Replies

The SacBee article is very telling. It reveals that the new March 24 BOC memo** was not asked to be rendered "secret or confidential" by the BOC but that DWR asked that it be deemed "confidential". This is huge. Why? If you look deep enough into the architecture of the controlled spillway, you can identify a "scenario" that could be deemed a "security" issue. That is likely what DWR assembled. Thus, using this "security" scenario/issue, you ask that the whole memo be deemed secret/confidential. Thus DWR can dodge the "heat" from the latest BOC memo.

I'm not downplaying the actual security "scenario", just highlighting the politics at play.

= = Article clip:

"DWR requested the consultants’ report be kept confidential, said FERC spokeswoman Celeste Miller."

= = end clip.

= = Reason cited for "confidential status": (emphasis mine)

FERC’s website says a document can be made confidential if it “gives strategic information” related to “the production, generation, transmission, or distribution of energy” or could be “useful to a person planning an attack on critical infrastructure.”

= = end clip.

**Memo - likely bulleted mini-report with more detailed results & commentary just like the March 17 memo (that gave great heartburn to DWR)

FERC’s website says a document can be made confidential if it “gives strategic information” related to “the production, generation, transmission, or distribution of energy” or could be “useful to a person planning an attack on critical infrastructure.”

That's a very loose rule on FERC's part. I've seen it in effect before. Maps of power transmission lines removed from the public domain, yet the towers and conductors are obvious in real life. Images of nuclear plants are "verbotten", but Google Maps, Bing Maps, and others show exactly where the plants are. Not to mention the snapshots I acquired from the water just because I could. :)

I'm in the power industry. We are beholden to certain requirements in terms of disclosing information. And I agree, but things that are obviously visible don't lend themselves to being hidden.

My opinion is that CA DWR is hiding behind NERC rules to avoid public disclosures of certain "issues" involving the dam, and more specifically, the spillway(s). There's a lot of past transgressions here.

I’ll add this - I have a transmission line running across my property, and a steel transmission tower 30 feet behind my property line. It wouldn’t take a lot of genius to carry out nefarious activity on that structure, though in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t do squat to the transmission grid in general. But a bad guy might not know that.

On the other hand, a bad guy might not know that I actually look at the tower from time to time and would report nefarious activity. That’s how us electrical guys roll.