Posted on 02/11/2017 8:22:22 AM PST by Kevin in California
State water officials said water has begun flowing over the emergency spillway at Oroville Dam. Doug Carlson, a spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources, said water started topping over the auxiliary spillway shortly before 8 a.m. at a rate of between 5,000 and 10,000 cubic feet per second.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
It just dumps it back into the Feather River down stream. The thinking was, if the emergency spillway is in use, the dam is in danger. The Feather river empties into to the Sacramento River and from there to San Francisco Bay.
The Oroville Dame went in back in the late '60s. The Feather River hasn't flooded in a big way since Christmas of '64. I opened my Christmas presents in a tent up in the Sutter Buttes that year. My dad wasn't taking any chances and we were not alone in the hills.
Actually the dam was completed in the late '60s. I'm guessing they'll blame it on then Governor Reagan.
Yikes .. That’s a whole buncha water !
Yeah, I know. We can dream, but for a moment though, right?
Yeah, the debris is going to be a problem but I think our levees can handle the extra flow. There has been some flooding in the area but those areas always flood. Some of the poorest parts of Yuba County. Must be by design.
Not sure but I think it's mainly oak trees at that elevation.
So, sounds like it’s working as designed... some folks are trying to make a scare out of nothing?
Didn’t know Clark Griswold worked for the gooberment. https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=Q2jTFMszzkk
In the meantime, if folks in LA could please remember to flush twice and water their lawns it might help a little. :o)
Storms have eased off for a few days. The weather forecast for the Oroville-Paradise area is for seven solid days of showers from Thursday, February 23, through Wednesday, March 1. That's the time period to worry about.
It will take a few days for the reservoir to fill from whatever level they've drained it to by Wednesday. Then the overflow will pour over the emergency spillway at 100,000 - 150,000 cubic feet per second and start eroding a steep and deep ravine in it. This will escalate fast and very possibly gouge a deep enough ravine to commence irreversible near complete dewatering of the reservoir.
I do not expect river floods per se to be a threat until those erode holes in downstream river levees. Then watch out!
The worst danger lies in the Natomas area between Sacramento and the Sacramento airport. There are at least 100,000 homes in a floodplain which should never have built.
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article2604482.html
It will take a few days for the 3-5 million acre feet of water released from an emptying Oroville reservoir and those downstream from it to get to the Sacramento area.
Think of our Governor Jerry Brown leading a mass of volunteer small boat flotillas in a Dunkirk-type rescue operation for all those homeowners in flood plains. With donations and advertising by Bass Pro Shop.
I'm afraid both of those actions are illegal... unless of course you're a movie star.
Ooops
At 791 feet it’s the tallest dam in the United States and it hold back 3.5 million acre feet of water.
If it goes, there will be a lake from Yuba City to the Stockton Delta as high as my house and several miles wide.
The flood plain is 100 miles long and 40 miles wide.
That’s a LOT of evacuation.
http://www.kcra.com/article/water-begins-to-spill-over-oroville-emergency-spillway/8732032
And a Sacramento Bee video of the base of the concrete lip here:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article132154774.html
At this point there'd have to be a danger of the lip eroding from underneath in the splashway area, and I don't see the flow getting so bad that this would happen. The spillway horizontal area is just too long, and the splash surface right below the lip looks to be concrete as well.
Eventually the dirt catchment area to the left (west) of the main concrete spillway (the one with the crater) will start eroding up towards the horizontal concrete catchment area of the emergency spillway and undermine that, because most of the emergency spill water will be flowing there, but this will take a while.
Every day of delay before the concrete part of the catchment surface, and the emergency spillway lip, start eroding gets us another day closer to the end of the rainy season.
Things do no look anywhere near as grim as I feared.
If the dam should give way, I would think the flood water will cut the quickest path to the bay taking out everything in its way. How much warning would people have?
So far the authorities have not even shown the potential path of the flood waters. They keep saying everything will be okay. Well maybe it will be, but what if they are wrong?
Today is a nice clear warm day. No rain. This is not good. We have had record snow fall this winter. A nice clear warm day means the snow is melting. That means more run off into the lake, faster than they can empty it.
So like I said, if I could look at a map and I can see the way the flood waters would take, and I lived in that area, I would self evacuate until the dam was safe again.
Fortunately I am 100 miles south of it.
Consider this: There’s 30+feet of snow in the mountains. More coming.
If we get a genuine Pineapple Express in late March, all bets are off. That emergency spillway will cut the mountain in half, all the way to the river bed.
Assuming the water travels at 25mph from the breach, on average, it would be in downtown Sacramento in less than 3 hours to join the high outflows from Folsom dam.
It would reach the delta in about 5 hours.
3.5 million acre feet to join all that’s there already.
The Sacramento River is 2 feet below flood stage at the Tower Bridge downtown, and that’s just to take the controlled releases from all the dams from Shasta south to Folsom.
We are flushing water as fast as we can now. And come spring we may be swimming.
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