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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.
I was watching last week when the bad cracks in primary spillway gave way and limited its use. Of course, that didn't stop Governor Moonbeam last night, who finally addressed the issue at 11pm over a week after we knew this was going to be a problem, from playing politics and blaming global warming. The requirements for the dam were created in the late 1950's, and this hasn't exceeded the design capacity of the dam. The problem is that the damaged spillway can't be used at full capacity because of bad maintenance. Well, maybe even that isn't a strong enough term since the last time the spillway was inspected it was done visually at a distance.
Summary: life is more complicated than the current tribal cold war has people believe.
But I'm pretty sure CA has not spent billion dollars on a hyperloop project.
There have been multiple proposals to do just that, but between the environmental lobbyists and the people who would rather use the money for a train they're going to ride about once, it's just not happening.
It may be hard to comprehend, but California is a pretty big state. It also covers a large swath of territory from north to south, and the northern edge is almost nothing like the southern edge, in terms of terrain/climate. Northern California is no longer in drought, but Southern California is a different story. Geographically speaking, it would be like saying "Pennsylvania is no longer in drought, but Georgia and South Carolina still are", because that's about how far apart the ends of California are from each other.
Until you can learn to communicate in a post-elementary-school-playground manner, neither do you.
It certainly does if you're trying to ascertain whether fossil fuel burning has caused enough climate change to displace people, as the OP asserted.
Your hypothetical interview scenario is moot and useless. Calculation of population displacement due to climate change would never be based on interviews -- it would be linked directly to (habitable land mass before change) - (habitable land mass after change).
Protip: Use more logic and reason, and less emotion when composing your arguments.
sig: sauer
That's false. The Legislative Analyst's Office questioned the assumptions but did not find anything in the CAHSR's numbers that were factually incorrect. The State Auditor found some risks and weak oversight but again could not disprove the numbers. We see the same thing over and over again, and each time it helps California improve its planning and oversight.
Meanwhile, every HSR line in the world that's at least a few years old is already making a profit.
Every.
Last.
One.
Even Amtrak's Acela Express makes a profit. So why would California's HSR be any different?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Hi Martin,
Well, I think the environmental groups are blowing their own horn a whole lot over this, but I don't think they actually predicted a structural failure. What I believe they thought would happen was that the spillway would be over capacity. It actually wasn't over capacity, it just broke. And they were afraid that the emergency spillway would have had to be opened due to overcapacity, and that this would increase the turbidity in the river and we'd get a hillside of silt deposited somewhere.
I was a volunteer for one of those organizations for several years. They don't have the facilities to predict a concrete structural failure.
Bruce Perens.
1) Agreed. Part of the reason Katrina was so bad was because the levees meant to hold back floodwaters from a hurricane hadn't been maintained because there hadn't been a direct hit from a hurricane in so long. The problem here is that the vast majority of elected officials are elected to 1-, 2-, or 4-year terms. Whereas maintenance typically has a 20-, 30-, or 50-year time constant. The temptation is always for the politician to defer it so their budget numbers look better while some schmuck who gets elected in the future will have to deal with it. The politicians in New Orleans made that gamble one year before Katrina, and lost. It remains to be seen what will happen in Oroville.
2) While the source of the water was natural, the dam was built to create an artificial reservoir to hold fresh water to deliver throughout the state for drinking and irrigation. The dam didn't help absorb the rainwater. Without it, the water would've been sent down the river at a manageable rate over the last 2 months of heavy rainfall. Even now, as long as the spillway(s) are being used, the rate of water flow below the dam (which by definition, since the reservoir is full, equals the rate at which new water is being added to the reservoir by rainfall upriver) is manageable. The danger exists only because if the dam fails, all the water which has been artificially bottled up will come crashing through all at once. So if it fails, it will very much be a man-made disaster.