Just got real: Releases through the main spillway at Oroville Dam have been boosted to 100,000 cubic feet per second from 55,000 cfs in hopes of easing pressure on the emergency spillway before a failure occurs, officials said Sunday night.
More (from Friday) at WUWT.
Evacuations are under way, as imminent failure is expected. Live coverage here.
Forget the earthquake. How long can you tread water ?
Lets see, decades of neglect, no political will to do the necessary repairs..cause Climate Change.
Now god forbid, the magnificent Oroville Dam is destroyed?
The Gang Green will blame??
Climate Change.
Hopefully the water will slow down before the dam is eroded away, but the miss-management is just the tip of the iceberg.
So much infrastructure underfunded and in slow decay as the money is stolen by the Cult of Calamitous Climate.
Not stopping stupid,can get you killed.
Good luck to the citizens downstream.
The money that should have been spent in infrastructure repair was probably spent erecting bird wackers.
The willful neglect of CA’s water infrastructure (dams specifically) should surprise nobody. The same willful neglect, if not simple incompetence, is rather predictable. Remember that the State of CA is being run by the same eco-frauds who have been trying to dismantle Hetch Hetchy reservoir for decades … citing the Hetch Hetchy Valley as being more glorious than Yosemite valley (per the writings of their eco-Jesus, John Muir). So, I would not be the least surprised to learn that this shocking lack of inspection and maintenance wasn’t deliberate. It should also be noted that most of Oroville’s water goes to Central Valley farming and on to Southern California … not exactly favored uses by California’s leftist political elite. The State has been systematically and arbitrarily DUMPING our reservoirs to feed the narrative of global warming and climate crisis. Using the cover of a Federal Lawsuit to “save the Delta Smelt” … California’s reservoirs have been rendered near useless. The logical (illogical) next step is to simply remove the reservoirs altogether. You can expect many more of those lawsuits moving forward … led by the Sierra Club.
What is it going to take to learn just how dangerous leftwing politicians and bureaucrats are to our very survival. The leftists didn’t just START “resisting” Trump. They have been resisting and dismantling public infrastructure they dislike for decades. Jerry Brown has diverted every gas tax and auto registration dollar specifically earmarked for roadway construction, and diverted it into various global warming bureaucracies. Jerry has used taxpayer dollars to hire eco-Law Firms to SUE to STOP automobile infrastructure. The SF-Oakland Bay Bridge reconstruction was delayed for more than a decade from multiple eco-lawsuits. It’s far past time that the general public wake the fukk up to the damage being done by the left.
Google Earth the dam.. It is large/dangerous.
Good comments Kenji. Thanks.
Carly Fiorina said,
“… liberals have simultaneously prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades. This has happened during a period in which California’s population has doubled. It is clear that improved or additional infrastructure would allow for greater conservation before droughts — especially as the population continues to explode — but California has not completed a major water infrastructure project in 50 years.”
http://time.com/3774881/carly-fiorina-california-drought-environmentalists/
CAS
2nd largest in CA, behind Shasta. BTW … Oroville is FULL and overflowing on Feb 12 … The annual PEAK water level for Oroville occurs in June … when most of the Sierra snowpack melts and drains into the Res.
It should also be noted that Shasta res. was less than 6ft below maximum capacity today. That is a massive amount of water !
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryDaily?SHA
Yet Jerry Brown still REFUSES to “declare” the end of CA’s drought. PS … Oroville was 95% full LAST YEAR in June. The drought was OVER last year. Only a global warmists would blithely ignore the facts and perpetuate a FAKE drought.
I meant to also say that this (likely) willful neglect reminds me of Katrina and the poorly maintained levees … despite massive federal funding for that specific purpose. Katrina’s extraordinary damage occurred ONLY because of failed levee maintenance … it had nothing to do with Bush … or Brownie.
The WUWT article included a readers comment and photo reportedly from 2013 showing officials inspecting a large crack in the Oroville spillway … 2013. Almost appears as though nobody really could be bothered to rearrange their bloated CALPERS pension budgets to make the repairs.
They paid Leonardo DeCaprio $25 million for his role on ”The Wolf of Wall Street” yet his co-star Jonah Hill only received $60,000. The Governor of California, Jerry Brown (Dem.) can always go to Hollywood for donations. Lady Gaga is sure contribute.
Zero sympathy!
They paid Leonardo DeCaprio $25 million for his role on ”The Wolf of Wall Street” yet his co-star Jonah Hill only received $60,000. The Governor of California, Jerry Brown (Dem.) can always go to Hollywood for donations. Lady Gaga is sure to contribute.
Zero sympathy!
They’re a long ways from Hollywood, see the federal voting record for Butte County…
In only 3 elections have they swung for the Democrat candidate since the second world war, the other 15 times, this county has been Republican.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte_County,_California
This will be all Trumps fault in 3, 2, 1…
There are three valleys downstream of the dam. There is no realistic threat to the main body of the dam.
The lowest dam is the valley that the main dam is in. It’s not threatened. The overall dam is not threatened. This appears to be an earth-fill structure that could suffer catastrophic failure by water flowing over or through the main body of the dam, but such a failure would occur within 12 hours to a day of the original water flows.
The secondary valley is the one that the spillway is in. Based on the early images of the damage done, they put the concrete slab on top of soils/sands/unconsolidated sediments. There are good reasons why mining dams are not allowed to do this (why Mt. Polley was allowed to do so points out why regulators need to be held to the same standards when agreeing to use a design… but I digress). Water from rainfall in that local valley, not from the dam and down the spillway, eroded under the spillway and caused an original failure of concrete slab that makes up the spillway. Either that same water from outside the dam, or water from the spillway, has been eroding for a long time and caused massive erosion under the spillway and now that the spillway is in full use, is causing the spillway to be undermined to bedrock. This could cause a large outflow of the top levels of the dam down to the bedrock layer in this second valley. This is likely 10-20 feet below the current water level of the dam. That’s a lot of water, but it’s minor in comparison to the main dam releasing. If this valley becomes the discharge point then that also means that stopping the flow of water so that a new spillway can be introduced becomes difficult and very expensive (unless the upstream catchment goes into a prolonged dry spell).
The third valley is the one that’s being discussed as an emergency spillway. I’ve seen it on the aerial photos, but know nothing about the bedrock conditions there. Worse case with a release in this third valley is the same as in the second valley, but if water flows through here instead it means some of the current spillway can be saved, and it should be cheaper/easier to rebuild along the current spillway. And to do it right this time.
marc in calgary said: “In only 3 elections have they swung for the Democrat candidate since the second world war,…”
That explains why the no money for dam repairs, eh?
Progressives are sneaky like that.
Kind of like how the Liberals never seem to find any money for anything outside big Canadian cities that consistently vote Liberal…
I wonder how many of OUR dams are busted like this?
I think I’ll make up a new go-bag this week. Too many stories of people walking around in their PJs at the Oroville rescue center last night.
My comments above aren’t intended as any form of defence of those who chose not to do the proper maintenance on the coffer dam. It might say why they thought they could continually push off the maintenance, because “it’s not like the whole thing would fail”. They don’t understand the reasoning behind “A stitch in time, saves nine.”
Good comments, Kenji.
All predictions made by the media are linear not cyclical like reality. I’m remembering watching the Glenmore dam in Calgary running its spillways at maximum in around 2003. The aquifers were full they said and could not take anymore water and thus it was on surface. In the years prior which were droughts the media was quoting “experts” who said the aquifers were so low , they could never be refilled. I also remember thinking , never is a long time, even longer than the melt cycle between glaciers. Same media that reported the fires of Kuwait as the greatest environmental disaster of all time , when in fact the fires burned the same amount of oil as Los Angeles does everyday.
And indeed, that is the last refuse (misspelling intentional) for Jerry Brown’s department of eco resources global warmists water specialists … aka The CA DWR … the “aquifers”. The invisible aquifers. Can’t be photographed aquifers. State-bureaucrat-measured aquifers. The actual measurement of the aquifers are unnecessarily complicated by State (and Federal) experts. Whereas each and every farmer and well-driller can provide immediate feedback regarding aquifer levels … the State takes a year or more to “massage” their data (NOAA-style) and publish new RED maps illustrating how the aquifers will NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER … return to normal. Anyone with a pulse and a modicum of real-world, real-life experience can surmise that overflowing reservoirs, snowpack, and rainfall = fully recharged aquifers. But the “aquifers” have become equal to the “catastrophic” damage predicted for global warming … always just out of sight … just out of measurement … so the public can be duped. My advice ? Trust your senses and instincts. Mankind has very highly evolved survival instincts. When CA … actually … becomes doomed to a never ending “drought” as espoused by Jerry Brown … I will be very much aware of it. As for our last 4-year drought that has been OVER for 1-1/2 years ? Meh. Typical CA Mediterranean climate … normal and cyclical.