Article

2017-02-15 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

Oroville Dam Spillway No Longer in Danger of Failure - Repairs Underway

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Posted by lord garth 2017-02-15 08:02|| || Front Page|| [8 views ] Top

#1 Trump arranges FEMA funds for dam repair despite organizing a cabinet and dodging all the Washington sniping from both parties. California was warned 12 years ago about this dam condition.

Posted by JohnQC 2017-02-15 09:13|| 2017-02-15 09:13|| Front Page Top

#2 Stay out of his way. He gets things done!

Posted by Besoeker 2017-02-15 09:14|| 2017-02-15 09:14|| Front Page Top

#3 The media blames Trump for the dam's failure in 5.. 4... 3...

Posted by CrazyFool 2017-02-15 09:16|| 2017-02-15 09:16|| Front Page Top

#4 Whoever coordinated all the trucks, construction equipment, copters, etc. did a pretty darn good job.

OK. They did a credible job dealing with an emergency. But they failed to prevent the emergency. What will be the next failure?

Posted by Abu Uluque 2017-02-15 11:19|| 2017-02-15 11:19|| Front Page Top

#5 IOW, they got lucky. Next time they might not.

Posted by Abu Uluque 2017-02-15 11:20|| 2017-02-15 11:20|| Front Page Top

#6 Best meme on the damned dam.

Snark of the day.

Posted by rjschwarz 2017-02-15 11:26|| 2017-02-15 11:26|| Front Page Top

#7 I've been noticing a lot of comments from various folks in the construction industry that the photos of the damaged spillway do not appear to show any embedded rebar or mesh in the exposed concrete.

Seems very odd, but I'm not a hydro guy. Frank?

Posted by Mullah Richard 2017-02-15 11:38|| 2017-02-15 11:38|| Front Page Top

#8 and updated weather forecasts

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this was the major contributor.

Fix the dam. Maybe they could run some kind of conveyor belt to drop a bunch of boulders into the hole and pave it over.

Posted by gorb 2017-02-15 11:40|| 2017-02-15 11:40|| Front Page Top

#9 Mullah the rebar is there, it's the scale of most of the pictures that can't show something that small.

Posted by Shipman 2017-02-15 12:34|| 2017-02-15 12:34|| Front Page Top

#10 Damn good idea gorb; looking at #6 rj's (great) pic, there isn't enough road access to even set that up. No room for loaders/tractors to work.

In fact, access is absolutely abysmal. What happened, bought a 6 lane with turnabout and got a pickup track?

Posted by swksvolFF 2017-02-15 12:35|| 2017-02-15 12:35|| Front Page Top

#11 But with mining equipment

Posted by swksvolFF 2017-02-15 12:48|| 2017-02-15 12:48|| Front Page Top

#12 Thanks, Shipman. Most of the folks were referencing the photo here because it was the largest image file available showing the damage fairly close up. If there is rebar, it doesn't seem to be as much as expected, though.

Still, that image is taken from 100-ft or more away so you are most likely correct.

Posted by Mullah Richard 2017-02-15 12:55|| 2017-02-15 12:55|| Front Page Top

#13 Side dumpers would work just fine.

Posted by Skidmark 2017-02-15 12:55|| 2017-02-15 12:55|| Front Page Top

#14 the repair team has been placing about 30 truck loads of stones and boulders per hour in the area behind the emergency spillway with priority to the part of the spillway that had the most erosion near it - they also have been placing about 10 large sandbags per hour and sometime today, they will place the first slurry over some of the resulting mass

Abu Uluques makes a good point that this should not have been necessary at all but the people who designed and built these dams have mostly retired by now and its not productive to concentrate on this aspect of the situation - and it any event, its not the fault of today's repair crews that yesterday's designers made mistakes

the repair team isn't responsible

Posted by lord garth 2017-02-15 15:15|| 2017-02-15 15:15|| Front Page Top

#15 30 truckloads an hour is a pretty good pace, lg. At roughly 40-yards per haul (based on the size of the trucks I saw in the photos), that's some serious tonnage at about 110,000 pounds per load.

Kudos to that crew.

Posted by Mullah Richard 2017-02-15 16:26|| 2017-02-15 16:26|| Front Page Top

#16 Lost in all the news about the spill are the initial reports, before the emergency spillway near-failure, that the auxiliary spillway damage wad been inspected mere months before its failure, but tha the inspection was "visual, not actually physically inspected". The sinkhole that developed was the result of massive undercutting by high dynamic water forces through failed concrete seams in the spillway, seams that would have been easily detected if someone had actually walked the spillway in the time preceding the failure. I bet a big lunch that no civil servant from DWR walked that spillway in a very long time. That failure, and the stoppage to inspect the hole, and then the overflow and massive erosion hole now created, and the hundreds of millions of dollars to remedy the mess, all are the result of sloth and deferred maintenance, soon to be paid for by the taxpayers of the nation. Wanna bet no one gets fired?

Posted by NoMoreBS 2017-02-15 18:49|| 2017-02-15 18:49|| Front Page Top

#17 They need just a really big roll of Flexseal tape.

Posted by Airandee 2017-02-15 20:40|| 2017-02-15 20:40|| Front Page Top

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