Posted on 01/05/2018 8:00:45 PM PST by BenLurkin
Complacency, bureaucracy and an inadequate safety culture led to the failure last year of the Oroville Dam spillway, according to an independent investigation report released Friday.
The findings point to human error by a number of organizations but say that the dam's owner, the California Department of Water Resources, was "significantly overconfident and complacent about the integrity of its State Water Project civil infrastructure, including dams."
It describes the department as an "insular organization which inhibited accessing industry knowledge and developing needed technical expertise." Within the department, the engineering division clashed with the operations and maintenance staff, resulting in a "lack of mutual respect," it found.
There was a belief inside the department that became "mythologized" over the decades that it built the state's water delivery system with the "best of the best" experts, the report said. But the reality was quite different.
The forensics team found that one of the key Oroville spillway designers was hired as a postgraduate with no engineering experience in spillways.
The report found that periodic inspections of the spillway failed to identify the original design flaws and the subsequent deterioration of the spillway's integrity. Instead, a comprehensive review of the original construction and whether it meets modern standards should have been conducted.
...
Exactly how the Department of Water Resources should change its culture was left unaddressed in the report — France suggested the engineering team's expertise is not in management consultancy.
(Excerpt) Read more at beta.latimes.com ...
Too much money being spent on illegals versus infrastructure.
Overpaid and incompetent. The story of California government.
ping a ling a ling
who would have thunk it....
duh
The best way to change the culture of any organization is to replace the leadership.
But that won’t happen here. So this will happen again. The only question is when.
L
They need the money for CA government pensions!
Is there any way to charge then under RICO for collective stupidity...
all a taxpayer needs to know about gov’t employees can be learned by visiting the DMV.
All gov’t organizations operate like the DMV
This sort of observation is just so much blah blah blah, IMHO. Not helpful.
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. You have been tried in the balance and found wanting.
That's more like it!
And if you’ve ever been to a CA DMV Office, you know they are the worst of the worst. Nobody gives a sh!t about the customer.
They just didn’t give a dam.
The DMV is a highly tuned operation.
It pushes it’s ‘clients’ right to the edge of armed, violent insurrection, but not over it.
Honestly, does ANYBODY do that on large systems? With all the pressing and underfunded maintenance work and routine upgrades, who could ever find the budget to do a comprehensive review of the original design? I worked in lots of old fossil power plants at the beginning of my career. The best we could do was identify areas of possible incident failure and fix them before they failed during annual or semiannual planned maintenance outages.
Reads like a study of the postal service where a few groups function well but most don't and the whole thing is a fragmented bureaucratic, California mess.
The only conclusion I'd draw so far is that the State of California would be safer if it turned over management of the dams to private engineering companies. The private sector, unlike what's reported here, keeps its employees up-to-date via educational activities and experience working in many geologic locations across the country and world. The State does not and the culture sounds positively desicated.
In summary, the downstream residents of Oroville Dam will probably be saved from disaster this time due to this expert attention. But the rest of the huge Reservoir and Aqueduct system is living on borrowed time. JMHO.
Reads like a study of the postal service where a few groups function well but most don't and the whole thing is a fragmented bureaucratic, California mess.
The only conclusion I'd draw so far is that the State of California would be safer if it turned over management of the dams to private engineering companies. The private sector, unlike what's reported here, keeps its employees up-to-date via educational activities and experience working in many geologic locations across the country and world. The State does not and the culture sounds positively desicated.
In summary, the downstream residents of Oroville Dam will probably be saved from disaster this time due to this expert attention. But the rest of the huge Reservoir and Aqueduct system is living on borrowed time. JMHO.
One time the only thing that stopped me from beating up a DMV employee in the parking lot after work is I didn’t want my little granddaughter see her mema get arrested.
FTA: one of the key Oroville spillway designers was hired as a postgraduate with no engineering experience in spillways
What could go wrong? Just concrete.
So who skimmed millions from this project?
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