If these jerks want to stop erosion, ask the Pentagon if CA can have a few hundred 40 ton mothballed tanks. Sikorsky twin rotor choppers can drop them inthe giant hole.
Its monday night and the lake level is almost 8 feet below the emergency spillway, today they dropped riprap and pumped grout into a fissure gouged out by the water, a fissure nobody is talking about. Its stable for now, they cannot use the emergency again and are calling it the auxiliary instead. They cannot prep it enough to use again. Total design failure even at a 5% release rate.
36 hours is the current estimated time left, it’s literally dammed if they do, dammed if they don’t.
Main spillway is at 100,000 cubic feet per second, undamaged it can go more than twice that rate but will flood downstream.
Really depends on the next storm, final solution is they must drain lake low enough so that even with the spring melt they won’t need to use the main spillway which may take six months to rebuild if they went all out. But they also need to get the pennstock valves open at the powerhouse, its flooded.Must get wster below main spillway gates.
I envy the guys sitting across the dam doing live streaming.
Guess the SF TV station decided to let fewer people see the drone video.
What is the Pennstock and where is the powerhouse? Do you work there?
If these jerks want to stop erosion, ask the Pentagon if CA can have a few hundred 40 ton mothballed tanks. Sikorsky twin rotor choppers can drop them inthe giant hole.
Daniel, thanks for the info.
Where is this fissure; right under the e-spill?
Check out the citizen journalist’s report here (h/t maggief)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3524221/posts?page=745#745
Maggief mentioned in that post that it hadn’t been confirmed, but from what you are saying, word has gotten out about it. And that there indeed is a crack.
Maggief has posted tons of pix on the long thread
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3524221/posts?q=1&;page=701
Many thanks; and I will be looking there for what you mentioned.
We’ve lived below a spillway for fifty years so to clarify, in the grand scheme of things, the spillway shouldn’t be in the equation. It is not a dam. A spillway does nothing but holds back water at a certain level. When the water reaches a certain level, it spills over. There is nothing to stop the spill. The huge hole in the chute shouldn’t cause worry right now as it is not damaging the dam itself.
What the main worry should be is the dam itself. The dam is what is holding back the main water. The gates on the dam are the only things holding back the truly major huge flood. The gates are the only things that workers can control.
Picture a glass of water. If the water level is too high, it spills over the rim. There’s nothing the workers can do to stop it until the faucet/rains stop filling it up. What they should have done is open a few of the gates to let water drain out down stream PRIOR to the rains. With the glass, one would poke holes (gates) to let the managed water flow out and plug them up (close the gates) when it reaches a margin of safety below the rim. But that requires more than two brain cells which far too many water authorities don’t possess.