Just going to suck for us locals who will have to adjust to even more truck traffic on Highway 70.
The spillway was poured in sections but it was not a lapped pour. In effect it was just big sections of concrete slabs. It it had of been a lapped structure the water going down the spillway could not have undermined the sections of concrete, engineering 101 and also aerodynamics which is fluid flow dynamics. The real hell of it is to make it a lapped spillway would have added minimal costs to the project.
The emergency spillway was a crime of engineering. They built it on unconsolidated ground. This was even a greater crime than the poorly designed spillway. In short order the water going over the emergency spillway started washing out the unconsolidated ground. If this had of continued it would have taken out the adjacent spillway and they would have lost the entire lake quickly and a catastrophic down stream flood would have occurred.
That is why they reopened the damaged spillway despite the damage to it. They damn near lost the lake.
It would be very interesting to see the original engineering proposals for the damn. Were the original proposals changed or was the engineering just piss poor.
Better worry about a 3.2 earthquake...Now...
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