The simple presence of so much gushing water in the side discharge drains + the 5 miles of linear cracks in the spillway top to bottom along the thin concrete drain lines should have triggered a massive "Stagnation Pressure Failure" alarm years ago. Other dams ripped up their spillways and completely replaced them from far smaller indicators (Ground Penetrating Radar "voids" + underslab erosion).
No tests required. Experts had been warning dam owners for years over spillways busting up from Stagnation Pressure. Oroville's spillway was a sieve in the seams, joints, and 5 miles of cracks. All of these extreme danger "busting up" sign were there. It almost took a determined effort, by engineers and/or mgmt to purposefully ignore such dramatic sign of imminent failure.
It's called "looking out for ants when elephants are walking by".
more and more evidence IMO that the models they use to predict inflow into the lake are too low
if you look at the data from last summer there is actually negative inflow per hour most of the summer which obviously in not correct
I noticed they made an adjustment to the hourly inflow calculations that made more sense back in FEB..but i hope the models are not based on bad past flawed data
for example i have been paying attention to the NWS river forecast on the feather river upstream..and it has been pretty much right on with predicted flows during this last storms
but the model from last Friday from DWR predicts 20,000 cfs at this time and its around 30,000
https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-spillway-failure.t8381/page-41
New
I emailed the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley about this and got the following response (quoted verbatim from the email I received):
Content from external source
Hi Aron Z,
Rune Storesund (ccd this email) forwarded your email to me.
you are correct about the source of the photographs you cited. i obtained these from the metabunk forum web site.
due to limitations on the time i could devote to producing my preliminary report (all done pro-bono), i was not able to cite the many sources i used to obtain the photographic documentation included in the report.
i found the metabunk forum web site to be very useful in helping me develop a basic understanding of how and why the spillway failures developed. i would appreciate it if you could communicate my apology and reason for not citing the metabunk source for the photographs you cited.
Bob Bea
—
Robert Bea
Professor Emeritus
Center for Catastrophic Risk Management
University of California Berkeley
I went through the Bea Report. Hadn’t been for us at FR and Metabunk, he wouldn’t have a report.