Oroville Dam

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So that Moonbeam and his pals can try to deflect some blame away from themselves ?


I am not sure that is going to work this time. My suggestion is to a] tell them they have money for sanctuary cities, they have the money for repairs to the dam and if they want money from the Federal Government to repair the dam they will cooperate on Sancturary Cities and the BLM or the Army Corps of Engineers will come in and take over the repairs on the dam. Giving the money to the State for this is like giving cash to a heroin addict and telling them they have to use it for food, not drugs [been there with my dead brother-in-law drug addict/diabetic - doesn't work].
 
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-...ug-oroville-dam-hole-using-rocks-and-sandbags

In Race Against Coming Storm, Workers Scramble To Plug Oroville Dam Hole Using Rocks: Live Updates

by Tyler Durden
Feb 13, 2017 3:01 PM

Update 3: Here is the question officials are asking: can they drain the Oroville dam fast enough before the Wednesday storm? As the SacBee writes, water is flowing out of Lake Oroville's main spillway fast enough to cause lake levels to drop by up to 30 feet before the next storm Wednesday night. Officials hope that will be enough. Lake Oroville can fill fast during a big storm. During storms from Monday of last week through Friday, lake levels increased by 50 feet.

The main factor in how fast the lake drains continues to be the condition of the main spillway. Officials said Monday morning that the main spillway had not further deteriorated despite huge outflows cascading over it Sunday afternoon and evening. The more water drained from the lake by the next storm, the less chance that the lake again will fill to the point that activates the emergency spillway. Erosion on the emergency spillway Sunday night created the need to evacuate nearly 200,000 people.

With 100,000 cubic feet per second of water flowing out of the lake, lake levels were dropping about one foot every 3 hours on Monday morning, state figures show. That translates to a drop of about 120,000 acre-feet every 24 hours. At current pace, the lake will fall to about 400,000 acre-feet below its emergency spillway by Thursday morning. To get the lake back to the levels normally mandated for flood control, it would need to fall by about 700,000 acre-feet.

Officials have more modest goals. They said Sunday night that they hope to drain the lake by 20 to 30 feet by the next storm. At current pace, they will hit that target.

* * *

Update 2: Video clip of a flooded park located underwater from the Oroville dam

Brian van der Brug @bvdbrug


Flooding in a park along Feather River downstream from #OrovilleDam. No picnicking today

10:40 AM - 13 Feb 2017

Update: some good news - according to state officials, an early morning inspection of the battered main spillway revealed that ramping up the water releases did no additional damage to the main release point for the dam. “There’s been no additional erosion on the main spillway,” said Chris Orrock, a state Department of Water Resources spokesman. “We will continue at 100,000 (cfs).”

Orrock added that while giant sandbags are being filled with crushed aggregate at a staging area overlooking the dam, it is still uncertain whether the aggregate will be helicoptered in to try to fix the erosion beneath the emergency spillway.

[URL='http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2017/02/08/AGGREGATE.jpg']

Bags full of crushed rock sit ready to be dropped into the damaged areas of the Oroville Dam emergency spillway on Monday, Feb. 13, 2017.
The larger rocks in the background are being crushed to fill the bags.

* * *

After discovering a hole in Oroville Dam's emergency spillway, officials said late Sunday that they will attempt to plug it using sandbags and rocks. But, as the LA Times notes, they stressed the situation remains dangerous and urged thousands of residents downstream to evacuate to higher ground. Video from television helicopters Sunday evening showed water flowing into a parking lot next to the dam, with large flows going down both the damaged main spillway and the emergency spillway.

https://twitter.com/dakasler/status/831173718583894016/photo/1

They also showed lines of cars getting out of downtown Oroville. An evacuation center was set up at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds in Chico.

Almost 200,000 people were ordered on Sunday to evacuate from the area below the Lake Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in the United States, after authorities said its emergency spillway could give way.

While officials said the situation seemed less dire overnight, Sacramento television station KCRA reported that helicopters from around the state were sent to drop chest-high bags of rocks to close the hole in the spillway. The NBC affiliate showed dump trucks dropping off piles of rocks - see below - which were then loaded into the bags with backhoes, while helicopters were deployed to the site with oversized sandbags. The operation to close the gap would begin as soon as it was feasible, the station said.

Dale Kasler @dakasler


Live updates: Preparations to shore up #OrovilleDam emergency spillway under way http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article132379669.html …

9:03 AM - 13 Feb 2017





Updates: Torrent of water didn’t further degrade main Oroville Dam spillway
Lake Oroville water levels continued to fall below the level at which water flows over the emergency spillway of the dam.

Officials feared a failure of the emergency spillway could cause huge amounts of water to flow into the Feather River, which runs through downtown Oroville, and other waterways. The result could be flooding and levee failures for miles south of the dam, depending on how much water is released.

The efforts to make repairs to the damaged emergency spillway at the Oroville Dam are a race against time. Forecasters say Monday and Tuesday should be dry. But on Wednesday, more rain is possible. And the wet weather is expected to continue into the weekend. The rain is likely to increase water levels at Lake Oroville. Sunday night, officials were able to send water out of the damaged main spillway, taking pressure off the emergency spillway. Workers plan to make repairs to the emergency spillway beginning Monday.

After five years of drought, Northern California has experienced one of the wettest winters on record.

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If you go to the link above there is a lot of video of the ongoing attempts to plug this thing before the already predicted next big storm moves into the region this week.
 
At one point I had read that the power plant tubes are not being used to release water because debris had backed up at the exit and they couldn't function properly as a result. Has this been resolved? Can anyone show me on a map/picture where the exit tubes of the generating station are?
 
At one point I had read that the power plant tubes are not being used to release water because debris had backed up at the exit and they couldn't function properly as a result. Has this been resolved? Can anyone show me on a map/picture where the exit tubes of the generating station are?

There isn't exit tubes, per-say on this dam......... read below/
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2017/02/how-did-the-oroville-dam-get-so-bad/516429/

How Did the Oroville Dam Crisis Get So Dire?



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Water pours over the damaged main spillway at the Oroville Dam and over a hillside. California Department of Water Resources via Reuters

Maybe the Oroville Dam was cursed from the start.

In December 1964, three years into the massive barrier’s construction, a huge flood struck the northwest, killing dozens. The dam was nearly overtopped, which could have led to its failure even before it was completed. Instead, the partially completed dam helped prevent a larger disaster by reducing the flow of the Feather River. Less than a year later, two trains working on the site collided head-on in a tunnel near the dam, killing four men in a fiery crash and damaging the tunnel, slowing down work on the project.

Related Story

American Aqueduct: The Great California Water Saga


The dam, which sits south of Chico and north of Sacramento, was eventually completed in 1968, creating the nation’s tallest dam. It forms the head of California’s massive, byzantine State Water Project (SWP). The SWP moves water from Northern California south toward Los Angeles, an average of 3 million acre-feet per year. A drop of water that starts at Lake Oroville, above the dam, takes 10 days to move all the way to the end of the system, south of Los Angeles.

At least in theory. Controlling a system that large is never simple, and the delicate flow of the State Water Project is under threat now, and on Sunday, authorities ordered 188,000 people near the dam to evacuate. “This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill. This in NOT A Drill,” the Butte County Sheriff’s Office blared in its order. Officials say the dam itself is structurally sound, but the spillways designed to take pressure off the dam in the case of high water levels are both damaged. Dramatic videos show water pouring out of the lake and over the spillways.

There’s some bitter irony to the problem of too much water menacing the Golden State. California has suffered through a long and severe drought, at times driving Governor Jerry Brown to institute stringent—critics say draconian—water controls. This winter has seen much more snow and rain, which is good news for the parched state, but bad news for the Oroville Dam, where huge amounts of water are collecting. The lake rose 50 feet in a matter of days. Earlier in February, as operators let water over a concrete spillway to reduce the pressure, a crater appeared in the spillway. Faced with too much water in the lake, they continued to use the spillway anyway, and the damage got worse. On Friday, the crater was 45 feet deep, 300 feet wide, and 500 feet long.

There’s a backup for the concrete spillway, an auxiliary spillway that had never been used. It’s really just a hillside sloping down from the reservoir, covered in brush and trees. As the situation became more dire last week, crews starting clearing the slope for its first baptism. Managers hoped pressing the auxiliary spillway into service would give them time to patch up the concrete spillway over what’s expected to be a drier season. (That could be easier said than done: Snowpack upstream is 150 percent of normal for this time of year, meaning there’s going to be more melt headed downstream than normal.)

A crater in the middle of the primary spillway at the Oroville Dam (California Department of Water Resources via Reuters)
Initially, that seemed to do the trick: The water level in Lake Oroville was dropping, and the danger seemed to be abating. On Sunday, however, officials noticed the auxiliary spillway was starting to erode—at the same time that huge amounts of water continued to flow into the lake. The fear is that if the spillway gives out, a wall of water could push down out of Lake Oroville and toward lower ground. Workers are trying to shore up the emergency spillway with bags of rocks, including dropping them from helicopters. If it gives way, the Feather River would flood downstream, and might wash out other levees farther down the river. Meanwhile, debris from erosion also forced the state Department of Water Resources, the dam’s operator, to shut down its power plant, which could have helped to release some additional water. And there’s rain forecast for later this week.

How did the situation get so dire? One part of that is the seesaw state of the drought, with the weather moving from dry to saturated in a matter of months. (While droughts are a normal part of the globe’s climate, scientists say human-caused climate change has exacerbated them, increasing the severity of California’s drought by as much as 20 percent.)

Dam operators can’t control the weather, but they can try to prepare for unexpected events like the sudden inundation of Lake Oroville with consistent maintenance. One question in this case is whether the Oroville Dam has been adequately maintained.

In 2005, a trio of environmental groups filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, saying the emergency spillway was unsafe, The Mercury News reports. Their worry proved prophetic: The groups said in the event of heavy rain and flooding, the hillside would wash out and produce flooding downstream. They asked that the auxiliary spillway be paved with concrete, like the primary one. But the federal government rejected the request after consulting with the state and local agencies involved in the water system, which said they did not believe the upgrades were needed.

As for the primary spillway, the state did some repair work around the area of the collapse in 2013, CBS Sacramento reports. The last state inspection was in July 2015, but workers did not closely inspect the concrete, the Redding Record Searchlight notes, instead eyeing it from a distance and concluding it was safe. Officials say repairs should cost $100 million to $200 million, once it’s dry enough to begin them.

The Oroville Dam may be the most urgent case in the country at this moment—it’s not often that nearly 200,000 people are forced to evacuate—but it’s hardly alone. In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers conducted its most recent quadrennial survey of the nation’s infrastructure, and it gave the U.S. a ‘D’ for maintenance of dams.

“Thousands of our nation’s dams are in need of rehabilitation to meet current design and safety standards,” the report said. “They are not only aging, but are subject to stricter criteria as a result of increased downstream development and advancing scientific knowledge predicting flooding, earthquakes, and dam failures.”

But California is by some standards among the best states for dam safety in the country. While it has an enormous number of high-hazard dams—a classification meaning that lives are at risk if they fail—they are also inspected far more regularly than in some other states. More existing dams in the U.S. were built in the 1960s, like the Oroville Dam, than in any other decade. The combination of aging dams, bad maintenance, and spotty inspections means that what looks like a trickle of worry out of Lake Oroville and over the dam’s fragile spillways could turn into a gusher of danger around the U.S. in the coming years.
 
Being The Atlantic they had to throw in the obligatory global warming schtick, but in fact we have had droughts this long and longer followed by extreme wet as far back as trees exist to measure the tree rings. CA has not kept up with growing population in water storage so they felt it more acutely this time.
 
Gem, this article has a good cutaway of the dam itself....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4221808/Officials-warned-Oroville-Dam-12-years-ago.html

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Destruction: An aerial photograph shows the damage done to the area surrounding the emergency spillway - including a torn-up road - at Oroville Dam after it nearly collapsed on Sunday

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Also on Monday, it emerged that California Governor Jerry Brown had overlooked the Oroville Dam in the $100 billion list of 'key' infrastructure projects filed this month.

The list, generated at the request of the National Governor's Association after Donald Trump called for $1 trillion of infrastructure investment, is a 'wish list' of projects for Brown, CNBC reported.

But while the list mentions the Folsom Dam, some 60 miles south of Oroville, as well as flood control in Sacramento, 66 miles away, there is no mention of Oroville Dam itself.

Instead, most of the suggested upgrades in the three-page document are related to transportation, such as highways, bridges and railroads.

Projects to reduce flooding risk in Marysville, 30 miles south of Oroville - and which is in danger of flooding if the dam breaks - are mentioned, as are other levee and dam plans.

All are placed below a proposed high-speed rail track between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the list - although the governor's office says that the order of the list does not represent how important the projects are.
 
Ditto on that, Thank you Waterbaby. There wasn't more than a 15 second blip on the local Denver news last night. I am trying to keep up on this thru this site. Sq
 
This Oroville problem is really distracting to Jerry Brown. He wants his bullet train !!!


Yep.. he turned in a $100 billion wish list with the bullet train at the top of the list and not a word about this dam for a lake that provides drinking water tor 2/3 of the State of California [think about that next time someone says they get all their water from the Colorado River - the Colorado "only" handles the lower 1/3 of the state, the rest is all from this one lake. And - BTW - Shasta the second largest lake in CA is now at full pool and another storm is moving in late Wednesday, early Thursday.
 
Waterbaby, I agree with one of your earlier posts. It is a shame to see all this water going out to the ocean. Where I live in Orange County, they want to add another 85,000 housing units. That can be either apartments, condominiums, or single family houses. They have not taken into consideration the drought, which may be a mute point for now. California needs to turn a deaf ear to some of the naturalists and build some more reservoirs.
Along a slightly different line, there is an earthen dam much smaller than Oroville above the Pasadena area that they are concerned with structurally. It has a lot of debris behind it from fires that needs to be cleared. Everytime they bring up clearing out this debris, the locals complain about the noise, and an endangered bird. If this dam collapses, there will be more problems than noise, or an endangered bird. We Californians have some really strange priorities.
 
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/cr...alifornia-dams-troubles/ar-AAmXeIm?li=BBnb7Kz

Cracks may offer clues to California dam's troubles
17 / 26

Six months before rushing water ripped a huge hole in a channel that drains a Northern California reservoir, state inspectors said the concrete spillway was sound. As officials puzzle through how to repair it, federal regulators have ordered the state to figure out what went wrong at Oroville Dam.

Earlier inspection reports offer potential clues, including cracks on the spillway surface that could either be cosmetic or indicate deeper problems. In recent years, construction crews patched cracks — including in the area where water burrowed a huge pit last week. If past repairs were not done properly, water could infiltrate and eventually tear through the concrete.

Damage to the main spillway triggered a series of problems that threatened to unleash a torrent of water on cities downstream. On Tuesday, officials said the immediate danger had passed, and allowed nearly 200,000 residents to go home after evacuation orders scattered them for nearly two days.

Inspectors with the state agency that both operates and checks the dam, the nation's tallest at 770 feet, went into the half-mile-long spillway in 2014 and 2015 and did not find any concerns.

"Conditions appeared to be normal," the inspector wrote in reports from both years.

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© The Associated Press Water gushes down the Oroville Dam's main spillway Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. The Oroville Reservoir is continuing to drain Wednesday as state water officials scrambled to… Getting into the channel affords both a closer view of cracks as well as a chance to tap it with a special hammer, with the sound telling a trained ear whether the concrete is solid or there may be erosion in the earth below. Last August, a team of inspectors only checked the channel from vistas around it, not inside. They concluded that everything looked fine.

The inspection came as California was enduring a five-year drought, and the channel rarely was used to relieve pressure on Oroville Lake, which is about 70 miles north of Sacramento. An extraordinarily wet subsequent six months changed that.

Dam managers were draining water last week from the fast-filling reservoir into the Feather River below when the pit appeared. They temporarily stopped the releases and the reservoir kept rising — pushing water over its lip and down a hillside, where erosion prompted concerns that a broader failure was imminent.

Experts said problems like the cracks in the concrete spillway and spots in nearby areas where water seeped from the reservoir through a hillside were common issues with dams. What mattered, said John Moyle, New Jersey's director of dam safety and flood control, was whether dam operators dealt with the problems carefully — patching cracks so they were watertight, and dealing with spots where water was leaking through so they didn't grow to undermine the concrete.

The Department of Water Resources declined to answer specific questions about the repair work, saying engineers were focused on ensuring public safety.

Robert Bea, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at University of California, Berkeley, said it's "obvious those repairs didn't work."

"We don't have details on the repairs, but they put cement into the cracks and troweled it over," Bea said. "I call it 'patch and pray.'"

On Monday, federal regulators told the department it must enlist a group of independent consultants both to assess what went wrong and to recommend long-term fixes.

Documents and interviews show that crews were patching cracks in 2009 and 2013. A water resources department spokesman said it was normal for maintenance crews to be troubleshooting cracks in the channel during dry summer months.

One resident of the region said he saw crews in the spillway at least once a year for the past several years.

"When they have four or five trucks down there, the only thing they have to do is fill cracks," said Don Reighley, a retiree and fisherman who several times a week drives past the channel to launch his boat into the reservoir.

One of the state inspectors who went to Oroville Dam in August said authorities may never know exactly what destabilized the spillway.

"Any type of evidence that might have been there is gone," Eric Holland of the water resources department's dam safety division said. "Everything has been washed away."

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http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/to...-flooding-in-california/ar-AAmYs7C?li=BBnbfcL

'Biggest storm of winter' expected to unleash flooding in California
8 / 18

AccuWeather

Alex Sosnowski 6 hrs ago


Upcoming storms will likely bring more challenges to Oroville, California, where residents were recently forced to flee their homes after an emergency spillway at the Oroville Dam developed a hole. " Upcoming storms will likely bring more challenges to Oroville, California, where residents were recently forced to flee their homes after an emergency spillway at the Oroville Dam developed a hole. A new train of storms has arrived along the Pacific coast, and a potent one is set to hit California hard with heavy rain, mountain snow and strong winds during the latter part of this week.

The first storm will focus on areas from Northern California to Washington into Thursday. The second storm in the series will focus most of its moisture on Southern California from Thursday night to Saturday.

"The late-week storm has the potential to be the biggest of the winter in terms of rainfall and impact to much of Southern California," AccuWeather Meteorologist Jim Andrews said.

The storm will bring enough rain and excess runoff to cause flash flooding, which can cause major delays for motorists. Along with the heavy rain will be the potential for mudslides in some neighborhoods, especially in recent burn scar locations.

"We expect 3 to 6 inches of rain to fall in the lowlands along the coast and over the Los Angeles basin," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Ken Clark said. "From 6 to 12 inches of rain is likely below snow levels in the mountains, especially along the south-facing slopes."

In the Los Angeles area, much of this rain may fall in 24 hours from Friday morning through Friday night.

That much rain in such a short period of time could lead to some roads becoming impassable for a while.

The combination of heavy rain, a low cloud ceiling and gusty winds will also lead to airline delays.

As the ground becomes soggy again, gusty winds will raise the risk of fallen trees and sporadic power outages.

Snow levels will remain well above the passes in Southern California. However, those venturing over Donner Pass are likely to encounter slippery conditions. The ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada will likely receive 1 to 2 feet of snow from the storm later this week.

In the wake of the big rain through Friday night, spottier showers will continue to dampen the region on Saturday and Saturday night.

Little to no rain may reach Southern California during the period from Sunday through next week.

Another storm will roll ashore from the Pacific during Sunday night. However, most effects from the storm will be focused from Northern California to Washington during the first half of next week.

As a result of the ongoing storms, more challenges are ahead for crews, officials and residents in the Oroville, California, area. Damage to the spillway at the Oroville Dam forced evacuations earlier this week.

The rainfall to end this week will take another big chunk out of the drought over Southern California.

Total rainfall since Dec. 1 over much of Southern California has ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 times that of average.

While less than 1 percent of the state remained in extreme drought as of last week, much of the region remained in moderate to severe long-term drought, according to the United States Drought Monitor.
 
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https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/02...-river-taking-aim-on-beleaguered-orovilledam/

Super-soaker: Atmospheric River taking aim on beleaguered #OrovilleDam
Anthony Watts / 5 hours ago February 15, 2017

We’ve already had two big events like this so far this year, now forecasts show a clear pattern of a heavily moisture laden “atmospheric river” taking aim directly onto the Oroville Dam watershed over the next week. Accumulated precipitation forecasts show that the Lake Orovile watershed will score a direct hit with the maximum amount of precipitation over the next 10 days (see graphic near bottom of this article).



Above: Computer forecast models indicate a powerful jet stream will continuously pound California over the next ten days and bring copious amounts of moisture from off of the Pacific Ocean into the state. This 10-day loop of predicted upper-level winds at 250 mb are in 6-hour increments from today until Thursday, February 23rd; maps courtesy tropicaltidbits.com, NOAA/EMC (GFS)

Meteorologist Paul Dorian of Vencore Weather writes:

There have been many occasions in the past in which floods have followed droughts in California and this recent time period is yet another example. In California, incredible amounts of rain have piled up in recent weeks across low-lying areas of the state, mountains of snow have accumulated in the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountains – and more is on the way. After a couple days with a break in the action, another storm is likely to arrive in northern California by later Wednesday and continue into Thursday and then a second storm looks like it will slam the entire state by early this weekend.

After a lengthy drought, California has been battered by potentially record-setting rain, with the Northern California region getting 228 per cent more than its normal rainfall for this time of year. The average annual rainfall of about 50 inches had already been overtaken with 68 inches in 2017 alone and another 6+ inches is possible over the next week-to-ten days. The latest computer model forecast of upper-level winds for the next ten days (Monday, 2/13 to Thursday, 2/23) does not hold out much hope for any significant drying in California. Powerful winds in the upper atmosphere (at 250 mb) will continuously pound California and bring copious amounts of moisture from the Pacific Ocean into the state. The total precipitation forecast map by NOAA for the next 7 days indicates more significant rainfall (and snowfall) is likely throughout the state.

More here: https://www.vencoreweather.com/blog/2017/2/13/1025-am-california-has-a-brief-break-before-getting-pounded-again

The long-term forecast has rainfall totals withing the watershed that are showing the exact spot where Lake Oroville watershed is located will get 11.62 inches of rain over the next 10 days, the most accumulated rainfall in the entire western USA:

 
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