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188,000 Evacuated As California's Massive Oroville Dam Threatens Catastrophic Floods (washingtonpost.com)
Mr D from 63 quotes a report from The Washington Post: About 188,000 residents near Oroville, Calif., were ordered to evacuate Sunday after a hole in an emergency spillway in the Oroville Dam threatened to flood the surrounding area. Thousands clogged highways leading out of the area headed south, north and west, and arteries major and minor remained jammed as midnight approached on the West Coast -- though by early Monday, Lake Oroville's water level had dropped to a point at which water was no longer spilling over. The lake level reached its peak of 902.59 feet at about 3 a.m. Sunday and dropped to 898 feet by 4 a.m. Monday, according to the Sacramento Bee. Water flows over the emergency spillway at 901 feet. "The drop in the lake level was early evidence that the Department of Water Resources' desperate attempt to prevent a catastrophic failure of the dam's emergency spillway appeared to be paying dividends," the Bee reported Monday. Officials doubled the flow of water out of the nearly mile-long primary spillway to 100,000 cubic feet per second. The normal flow is about half as much, but increased flows are common at this time of year, during peak rain season, officials said. But water officials warned that damaged infrastructure could create further dangers as storms approach in the week ahead, and it remained unclear when residents might be able to return to their homes.
That does not negate any of his points.
The dam is for water management first, electrical power generation second, and flood control third. You can concern troll about hydro if you want, but it's mostly inappropriate here.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
It's interesting that everyone's trying to put a political spin on this, and finger pointing is starting.
First, T supporters say T should only give emergency assistance if CA swears away from "sanctuary cities". CA's response is that CA has always paid into the fed just like every other state, and that one political issue shouldn't be used as a threat against another.
Second, is the reason for not preventing this. There was concern of weakness in the dam's overflow systems going back years. Different experts gave different opinions. It seems it was on the borderline of being problematic, at least on paper. If it's only on the borderline of being a problem, then expensive fixes tend to get ignored.
It may also be a case of "cascading failure" whereby the backup (overflow handling) failed, and then the secondary backup also failed. Sometimes bleep just happens under extreme weather. Other CA damns and water systems held up; the chance of all them working perfectly is slim. If you have hundreds of water systems, at least a few will have notable problems during heavy rains just out of shear probability.
Large dams are probably a thing of the past, in part because they are a single big point of failure, and in part because they screw up the existing state of nature. Smaller sub-dams are the preferred way now, if any. But we still have to maintain the big old ones because many existing dwellings and roads rely on them to work.
Table-ized A.I.
You have no idea how big California is or how many biomes it spans, do you?
It actually does negate most of Mr. D's point -- Mr. D suggested that there are alternatives worth considering for hydro power to avoid the eco damage. He's right about that. But there is no alternative to storing water. You either dam the water up somewhere so that you have it available during droughts or you don't. And water takes up space.
I don't know what rock you've been living under. For years, client scientists have been saying that AGW will bring about more droughts and more floods. Those two items are in no way mutually exclusive.
What percentage of climate change is due, solely, to fossil fuel burning? We all agree that the number is less than %100, but what is it?
How much area, in square kilometers or whatever area unit you wish to use, has been affected by climate change so that people have been displaced?
Until you can answer those two questions, you have no place in this discussion -- your assertion is little more than mere conjecture.
sig: sauer
Not really anything to do with hydro though, is it?
The dam was built to manage the water supply and prevent flooding. They just added hydro as a nice bonus because why not make use of all that free energy? It wasn't build for hydro, it was built for water management.
It's like blaming radios for car accident deaths because many of the cars involved happen to have them. Banning hydro wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference, the dam would have been built anyway. And even if this dam didn't have hydro, it would still have failed in exactly the same way.
Besides which, few places are building new hydro dams because most of the places where a dam is beneficial already have them. Small scale hydro perhaps, but it's mostly wind and solar and some geothermal now. Oh, and tidal of course.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As has been pointed out by many people, California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop while letting this particular bit of infrastructure upgrade get ignored.
Perhaps you mean the California high speed rail, which was paid for (so far) by a bond measure, the money for which cannot legally be designated for something else?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The reason they're saying the hydro downsides don't apply is because it has little to do with hydro power. The storage and damming is going to happen regardless, because having water supply is going to outweigh any other type of consideration. If you can get the hydro power for free, then you have no reason to not do it except for spite. But you can't blame the downsides of damming on hydro power if damming will happen with or without power generation.
So, you're admitting that there is no way to know that anyone has been displaced due to the burning of fossil fuels. Yet, you're arguing for the validity of making that very assertion. Now, who's the idiot?
sig: sauer
The earthen emergency spillway would never have been used if the concrete spillway had not failed. The problem with the earthen spillway is that once used, there was an indication that it might erode back to the weir, which is a door the width of the spillway at the top. When the weir is opened and the water is high enough, it is released. If the weir was undermined, water might have started flowing out under it, and the flow would have been uncontrolled until the water level fell to a level that would be blocked by the dam wall.
None of this would have happened if the main spillway did not fail.
While we will probably avoid a flow high enough to flood Marysville (again - Marysville has been no stranger to floods), the real problem, and the one that the ecological groups were really warning about, is that a whole hillside of soil got dumped in the river. This is increasing the turbidity all the way out the Feather and Sacramento rivers to the San Francisco Bay, which is not going to be good for the Salmon run. Fish need cold, clear water. We're going to get all of that silt deposited somewhere, too.
Bruce Perens.