Posted on 02/19/2017 6:26:41 PM PST by Mariner
If you live in the middle you are definitely near a river and levees.
Yes, they said the entire Central Valley of California needs to be ready to evacuate on short notice.
“Yes, they said the entire Central Valley of California needs to be ready to evacuate on short notice.”
Prayers Up! Are YOU safe?
If I lived anywhere close to a river below Oroville, I wouldn’t wait for the call to evacuate. By then the highways will be packed, people will panic, and it won’t be nice. If I had a family, I would be taking a vacation..... loading up and leaving right now...to higher ground.
“The Oroville Dam is to be soaked by a foot of rain by Tuesday, ramping up the pressure on engineers who are frantically trying to repair ‘patch and pray’ quick-fixes which led to its near-collapse last week.”
Great. They’ve been performing “patch and pray” for quite some time.
Considering the area that the dam affects - they, actually, thought those procedures hold. Not so!
They’re too busy trying to initiate a One-Way-Westbound-Only Choo Choo Train.
We pray for everyone - may they stay safe.
If it wasn’t for the levee the Sacramento River would be waist high in my living room.
Exactly.
I would leave right now and not stop until I got to Texas.
Ping
+100
I'm down in southern California on vacation (no snow), it is NOT necessary to go very far to get UP above the impact zone.
Water Wings or those pool noodle thingy-s! Just in case. ;)
““The Oroville Dam is to be soaked by a foot of rain by Tuesday, ramping up the pressure on engineers who are frantically trying to repair ‘patch and pray’ quick-fixes which led to its near-collapse last week.””
I am not going to say that this whole issue isn’t serious, but any suggestion that the dam itself is in danger is really a stretch. The area where the emergency spillway is located has a concrete cap. There is concern that if it were to fail the lake might drop as much as 30 feet all at once, but not the whole lake! Right now the lake has been drawn down about 50 feet, so all the water is going out the main spillway. The real issue is what will the coming rains bring? As long as they can release as much water as is flowing in, everything will work out. If the emergency spillway is topped again, that’s when there could be a problem.
I think they plan on breaching those levies to protect Sacramento if it gets much worse. Stay packed...
Here’s the NOAA Forecast. Take a look:
Looks as though there could be 6 inches of rain. That’s a bunch as the Lake Oroville Watershed is huge.
Short notice isn’t going to be enough to get out of the way of flood waters.
Teleporting might be able to accomplish it, but one stalled car on the road will tie it all up and people will die.
Same here.
I’d have packed up everything that was really important to me and high tailed it out for a vacation with friends or family somewhere else.
Of course they would. Capitals rule, everybody else can grow gills. Same here in Austin, below Lake Travis. We drown behind the dam (Mansfield) because they don’t want their docked boats getting mud splashed on them, or, heaven forfend, having to trailer them up onto the entertaining area of the gardens.
That 30 foot is only a quarter of a TRILLION pounds of water due to the size of the lake. Can’t imagine it would do anything to the impoundment with already an exposed history of rotten rock. As it moves downstream it might move an item or two in its way.
Now, I will concede that we do not know that it will happen. We only surmise that it may happen. I don’t think I am going to dine in one of those charming River front Restaurants on the North side of Sacramento on Wednesday or Thursday.
"In other words, those living anywhere near a river, a slough, a levee, a creek or a canal need to be ready to flee floodwaters at a moment’s notice."
That is bad enough.
The state flood control system operators have done a great job so far. The system is close to overload so this present storm might put it over the edge. Any big warm rain in the next month might melt enough snow pack to do the same.
At that point the flood control operators will triage some areas by opening levees to save as much as possible of the rest. They won't wait until large areas flood simultaneously from widespread levee failures. That may happen anyway, but I'm sure the system operators have updated the triage plan and are ready to open levees as necessary to avoid avoidable flooding.
We're just at the point that major unavoidable flooding may happen by next weekend.
The Oroville Dam spillway break compounds the problem. The flood control operators must assume now that its emergency spillway will fail the next time it is used, and make a worst case plan for that. This means adding a sudden surge of several hundred thousand acre feet of water over several hours to their planning.
Which will mean opening levees downstream as soon as the Oroville Reservoir level goes over a certain level - maybe 895 feet above sea level (it's about 850' now and the emergency spillway top is at 901' above sea level). It will take several hours for the flow from an Oroville emergency spillway breach to get far down river, and a breach would take several hours to unfold. But it will also take hours for intentional levees breaches to minimize any dam breach spill pulse enough to avoid widespread damage to the downriver flood control system.
None of this can save Oroville, Yuba City, Marysville, etc, from an Oroville Reservoir breach.
Pay real close attention to intentional levee breaches by California flood control system operators. That will give us a few hours warning of how scared they are, particularly of the Oroville Dam.
O/T: I *just* saw evidence of counter-lock in this thread. FR’s seizing up because the code, when someone is filling out a reply, runs out and increments the counter and locks the thread_comment_key even though nobody’s hit post yet. I’ve seen this a few times over the years. Change the write to the counter to happen after hitting post and the bottleneck should clear up.
I lived in the Bay Area for a few years. My experience with driving in the central valley leads me to believe an evacuation would not go well. California has a lot of highways that go north-south. But it doesn't have a lot that go east-west. Going east or west would probably be the best way to higher ground for most in the valley, but that's not where the roads go.
For instance, the central valley is separated from the San Francisco Bay area by a range of low mountains, but there are only a few routes over those hills. They would be brought to a halt by traffic quickly.
Also, there are a lot of state highways crossing the valley, but these are more for agricultural access, not moving large numbers of people, and cross streams and canals with low bridges that are not build for floods. In short, it would be easy for someone's planned evacuation route to get cut off by either crowds or water.
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