So How's That Evacuation Order Working Out For You?

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First Shirt
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Re: So How's That Evacuation Order Working Out For You?

Post by First Shirt »

What I feel bad about is that the people who are responsible for this mess are not the ones in the flood path.
But there ain't many troubles that a man caint fix, with seven hundred dollars and a thirty ought six."
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SoupOrMan
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Re: So How's That Evacuation Order Working Out For You?

Post by SoupOrMan »

That's where I was going, too, First Shirt.
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NVGdude
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Re: So How's That Evacuation Order Working Out For You?

Post by NVGdude »

Jered wrote:John Ringo wrote a post about this.

According to some of the commenters, that dam was originally designed to be used as a generator, and that the water level was supposed to be managed by the power generation.
Not really. The Dam is designed to do three things:

1) Create a large agricultural reservoir. Lake Orville holds over 3.5 million acre-feet. It's the 2nd largest reservoir in Cali.
2) Maintain flood control on the Feather River.
3) Hydro-eclectic power generator.

The Power plant is actually used as a peaker plant, and during non-peak demand is used to pump water back uphill and into the lake.

The Power plant wasn't being used because of debris and mud due to all the rainfall. The main spillway should have been able to handle the load. It failed.

Exactly why it failed will probably never be known, but the main issue is that they cut a lot of corners by not inspecting properly. The spillway is 50 years old. Instead of actually inspecting the spillway, and patching and repairing any cracks or incipient failures they inspected using binoculars from the adjacent access road and called it good. Once the spillway breached, it got a lot worse, which one might expect when releasing 100,000 CFS of water. Yeah, that's over two acre-feet per second.

Now I would not be shocked one bit to find out that the contractor back in 1967 skimped out on using as much re-bar as specified

The emergency spillway eroded heavily, as pretty much everyone expected. It was never actually intended to be used, so it wasn't paved, just dirt and trees and mud. Because it was already soaked, it eroded about 4 times faster than expected.
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