Posted on 02/12/2017 4:26:47 PM PST by janetjanet998
Edited on 02/12/2017 9:33:58 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The Oroville Dam is the highest in the nation.
Yes, that is from a couple of days back, but I don’t know if things have yet improved. They need to dredge the debris from the bottom of the spillway to allow water to flow out away from the dam and down the Feather River. The debris is acting as something of a dam itself.
I had read that the water level was slowly dropping at the base of the dam, but I haven’t seen any information on that aspect of the situation lately.
The 3 units that are pumps are actually generator/pumps that can work in both directions. The other 3 units are only generators.
Good picture - taken quite a while back, but gives the lay of the land. It appears that the unit at the end is out of service and has been partially removed. I doubt that they can do that with more than one unit at a time unless there is an area where they can set things down, or if there are two cranes to keep 2 units suspended.
OK then,
if they remove the turbines, do you think they can release water
without having to worry about being connected to the grid or not?
At this point, power generation has to take a back seat to water level control...
Something I’ve noticed about human nature and even more in government situations, is the mindset that says, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, which often means although some are vaguely aware that an underlying, latent problem may exist, it isn’t dealt with until its effect is manifested in some dangerous or catastrophic way.
Thanks!
Now that it’s “broke” we’ll see how they “fix it”. I’m very interested to see what they do to repair the main spillway. There likely will be reports given from analysis to what led up to the failure. That should be revealing (understatement).
One piece I’m curious about is what the top engineers thought the design “safety factor” was if the main spillway (and including the ES). Any good engineering source would know the extra margins of safety designed into all aspects of the project.
You don’t always know what you are going to run into. The Brooklyn Bridge construction is an excellent study. The designer & project leader was amazing. Even when they discovered that a vendor was cheating in providing poor quality steel wire, and a good deal of that wire had been already integrated into the suspension cables, they tested the strength of the poor quality wire and compensated the design with a greater amount of overall total high quality wire (to make the main cable “ropes”). This gave them the required “safety factor”.
There were other project challenges that very large project overcame. The bridge is still functioning to design today.
What is going on there? Something more than we’ve been told about.
First time I saw the spherical lights on the generator/pumps, I thought it would be fun to see them all replaced with the clear glass purple lightning plasma spheres. :-)
Nothing new. There were early reports of minor flooding in the powerhouse from the backed up Feather river. These reports had said that the water level was higher (20ft? IIRC) than it should be. This was the first time I ran across photos of the leaking they are dealing with to keep the powerhouse dry.
You’d think they would mention it in this DWR Feb 19 overview.
I guess that the question is how high the water was in relation to the equipment. The turbine is below the actual generator, and presumably, most of the electrical equipment is located up higher as well.
It looks like the sandbagged/prepared for water ingress on the generator floor. Hopefully, it didn’t get that high.
That Power house condition is pretty much what I speculated on about five days back, LOL.
I guess I should add that if it is preserved at the Turbine level as well as the second picture shows, they should be applauded for a tremendous effort.
Interesting...I wondered as well.
Thanks, Ray. I’m sorry that the fellow who shared that photo was fired. Was it a sin to show taxpayers the incompetence of their own politicians? I do not understand.
Nice article on the hard work behind the scenes at Oroville Dam to patch and repair. Some good pictures also, which I dont know how to post. Good and brave people doing this work.
I’ve been following this story since I first saw it on Free Republic a few weeks ago. It’s such a fascinating story of a battle of men against nature, fighting to save a town put at risk by corruption and ideology of politicians who redirected funds that should have been used for maintenance and repairs to their own pet projects. I pray these brave workers win this fight and those at fault are punished someday. .
When the first alarms went out earlier this month that Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway might collapse, a “small city” sprang up almost overnight on the hillsides flanking the imperiled dam.
Wartime metaphors also came to mind.
“This is on the scale of a battlefield,” said Eric See, a public information officer with the state’s Department of Water Resources, who says he’s never seen anything like this.
See gave Cal Fire, the state agency more accustomed to tackling wildfires, much of the credit for the rapid mobilization.
“They came in and set up overnight,” says See, with everything from food trucks and generators, to telephone connections, to portable showers.
All of this is supporting nearly 500 people on scene, including a hundred construction workers, give or take, who’ve been doing the grunt work 24-7 to make the critical repairs to the crippled spillway.
On a hillside staging area above the south end of Oroville dam, huge yellow dump trucks full of rocks rumble in with their loads, one right behind another, while in the air above, Blackhawk helicopters swoop in, lifting 4,000-pound bags of stone and gravel like raptors grabbing mice from a field. So rapid is the cycle of ferrying fill material across the dam to the spillway, that two helicopters often arrive for new loads within a minute of each other.The helicopters are some of the same ones that spend summers dropping buckets of water on wildfires. The work is pretty similar, according to Evan Welsch, a mechanic with Red Bluff-based P.J. Helicopters, except now instead of water buckets, they’re hauling bags of gravel and sand.
Blackhawk helicopters buzzed back and forth across the dam, carrying 4,000-pound sacks of rock and gravel.
The choppers have been placing those “super-sacks.” as they’re called, into huge gashes carved out when Oroville’s lake waters topped the emergency spillway two weeks ago, and tore down the earthen slope into the Feather River below.
“Some of the bags have big rocks, some of ‘em have sand, some have gravel,” says Mike Starcher, whose quarry, Sierra Silica, has been supplying much of the material. “It just depends on where the geologists want to layer ‘em in there.”
Like See, Starcher, whose company has been part-owner of Sierra Silica for 15 years, also says he’s never seen anything like this deployment — 2000 bags and counting, just from his operation. And each one had to be filled and transported by workers who knew they could be risking their lives by remaining at quarries just down river.
“There are some tough folks in this town,” says Starcher. He shrugs off the scant amount of sleep he’s had, saying “there are guys out here who have gone 30 hours on end without any.”
One of them is Reggie Gaston, who was zipping around on a forklift, lining up sacks where choppers could snatch them up. When Gaston’s wife and four kids were evacuated to high ground, he stayed behind, knowing the work he was doing could save his town from catastrophe.
“Yeah, they were pretty worried,” he admits. “They wanted me to come home and I said, ‘I can’t.’”
But Gaston says there was no pressure to stay on the job.
“Bosses were concerned,” he recalls. “They said family comes first, but if you feel like they’re safe, we can use some help.”
At the peak of the frenzy last week, crews were pouring fill material into the ravaged spillway at the rate of 40 truckloads an hour. Though 100,000 cubic yards of rock, sand and gravel had gone into shoring up the spillway by Tuesday evening of this week (picture 100,000 pickup trucks lined up), it’s a job that is still far from finished.
“Right now we’re fighting the winter, fighting the rain, fighting the water,” says Gaston. “Hopefully by summertime or spring the rain has died down enough and dam has dropped down enough where they can actually fix the problem.”
As for Starcher, he had to miss spending Valentines Day with his two girls, Claire and Catherine, whom he calls “Beeps.” So he took a can of red spray paint to two of the giant white bags of gravel and made them a valentine selfie; big red heart on one, their names on the other. His valentine will become part of the new, reinforced spillway.
Gaston, who’s spent most of his 30 years as an Oroville resident, never thought the nearly 800-foot-high dam looming above them would end up menacing his family and neighbors.
“Not really,” he admits. “But I have to say it is a man-made item. Man-made items do fall—and they do fail.
https://ww2.kqed.org/science/2017/02/24/on-the-front-lines-at-oroville-dam-little-sleep-lots-of-ot/
I’m searching for any information on the progress, or lack thereof, on removing some of the debris at the bottom of the spillway so that water can drain back away from the bottom of the dam. I’ve seen preparation work (assembling barges, getting heavy equipment in place) a few days ago, but nothing since.
It could well be that they can’t do anything substantive until the spillway quits spilling. That is a ton of water coming down, and there is likely still some debris coming down with it, though the erosion pattern appears to be mostly stable now.
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