California's Lake Oroville Main Spillway Severely Damaged/Eroded. Oroville Dam's Recently Reconstructed Main Spillway Fundamentally Flawed

Some dam(n) info on dams
DR Dave Rogers
(music intro at begin of lecture)

TAKE OUT SACRAMENTO..and Governer Moon beam

sweet!!!

doom hard!!

Is it near San Francisco?

Waaay upstream from San Franfreakshow.

Califoenia Gov been busy human / child sex trafficking / making Cp,Cartel money laundering,meth distributing

Would be a bad time for an Earthquake? [link to Earthquaketrack.com]

OP has been writing about the extreme drought for the last couple years? what will make you happy?
drought is over up north..only S. Sierra left dry

nice to see

This reminds me of the book The Emerald Mile about the Glen Canyon Dam in 83. Spillways got gigantic holes during massive snowmelt into Lake Powell. Youtube has some good old videos about it.

Let's put the water power involved in today's Spillway Failure at the Oroville Dam into perspective:

To put into perspective the amount of water that was flowing down the Spillway today at the Oroville Dam when it started to deteriorate was about 60,000 cfs. (was scheduled to go to 70,000 cfs at noon, but that apparently didn't happen, or didn't fully happen)

That water was dropping approximately 640 vertical feet to the river below (about 550 vertical feet down the spillway and another 80-90 vertical feet over bedrock after the spillway ends to the river below).

Niagara Falls (Horseshoe Falls) which is the outflow for ALL the upper Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie) in contrast typically has a daytime flow of about 100,000 cfs (50,000 cfs at night) going over it's MUCH WIDER edge, but it only drops 167 feet to the river below, or less than 1/3 the vertical height of the Oroville drop.

If you have ever seen the water go over Niargara Falls then you can start to understand the amount of water and it's power that was involved with the Oroville Spillway failure today. It was 2/3 the amount of water with 3.5x the vertical drop - ie: a MASSIVE amount of erosive water power was involved.

It is going to be interesting to see what kind of plan they come up with to deal with this issue. To release water at the rate it NEEDS to be released is almost impossible imo without causing major serious damage, possibly into the dam structure itself. .... I fail to see how they can release water down the Spillway at those rates for the 10's of hours on end needed to keep Oroville Lake at a safe height when the hole under the spillway is already 80' wide, 30' deep, and possibly up to 200' long.

The lake theoretically could be allowed to run out over a lower level area off to the side (not inside the spillway) (parking lot area for the boat ramps), which would be an uncontrollable release, unstoppable once it started ... but who knows how deep of a channel it would cut through that dirt (or how far down the bedrock is under that dirt) until the lake level and the ditch channel would be at the same height. Hopefully that digging effect wouldn't go sideways enough to effect the dam's integrity.

This is potentially TRUE DOOM!!! since this is the Highest Dam in the United States!!

The Great flood of 1862:

[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

[link to www.scientificamerican.com (secure)]

If I lived in Oroville, I would get out while the getting is good! If they can't release a lot of water within the next 48 hours they potentially risk major failure due to overtopping. (Yet that appears to be the problem - they probably can't, or risk the very catastrophic failure they are trying to prevent.) They need to release water down the spillway. But in doing so might cause so much erosion it could undermine the integrity of the entire structure. It appears that this a much bigger problem than folks are letting on. If you're not going to leave, at least get prepared to leave so that if the dam's failure appears eminent you can jump in your car and get to higher ground. Be safe, not sorry!

Uh oh. That is going to take more time to fix than they might have.

Doom for downstream


Hope Noah got that arc built in time

I spoke to my mother that is 30 minutes down from the dam and in between two rivers. I had asked her if she was thinking about getting out. She doesn't think anything will happen. I can hear a little bit of panic in her voice. The problem is these storms are warm and it is raining up to 7000 ft. They are saying on the news that the people of Oroville are safe so she thinks she will be fine.

She said if she would go she would grab some photos. I asked if she would please get some bins ready with food, water and dog food. Pull out a tent and seriously think about going somewhere before anything should happen. Entry out of the area would be difficult.

The lake's spillway was operated at full capacity in 1997, when a series of wet storms caused snowmelt at the high elevations of the Feather River watershed.

The inflow to the lake was much higher than the capacity to release it and there were concerns the dam would be overtopped. The spillway was dumping maximum capacity for days during that time - over 100,000 CFS as I recall - and there was no failure. Eventually, the inflow slowed and the the spillway was able to prevent a total disaster.

A major levee did fail many miles downstream, but the results were better than a total failure of the dam. Today's failure of the spillway at a moderately benign 60 to 70K release is concerning.

Dupe

Last Edited by Crunch62 on 02/07/2017 11:15 PM

HEY BUDDY....GET YER MOM OUT OF THERE ASAP!!!

OFFER HER LOTS OF MONEY!!!

THE FORCAST IS A WARNING UNTIL SATURDAY AFTER 9AM!!

ITS BAD
IT CAN FAIL

AND THEN AFTER A 3 TO 4 DAY BREAK YOU GET 5 MORE DAYS OF OVER 50% RAIN...GROUND AND ALL WILL BE SOAKED..

GET MUM THE FUCK OU OF THERE

WEATHER.COM
3 WARNINGS!!!!!

GO GET HER IF NECESSARY...

If she is in Biggs/Gridley/Live Oak/Yuba City/Marysville, I'd insist she at least has a bag in the car ready to go (and a full tank). No need to panic, but reasonable preps are in order.

Better order a crap ton of flex seal stat!

Great book

Stay safe man, be ready to bug out, Earthen dams have been know to slide when the reach peak levels. Even tho this site shows me from Canada, I'm in Red Bluff. The river here is WAY up. Expecting to peak in the morning. We still have some major storms coming, I feel for ya man.

We're pretty close to the river here, and it rose up about 10 ft. in the last day. They are doing some serious releases from Shasta right now too.

It's not looking good, they slowed it some, and the river went down about 15', but the rains came again this week, and now it's reclaimed all that and some.

I know, she needs to go. I am 4 hours away and tonight over 7 hours since I travel for my job. I have to travel home through SLO county tomorrow that has also received a lot of rain. Sandbags are literally in the center divider on the highway, last storm closed a portion of the highway. The ground is just so wet.

We have a cabin at 5800 elevation that had over 4 ft. of snow just over a week ago. Today was not the first day of rain and today another 1 1/2 inches was received. All that water just heading down into the valleys.

I hated that I had to travel this week.

Last Edited by Serenity12 on 02/07/2017 11:49 PM

From 7:30 PM pst (10:30 est) press conference:

(available if you scroll down the page at ... [link to sacramento.cbslocal.com] )

*They say they can release 15,000 cfs through the power plant piping which they will be doing starting sometime tomorrow. They were only using one penstock (have 2) pipe into power plant today ... the 2nd was under maintenance. They are now working to get the 2nd penstock feed pipe open for use sometime tomorrow so additional water can go through power plant piping. (15,000 cfs vs current 5000 cfs)

*If the lake begins to become too full they WILL release water through the spillway even though they know it will cause more damage. (got the feeling they were crossing their fingers, toes, feet, arms, legs as they said that one)

*Damage is approximately 250' long ... 180' wide. Spillway chute is 3000' long and damage is in lower part.

*Have no idea yet why the failure occurred.

*Have no idea yet as to HOW TO repair the Spillway or HOW LONG it will take. Still assessing the situation (remotely) at moment but engineers won't be able to actually inspect the spillway until daylight tomorrow

*Think they can keep the spillway dry for 3 to 4 days. (based upon lake level and weather forecast of more rain) (got the feeling they didn't think they could get it repaired by then ... but that they were thinking that they would then HAVE to release water down the spillway - they did talk in passing very early about possibly getting some rip rap into the gouged out areas)

*No public safety risk

*1997 they ran 150,000 cfs over the spillway so this wasn't even close to the spillway's capacity. (Wikipedia says official max capacity is 225,000 cfs ... but 150,000 cfs may be the realistic max capacity)

*2006 they ran 60,000 cfs over the spillway which is about where it was today when the problem cropped up. 2006 was the last release of that size. Releases since then have been much smaller.

And now we can see why California is supposed to break off and go in the ocean, eh?

Not just the friction from earthquakes, shit like this will break down the dam(eventually), and inundate everything in it's path.

Rinse and repeat.

Desired result.

But they can't control the weather.



Last Edited by wishiwas on 02/07/2017 11:47 PM

can she drive or has a car...make a reservation for her in a 'safe space'...tell her its your treat...call the neighbors and try to get them to leave with her...tell her you had a bad feeling or dream..anything to get her out of there....if it dont blow...so what...anything..early birthday present...x mas...valentines day treat...just to be safe...do it NOW!