A gaping hole continues to grow in the spillway of America's tallest dam

[MindWars]

Home | Daily Mail Online
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Guess those little trendy Californians better start praying, oh wait half of them don't have a soul left to pray LOL just kidding, just kidding..

 

[dannyboys]

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Home | Daily Mail Online
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Guess those little trendy Californians better start praying, oh wait half of them don't have a soul left to pray LOL just kidding, just kidding..

The other half are atheists.
Maybe CAL. the 'sanctuary state' will have to call President Trump to send in the ACOEs?
President Trump: "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you governor. Are you sure an illegal felon hasn't stolen your phone?"

 

[Claudette]

Boy if that thing lets go loads of Californians are going to have one expensive bad day.

Say, isn't Cali in debt up to its eyeballs? Wonder who they think will pay for the damage??

Can't be the Fed taxpayers because, hey, Cali is a sanctuary state.

Have fun Cali.

 

[longknife]

If one gets a full view of the dam, it's clear there are alternatives to release water.

Here's the correct link Gaping hole grows in the spillway of Oroville dam | Daily Mail Online

Go all the way to the bottom of the article and it has a video showing the alternatives.

 

[deannalw]

We lived a half mile from Lake Shasta for years. Most in northern Cali are normal and afflicted with those in San Fran and south.

Went to lake Orville a few times... once I was walk-in a bunch of kiddies on a dirt road and nearly walked em up on a big ole rattler. Thank goodness for kiddie eagle eyes...

Hubby says those alternatives are almost as sketchy as what's happenin

 

[EverCurious]

I feel for the NorCals...

That said, it looks like their optional watersheds are doing alright so I'm guessing there's not going to be a disaster.

 

[Old Rocks]

At Oroville Dam, a break in the storms gives engineers hope

Friday afternoon the sun peaked through the clouds above Lake Oroville and a rainbow arched over the Feather River.

It was a welcome sight for state engineers who were battling the lake’s worrisome rise with torrential releases down the reservoir’s broken concrete spillway.

The break in storms and a drop in the volume of water pouring into the huge reservoir gave dam operators hope that they could keep lake levels from hitting an elevation of 901 feet — the point at which uncontrolled flows would start washing down an unpaved emergency spillway that has never been used in Oroville’s 48-year history.

“The sun is coming out. The rain has stopped. The inflow has peaked,” said Eric See, a spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources. “We still don’t expect to use the auxiliary spillway.”

I hope the engineers are correct in this case. However, at both the St. Francis dam, and the Teton dam, the engineers said both were fine before they failed and killed people and cost millions of dollars in damage.

 

[eflatminor]

Hold on there a second buddy...

Are you telling me that a dam built by the California bureaucrats is failing after less than 50 years?

Color me shocked.

 

[Old Rocks]

Bureaucrats do not build dams, engineers do. And all too many engineers do not consult geologists when siting a dam. Nor do the plan for the worst possible flooding scenerio. We saw that at the Fort Peck dam in 2011. Were that dam to have failed, it's spillway was chunking out, the dams on the Missiouri and Mississippi downstream would have all failed, also. Because they are all earth fill dams.

We were visiting Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation at the time, and one of my wife's relatives that worked for the BIA was tasked with telling all residents there that they needed to get everything of value 50 ft above the reservoir level.

 

[eflatminor]

Bureaucrats do not build dams, engineers do. And all too many engineers do not consult geologists when siting a dam. Nor do the plan for the worst possible flooding scenerio. We saw that at the Fort Peck dam in 2011. Were that dam to have failed, it's spillway was chunking out, the dams on the Missiouri and Mississippi downstream would have all failed, also. Because they are all earth fill dams.

We were visiting Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation at the time, and one of my wife's relatives that worked for the BIA was tasked with telling all residents there that they needed to get everything of value 50 ft above the reservoir level.

Of course engineers were involved, but the Oroville dam was a project of the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). You don't get more 'California bureaucrat' than that.

 

[longknife]

The current storms are fortunately to the south

 

[Old Rocks]

Silly ass, the bureaucrats fund and ok the project, but the engineers design and oversee the the dam. And on the engineers is the final responsibility for the construction and safety of the dam.

 

[EverCurious]

Bureaucrats do not build dams, engineers do. And all too many engineers do not consult geologists when siting a dam. Nor do the plan for the worst possible flooding scenerio. We saw that at the Fort Peck dam in 2011. Were that dam to have failed, it's spillway was chunking out, the dams on the Missiouri and Mississippi downstream would have all failed, also. Because they are all earth fill dams.

We were visiting Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation at the time, and one of my wife's relatives that worked for the BIA was tasked with telling all residents there that they needed to get everything of value 50 ft above the reservoir level.

I'm going to second the premise of this.

I suppose it was about 8-10 years ago they built a whole shit ton of housing on the other side, 'mountain side' of Fire Lake, trying to put in lower cost housing to satisfy some Fed rule (my town's kind of wealthy) and the engineers publicly stated the ground was muskeg (basically swampy, it goes to hell if you mess up the perma-frost layer and during earthquakes) but the political folks insisted on pushing the program through regardless. (Even going so far as to change muni laws to allow the houses to be built much to close together for fire fighting needs.) Now all these poor folks are sinking into the ground - one unit has sunk as much as 3 feet

(Sorry can't find any links cause the turn over in the neighborhood is absolutely nuts. There was a court case, owners tried to sue the state because they'd pushed the shit through but the state buried them in fees. It's become more like a motel than a neighborhood, folks live there for a year or so then move into something better; all the while fighting every inspection that comes back they've got serious foundation issues - which they get around with the state inspectors finding that said foundation issue doesn't exist heh)

My house, built on the 'ocean' side of Fire Lake frost heaves as well, but my movement is only like 1/4" between winter and summer so it's relatively minor as far as that goes. Our doors are noisy in the winter cause the house comes up and the frames come out of alignment. The first half decade we went through and adjusted the doors with the seasons, now we're lazy and just give up on shutting the doors entirely. In the winter we can't latch the shop door so the wind blows it open all the time, I had to install an alarm so it yells at us in the house if the door opens heh

 

[Picaro]

Why don't the 'environmentalists' just have them all torn down? No issue with failures then. Aren't they endangering some endangered minnow species or something? Bound to be. In any case, some have pointed out how wealthy California is n stuff, and how it should secede, so the rest of us can ignore this sort of problem; the Facebook guy or Apple or Uber can handle this for them, maybe Brad Pitt or George Clooney.

 

[tyroneweaver]

The farmer in me tells me, When I die whether I go to heaven or hell I pray that I'm at the head of the canal.