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

I am curious to check my storage place I wonder if any of the richies have taken out their travel trailers and fifth wheels

I doubt it.

You can see that the water does not flow smoothly. The one joint at the lower right shows water going over the hill jetting up at the wall joint. So cavitation is starting. No sign that a slab is actually separating and coming apart.

Based on Glen Canyon 1983, three weeks cavitation at 20-30,000 could really wreck a wall.....

Is there any kind of space age amazing epoxy where they could shut this down on a sunny day and smooth over all the joints that are showing cavitation signs, and open it back up in 24 hours or less? My dentist has some amazing modern cavity fills.

Butte county and CHP can shut down whatever they want.

Go past that 'road flooded' sign and CHP will give you a $350 citation even if the road is completely dry.

It is a fucking racket.

Added 3,416 acre-feet to the reservoir over the last hour, 615,144 acre-feet left.

Any camera links to the spillway?

[link to www.parks.ca.gov (secure)]

It eventually pans around to the spillway.

I think the gates are all open, aren't they?

And no doubt DWR is worried about everything working right, but (just my opinion) doubt if they would hesitate to use the gates based on the known issues. They honest-to-God believe everything is fine and will work as planned.

I would instead put my money on DWR thinking "Let's fill up our piggy-bank as fast as possible and start counting the dough, baby!" Which pisses me off because the supposedly mandatory flood pool reservation is based on historical records of how much flood storage they MIGHT STILL need. Since DWR can't see into the future, it would behoove them to follow well-known, best-case conservative storage management engineering guidelines even at the risk of ending up a few acre-ft short of a full dam in May. And I doubt they'll be short at all with the next round of ARk storms rolling in.

Not sure what kind of dumb-assed game they're playing here, but they could have got a jump on maintaining flood storage four days ago by spilling. Everyone knew what was coming, even GLP. Now they can't release much faster if they wanted to because the Sacramento is flooding. They damn well could have started spilling last Saturday and made room by now without causing any problems downstream.

At the end of yesterday, 3/14, they already exceeded the upper storage limit by 42,000 acre-ft. It will probably be double that today. I'm sure they figure inflows will drop off as the week goes on, and then they'll draw the reservoir back down to the flood reservation limit. We know how that's probably going to work out. It's the ABV TOC column on this data set: [link to cdec.water.ca.gov (secure)]

Trunion anchor stuff:

https://twitter.com/_/status/1636090833643491328

https://twitter.com/_/status/1636091772400021507

FYI

4.2.3: Oroville Spillway Recovery, Plans and Design

Future Repair Stages

By November 1st, (construction timeline) the spillway can release flows of 100,000 ft3 /sec if necessary during winter months. The Department of Water Resources plans on reinforcing the hillside with a cutoff wall into bedrock, keeping erosion that can occur in the future from cutting back into the emergency spillway weir. On March 6th , heavy equipment began removing debris from the diversion pool as employees from the Department of Water Resources and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Geologists surveyed the spillway. Currently, the Department of Water Resources wished to return both the gated flood control and emergency spillways to their original design capacity, capable of passing maximum flood waters at Lake Oroville.

[link to geo.libretexts.org (secure)]

Your posts are always excellent. Thank you!

Does anyone know how the Folson Dam is holding up this year?

I now live at the upper part of the Sacramento River (formerly Paradise) and we are not even at flood stage yet but who knows when all this snow starts melting.

Pretty sure most of us here care more about the dam NOT failing and that is why we are so vigilant.

Fun little video for kids about the process of cavitation at the Glen Canyon Dam. [link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Who really runs DWR is the question.

While everyone is waiting, thought I'd share a 1965 book on the geology of the Oroville quadrangle.

"more diamonds have been found in Butte County- than in any other county in the state. All of the vein deposits occur in the bedrock terrane"...

Pg 83

of this tome:

ia800701 dot us dot archive dot org/0/items/geologyoforovill00creerich/geologyoforovill00cree​rich.pdf

Heavy rainfall triggers earthqukes when the geology of the area includes karst. Good to know if karst limestone is around.

Very nice presentation.

from the video, it looks like they opened the gates up more.
The rooster-tails coming from the seams between each slab in the wall have disappeared.

UH, THEY R DOING AZ LITTLE AZ POSSIBLE. TO SHAVE D-UH DAM AN
MAKE BANK ON WATUH. BUT, THEY'RE GONNUH FUCK IT UP..BY PLAN.UH

A little history lesson.



As a random pleb the best we can hope for is that the dam is never again tested the way it was in 2017. We've gotten over trusting experts to keep us safe.

Considering US taxpayers coughed up approx.
$1 billion to clean up the State of California's mess, the least they could have done was to use a few thousand of that and install livecams devoted exclusively to the spillway, gates and the front of the dam itself, that actually work and stay online 24/7

Those are the areas most people are interested in seeing, especially when severe weather hits.

Instead, we are tortured by being forced to sit through 5 minutes of trees, the horizon, a flat lake, and part of a wall just to view a small part at the top of the spillway,

Taxpayers should be able to view what they paid for.

What are they afraid of?

856.57

RIV REL. 'EXACTLY' 20,000

INFLOWS 53,533

OUTFLOWS 20,237

CALLIN 858.00 BY MIDNIGHT CALI TIME.

UP 8.21 FEET IN THE LAST 24 HRS.

Actually, this same camera USED to simply show the upper spillway deck and the spillway bridge area. A total of three views as I recall, all of the upper spillway area.

There is another camera, the 'lower spillway camera' that I believe is still in place across the diversion pool from the bottom of the spillway. We aren't allowed to view that one.

DISSSssss..uh...

Well, whats the worst that could happen?
I mean there is a lot of money to make either way so...

oh, i UH..JUS' GAVE BIRTH TO THIS AS WELL IF, UH..ANYONE IZ UH
BORED. OR, UH THHRHOHL....CAPS.

Thread: FINESTEIN ~ GONE ~ PELOSI + PAUL ~ GONE ~ FETTERMAN ~ GONE ~ BIDEN ~ GONE ~ MCCONNEL ~GONE ~CARTER ~ GONE ~ YELLEN ~ GONE !

the
DD
IF

If they dont let the people see it via camera, then it is logical to assume they know that the spillway will fail.