Post: #1

Apparently the Lake Oroville dam in California might fail at any minute. They're trying to lower the water level in hopes of buying time to do something about the problem but it might be too little, too late.

Threat of Oroville spillway collapse prompts evacuations for Marysville and Yuba, Butte and Sutter counties

That's a live-updated story so it doesn't lend itself well to quoting.

Emergency: California’s Oroville Dam Spillway Near Failure, Evacuations Ordered (Breitbart)

Quote:The California Department of Water Resources issued a sudden evacuation order shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday for residents near the Oroville Dam in northern California, warning that the dam’s emergency spillway would fail in the next 60 minutes.

The Oroville Dam is the highest in the nation.

An emergency alert issued on Facebook stated:

EMERGENCY EVACUATION ORDER ISSUED: Officials are anticipating a failure of the Auxiliary Spillway at Oroville Dam within the next 60 minutes. Residents of Oroville should evacuate in a northward direction, toward Chico. Other cities should follow the orders of their local law enforcement.

The emergency spillway, which is unpaved, was activated on Saturday morning to relieve the flow down the dam’s normal spillway, where a major hole appeared in recent days and began to widen. The height of the lake, once drained by drought and now swollen by recent rains and snow melt, had reached 901 feet above sea level when the emergency spillway was opened.

Aux spillway at Oroville Dam expected to fail within hour. Oroville under mandatory evacuations, could have downstream effects in Sacramento pic.twitter.com/DmHOrwQFRC

— Sacramento Fire (@SacFirePIO) February 13, 2017

As Breitbart News reported in continuing coverage of the crisis, officials initially assured the public that evacuations would not be necessary, because the damage to the normal spillway appeared limited. They repeated those assurances on Saturday as the emergency spillway was used for the first time since the dam’s construction in 1968.

Now, however, local ABC News affiliate KRCR reports that state officials warn the emergency spillway could suffer a structural failure. It is not clear whether that would lead to a structural failure of the dam itself, which would be a major ecological and economic disaster.

The Sacramento Bee quoted California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesperson Mike Smith: “What they’re expecting is as much as 30 vertical feet of the top of the spillway could fail and could fail within one to two hours. We don’t know how much water that means, but we do know that’s potentially 30 feet of depth of Lake Oroville.”

Authorities said Sunday afternoon that they had increased the flow down the normal spillway to 100,000 cubic feet per second, despite the damage, to relieve pressure on the emergency spillway.

The Feather River flows south into the Sacramento River. Flooding could potentially affect the Sacramento River and surrounding areas.

Update: A flash flood warning has been issued for significant parts of Butte County. The Butte County Sheriff has issued a warning: “This is NOT a drill.”

Update (6:53 p.m. PDT): Officials speaking at a press conference indicated that releases from the normal spillway had reduced some of the erosion to the emergency spillway and lowered the level of the lake. They were optimistic that the expected failure of the emergency spillway might be averted. They explained that they had evacuated the region out of an abundance of caution.

Even if the dam holds up, as it hopefully will, I'm sure it's not going to be a weekend repair job. It probably took years of neglect to get to this point, as such large structures rarely fail overnight unless they were incorrectly engineered or constructed to begin with. The dam has been around since the mid 60s and took 5 years to build.

I wonder if CA will still be so hot to threaten secession or become a sanctuary state now that they're asking President Trump for emergency federal funds over the January rains and faced with this new problem.

Post: #2

The dam is not failing. It's the spillway. There's a big hole in it.

This was a couple days ago to show the erosion.

Post: #3

A couple days ago the dam was "perfectly safe" and tonight they evacuated people from four counties, and emergency officials were quoted saying the emergency spillway could fail at any time.

Saying the spillway is failing but the dam isn't is like saying your car is fine, it just has a broken axle. The spillway is kinda part of the dam. Are you saying they're all wrong, and that the dam won't release a ton of water if the spillway fails?

Post: #4

(02-12-2017 11:16 PM)weambulance Wrote:  A couple days ago the dam was "perfectly safe" and tonight they evacuated people from four counties, and emergency officials were quoted saying the emergency spillway could fail at any time.

Saying the spillway is failing but the dam isn't is like saying your car is fine, it just has a broken axle. The spillway is kinda part of the dam. Are you saying they're all wrong, and that the dam won't release a ton of water if the spillway fails?

No, I'm just saying the dam part is not breaking. It's the spillway, and yes it could cause a lot of damage.

Post: #5

Okay, I see what you're saying, I just think it's a distinction without a difference here. The dam proper isn't failing (yet). Hopefully it won't.

The question in my mind is how much erosion is going to happen if the not-dam fails. If you start cutting away at the earth around any sort of structure like this, you're asking for failure. Not to mention the probable neglect that led to the failure-thus-far of the not-dam surely applies to the dam proper, so who knows what problems exist there, just waiting to be discovered.

There's more rain coming to the area on Wednesday, I guess.

Post: #6

Here's a real time snapshot of the main CA reservoirs storage levels:

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/...ain.action

Post: #7

Some of those other dams have pretty damn high water levels too. Shasta at 96%, Don Pedro at 98%, and a couple others at 90%.

Interesting:

Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago

Quote:More than a decade ago, federal and state officials and some of California’s largest water agencies rejected concerns that the massive earthen spillway at Oroville Dam — at risk of collapse Sunday night and prompting the evacuation of 130,000 people — could erode during heavy winter rains and cause a catastrophe.

Three environmental groups — the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League — filed a motion with the federal government on Oct. 17, 2005, as part of Oroville Dam’s relicensing process, urging federal officials to require that the dam’s emergency spillway be armored with concrete, rather than remain as an earthen hillside.

The groups filed the motion with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They said that the dam, built and owned by the state of California, and finished in 1968, did not meet modern safety standards because in the event of extreme rain and flooding, fast-rising water would overwhelm the main concrete spillway, then flow down the emergency spillway, and that could cause heavy erosion that would create flooding for communities downstream, but also could cause a failure, known as “loss of crest control.”

“A loss of crest control could not only cause additional damage to project lands and facilities but also cause damages and threaten lives in the protected floodplain downstream,” the groups wrote.

The Bush administration rejected that request, however, after the state Department of Water Resources, and the water agencies that would likely have had to pay the bill for the upgrades, said they were unnecessary. Those agencies included the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to 19 million people in Los Angeles, San Diego and other areas, and the State Water Contractors, an association of 27 agencies that buy water from the state of California through the State Water Project.

Federal officials at the time said that the emergency spillway was designed to handle 350,000 cubic feet per second and the concerns were overblown.

“It is important to recognize that during a rare event with the emergency spillway flowing at its design capacity, spillway operations would not affect reservoir control or endanger the dam,” wrote John Onderdonk, a senior civil engineer with FERC, in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s San Francisco Office, in a July 27, 2006, memo to his managers.

“The emergency spillway meets FERC’s engineering guidelines for an emergency spillway,” he added. “The guidelines specify that during a rare flood event, it is acceptable for the emergency spillway to sustain significant damage.”

This weekend, as Oroville Lake’s level rose to the top and water couldn’t be drained fast enough down the main concrete spillway because it had partially collapsed on Tuesday, millions of gallons of water began flowing over the dam’s emergency spillway for the first time in its 50-year history.

On Sunday, with flows of only 6,000 to 12,000 cubic feet per second — water only a foot or two deep and less than 5 percent of the rate that FERC said was safe — erosion at the emergency spillway became so severe that officials from the State Department of Water Resources ordered the evacuation of more than 130,000 people. The fear was that the erosion could undercut the 1,730-foot-long concrete lip along the top of the emergency spillway, allowing billions of gallons of water to pour down the hillside toward Oroville and other towns downstream.

Such an uncontrolled release from California’s second-largest reservoir while it was completely full could become one of the worst dam disasters in U.S. history.

“We said ‘are you really sure that running all this water over the emergency spillway won’t cause the spillway to fail?'” said Ron Stork, policy director with Friends of the River, a Sacramento environmental group that filed the motions in 2005. “They tried to be as evasive as possible. It would have cost money to build a proper concrete spillway.”

Stork watched with horror Sunday night as the emergency spillway was at risk of collapse.

“I’m feeling bad that we were unable to persuade DWR and FERC and the Army Corps to have a safer dam,” he said Sunday.

Stork said that officials from the Department of Water Resources told him informally at the time that the Metropolitan Water District and the water contractors who buy water from Oroville did not want to incur the extra costs.

“I’m sad and hoping, crossing my fingers, that they can prevent the reservoir from failing,” he said. “I don’t think anybody at DWR has ever been this close in their careers to such a catastrophic failure.”

Lester Snow, who was the state Department of Water Resources director from 2004 to 2010, said Sunday night that he does not recall the specifics of the debate during the relicensing process 11 years ago.

“The dam and the outlet structures have always done well in tests and inspections,” Snow said. “I don’t recall the FERC process.”

Stork said at the time he talked to Snow about the environmental group’s concerns, and he recalls that Snow said the issue was being handled mostly by one of his lieutenants.

A filing on May 26, 2006, by Thomas Berliner, an attorney for the State Water Contractors, and Douglas Adamson, an attorney for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, discounted the risk. It urged FERC to reject the request to require that the emergency spillway be armored, a job that would have cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

“The emergency spillway was designed to safely convey the Probable Maximum Flood, and DWR has reviewed and confirmed the efficacy of the PMF hydrologic analysis for Oroville Reservoir,” the attorneys noted.

Ultimately, they were successful. FERC did not require the state to upgrade the emergency spillway.

Post: #8

Great rundown on the situation here:

https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-sp...ure.t8381/

Post: #9

If only this were Hollywood, we could say #FloodtheSwamp...

Post: #10

Oh, so there are walls that do serve a purpose in California!

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #11

The commie-fornians are taking the 'no walls' thing a bit far.

Post: #12

(02-13-2017 01:45 AM)911 Wrote:  Great rundown on the situation here:

https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-sp...ure.t8381/

Thanks, good stuff. Amazing to see the erosion taking place in less than a week along that destroyed spillway. Only the bedrock remains on the side, the rest of it washed away. I also found the pictures of the river near Sacramento being nearly as high as the bridge interesting, maybe more disconcerting than interesting honestly. It's way up there and the emergency spillway hasn't even failed yet. Oh and the damage they had on the spillway in 2013 was noteworthy as well as the chief engineer said everything looked good after they attended to it. Wonder if they were negligent then and it's coming back to bite them in the ass.

Definitely appears the dam itself will probably be fine, but I wonder if the damage done on the spillways will make that a moot point? I mean that main spillway is fucked, and the non bedrock is just being eaten away like crazy. If that emergency spillway fails then how much water is going to be gushing over the hillside there? Will it matter if the dam fails at that point? I think they were saying they were going to move some rocks into the weakened spillway which sounds...desperate? Is that realy going to do anything if it's not embedded natural bedrock? That river in Sacramento is already nipping at the bottom of that bridge too, looks pretty scary to me. Going to be a major ordeal to house the 160k or so people stranded as well. What a mess.

Post: #13

4chan is rife with conspiracies about the comifornia goverment allowing the dam to erode and create this situation.

Post: #14

When you get outside the big cities, California is pretty redneck and conservative. The county this dam is located in went for Trump.

Post: #15

The Mosul Dam in Iraq is also on the verge of failure due to poor engineering under Saddam Hussein and war with ISIS. Several million people's lives and livelihoods are in danger since many large Iraqi cities are on the Tigris river, which the Mosul dam controls.

This article (despite the sensationalist title) goes into a lot of detail with interviews of the overseeing engineers and other experts.

I like the locals take on it:

Quote:Nazir knows that, if the dam fails, Wanke could be under sixty feet of water in a matter of minutes. But, he told me, neither he nor anyone else in the village thinks much about it. People in his part of the world are accustomed to having their lives upended. “We survived Saddam, we survived isis, and we will survive the Mosul Dam,” he said.

Post: #16

Is this an act of God to punish Californians?

Post: #17

Highest taxes in the country can't even maintain their infrastructure. Moar taxes! save the fish (or whatever the fuck organism will be effected by this).

Post: #18

(02-13-2017 11:09 AM)yeppels Wrote:  The Mosul Dam in Iraq is also on the verge of failure due to poor engineering under Saddam Hussein and war with ISIS. Several million people's lives and livelihoods are in danger since many large Iraqi cities are on the Tigris river, which the Mosul dam controls.

This article (despite the sensationalist title) goes into a lot of detail with interviews of the overseeing engineers and other experts.

I like the locals take on it:

Quote:Nazir knows that, if the dam fails, Wanke could be under sixty feet of water in a matter of minutes. But, he told me, neither he nor anyone else in the village thinks much about it. People in his part of the world are accustomed to having their lives upended. “We survived Saddam, we survived isis, and we will survive the Mosul Dam,” he said.

That's BS, that dam in Mosul is there in the first place because Saddam build it. Iraq had the best infrastructure in the region: dams, power grid, hospitals, universities, roads etc -and no jihadis-. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but he took good care of his country, and that ended up being his downfall.

Post: #19

(02-13-2017 09:53 AM)Mekorig Wrote:  4chan is rife with conspiracies about the comifornia goverment allowing the dam to erode and create this situation.

What is the advantage? I can totally understand California green-lighting this, however I can't see a clear motive.

Post: #20

Glad they spend all of their money on freebies for illegals instead of maintaining infrastructure.

Post: #21

(02-13-2017 09:53 AM)Mekorig Wrote:  4chan is rife with conspiracies about the comifornia goverment allowing the dam to erode and create this situation.

That's a bit naive of them. Maintenance and infrastructure spending is the first item to be cut. That stuff could collapse in 30 years because of this is of no concern for most politicians, special interests are their bread and butter.

Post: #22

(02-13-2017 12:24 PM)Roosh Wrote:  Is this an act of God to punish Californians?

It's in Trump country. Trump won that county.

Post: #23

So has this thing fallen or nay?

Post: #24

I bet leftists will find a way to blame Trump for dam failing.

Post: #25

Seems like a good opportunity for Trump to come in and get shit moving faster.
Can they do emergency repairs on the broken spillway?