Posted on 02/18/2017 4:49:41 PM PST by Navy Patriot
How did a giant, gaping hole tear through the massive Oroville Dams main concrete spillway last week, setting in motion the chain of events that could have led to one of Americas deadliest dam failures?
Dam experts around the country are focusing on a leading suspect: Tiny bubbles.
The prospect is simple, yet terrifying and has been the culprit in a number of near disasters at dams across the globe since engineers discovered it about 50 years ago. In a process called cavitation, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
GOV MOONBEAM IS SPENDING DAM MONEY AND INFRASTRUCTURE REPAIR FUNDS ON ERIC HOLDER’S LEGAL FEES......
I read that the water sprayed into the main spillway through those vents because of saturation of the soil. Bad news.
The 2013 main spillway damage was obviously never fixed correctly, and failed terribly last week. That hole is now an entire section of it now in a hole, and a cavern under the remaining concrete, working its way uphill as we type.
The method of keeping up the emergency spillway was long known: grass on the hill for smooth flow, rocks along the edge of the weir to break the spilling water. Ignored.
Still can’t find if a river valve is still down and it’s control room still submerged, after the 2009 valve test failure and tunnel damage. Almost killed several workers.
This unmaintained dam is a catastrophe waiting to happen, approaching quickly.
The real problem is that the repair money would have been spent in a Republican-leaning county.
“EXPANSION JOINTS HAVE TO BE CAULKED.”
Could be. Here in Seattle they had to demolish a 15 story building that was only about 8 years old. Somebody neglected to put a dab of epoxy on the ends of the steel cables when they were trimmed off. The cables started rusting inside the concrete. They spent a few million trying to repair them, but they couldn’t - so down the building came. (On purpose, but....)
Oh, those dam experts again.
These things happen when you have a Lake full of Champagne.
If it was full of Coca Cola, the Dam would have eaten away decades ago.
I’ve seen this, but I don’t understand the ramifications. It appears that some kind of repair was done here, but the problem recurred, to put it mildly.
If there was damage in the first place to the original concrete, why wouldn’t the damage occur again, even if the repair restored the original condition perfectly?
Doesn’t this indicate a design flaw in the vertical profile? Perhaps that drop-off is too steep?
Yeah, I recall Don Ho passed away shortly after Don Imus got in trouble for saying “nappy headed ho’s” on the air. There were plenty of tweets and parody videos where Ho’s last name was bleeped out to ridicule the outraged leftists.
Interesting points I’d not seen elsewhere, The spray jets from the wall seem too uniform and energetic too be just some weep holes though.
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That is so wrong that I hardly know where to start...
Those are drains to allow water that has escaped the channel to return to it. The fact that they are "spraying" due to high external pressure simply indicates that they are having to deal with more external water than the designers anticipated.
Some of that water got outside the channel through the known breaches in the sidewalls at the well-documented flow deck breach. Some of it is splash-over due to the turbulence and spray caused by flow perturbation.
With the channel full and flowing as much as 100Kcfs, no one can safely get close enough to document all the possible sources. But --the "return drains" issue is one that can be dealt with after the damaged channel has served its designed purpose of lowering the lake level and compensating for anticipated inflow.
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"Aerators"? Nope...
Sorry bad joke he was kinda a cool dude
We don’t know if repair work was done. CBS tried unsuccessfully to obtain maintenance records for the dam. The spillway worked just fine since 1968, so if any repairs were performed they didn’t meet specifications.
When this picture was taken in 2013 the spillway had not seen any water until March 2016 as evidenced by this video.
“Tiny bubbles” Are they implying that Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Band are the culprits?
Or Don Ho?
Great find on that picture. That was the start of the problem.
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