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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.
Question: Which energy technology has displaced the most people from their homes and villages, has rendered the most land uninhabitable by humans as well as all native plants and animals, and has killed thousands of square miles of animal and plant life?
Answer: Hydro of course. Everyone's favorite renewable. The source so many countries credit for high renewable percentages.
Other interestig tidbits: Deforestation due to hydro results is reduced carbon sequestration. Also, decay of plant material under hyrdo reseviors and active aquatic microbial digestion is a source of added methane emmissions. Studies show these emissions may be quite high.
I think Hyrdo is a great power source. But nothing comes without trade-offs. I think most here are willing to trade off the things I listed above for the benefits of hydro.
This dam is primarily for water supply, the hydroelectric aspect is secondary.
considering the state is in a drought half the time. If only there was a way to build a wall or something to hold the water until it was needed.
That does not negate any of his points.
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.
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.
I just wanted to post some info before everyone spins this as a partisan failure of one sort or another.
1) The dam was built and is owned by California.
2) California was warned about the potential problem (the one we are currently seeing) in 2005.
3) In 2005, as part of the federal re-licensing procedure for the dam, several groups urged federal officials to require that the dam’s [earthwork] emergency spillway be upgraded to concrete. The federal government declined.
4) The dam was built at a time when requirements were less strict in comparison to today's standards. The dam foundations were dug down to "weathered" rock, which is less structurally sound than "bedrock".
And finally,
5) As much as people feel the need for karma or justice or revenge or whatever, we DO NOT punish people's lives and homes over partisan bullshit. The federal government should (and most probably will) assist in any way that they can to help avoid a disaster.
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. Both California and the Federal government (viz: the licensing mentioned above) can share the blame for this.
It's another Katrina-like situation: both governments (Cali and Federal) were warned, did nothing, and now it's an emergency.
Also of note, and I'm trying to look at the big picture here and not point fingers, it's been pointed out that the infrastructure in our country has been neglected for a long time (especially roads, bridges, and the electrical grid), and we really need to start fixing up things.
Fixing our infrastructure was one of the campaign promises of the party in power, perhaps this will galvanize them to action.
You have no idea how big California is or how many biomes it spans, do you?
Were any of them kneeling?
Nope. I forgot to order a blow job with my skinny vanilla latte this morning.
First, Oroville, California, gets 52 inches of rain per year. NOT a desert.
According to US climate data 30.7 inches of precipitation per year
http://www.usclimatedata.com/c...
which is about 20% less than the national average
https://rainfall.weatherdb.com...
Still: not a desert.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
The "blister" is in the main spillway, not the emergency spillway. However, it seems to be holding out fine.
The problem is that the emergency spillway isn't really a spillway, it's just the side of a hill which is rapidly eroding from all the water running over it. This undermines the emergency spillway at the top, weakening it, and could lead to failure of this part of the dam. The main dam (highest in the US) seems to be fine for now.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
So, you live in southern CA.
If I was in Southern CA, I would have a muffin to go with my skinny vanilla latte. ;)
Guess how many of these quickly build damn dams exist in California.
The next 160 year cycle of Pineapple Express mega-floods is due in 2022. Geologists know the cycles from core sediments, which are indisputable.
Can they retrofit dams in time? Will they even try? Will it make any difference if they do retrofit? Will any bureaucrat get fired? I am betting NO.
Do the dam and water engineers already acknowledge this and the bureaucracy keep quiet on it, just like at Oriville Dam?
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
I have an idea!
Why don't we put all the water back into the aquifers we've been taking it out of, instead of letting it out, and down to the pacific?
What a lamentable situation! If only someone could invent something to do that!
Oh. Wait. They did. In 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1992, though, was 25 years ago.
What a lamentable situation! If only a millennial could reinvent old technology in ignorance, thinking it was new, to do that!
3 Groups filed briefs as far back as 2005 requesting that California update the overflow spillway as part of the re certification process. The overflow was found not to meet standards and caused risk. California put 0 money into the issue and ignored it. But hey, we got more welfare and crony projects like the Bullet-CrazyTrain. http://abc7news.com/news/repor...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Most of the nations food can be easily grown in the midwest.
If you want tomatoes in January, you aren't going to get them from the Midwest. You also aren't going to get grapes, almonds, or a wide range of vegetables. You will get sweet corn in July and August, and nothing the other 10 months.
The #2 state for agriculture is Texas, #3 is Iowa. In dollar value, California produces more than both of those combined.
If the levee breaks and washes away the legislature in Sacramento is that carbon positive, neutral, or negative? What about the snail darter and silvery minnow?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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
Ah, the Ukrainian dumbass is back. Now he is too stupid to realise that a drought in one place doesn't mean a drought elsewhere. Let ke explain it so you can understand: Frankfurt am Main is on the roughly same latitude as Kharkov, but when they had -20 degrees Celsius and a shitload of snow, we had +8 and a drizzle, which is, by the way, not how a winter is supposed to be in Germany. It has been years since we had snow for longer than a couple of days. Last January I saw birds trying to find food for their chicks. In January. That is global warming, dumbass.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
When the Banqiao dam system failed in 1975, killing 230,000, the hydro lobby's excuse was that because Chinese dams were built to different design standards from the US, such an accident could never happen here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But this failure of a modern American design means that the hydro lobby has finally run out of excuses. No matter how up-to-date the design, no dam is walkaway safe. No large project can be built without the possibility of corner-cutting by some person at some time. Some of this country's largest dams are approaching 80 years of age, and there are no provisions for dealing with the costs of eventual decommissioning. And after all these years, nobody knows how to deal with the increasing amount of leftover silt.
Also, decay of plant material under hyrdo reseviors and active aquatic microbial digestion is a source of added methane emmissions. Studies show these emissions may be quite high.
No headlines make these emissions sound "quite high" relative to every other energy source they're in-line with solar and wind. They aren't perfect, but they aren't worse than fossil fuels by a factor of 10.
Actually all points against hydro you make are wrong: ...
A) the energy source with the most devestating loss of land is nuclear energy, due to open pit mining of uranium. Oh! That does not happen in your country but in another country far far away
B) woods and trees don't "sequester" CO2. They use it to grow, and release it again when they die and rot. It is a zero sum game.
C) while methan is released (and a given size of methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbondioxide) the methan is destroyed by UV rays and dimishes rather quickly ... in other words the livestock we breed increases the total amount of CH4 in the atmosphere, but it is not a growing effect, it is static. Every belch or poop they make is sooner or later disintegrated by UV radiation. Or to explain it in other words: putting CO2 into the atmosphere will increase the percentage of CO2 untill we stop doing it. Having simple CH4 sources like a random hydro plant (you kno wit does stop its ill habit after all the sunken green stuff has rotted, right?) or a certain amount of lifestock only increase the 'constant level' ... it basically is in an equilibrium of decay of 'old' CH4 and newly produced one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The point is that gov't spending is not necessarily the answer to all our problems. In fact -- it can be the cause of future problems.
We needed infrastructure spending eight year ago after the economy cratered. Republicans gave Obama the bum rush. Now Trump is proposing $1T in infrastructure projects and $20B for THE WALL at a time when the economy doesn't need government intervention. The same Republican leadership will probably rubberstamp his executive orders without a second thought about the national debt.
Hydro means water, I guess you know this. It is greek.
Your post would make much more sense if you would add the missing word you are talking about.
Obviously considring the context of the post, the parent etc. we know the missing word is 'power' ...
Just saying.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Every claim you just repeated by the State has been proven _False_ by other agencies who did not "fluff" numbers and use hyperbole to determine usage. To be cost effective the train will need to cost more money than an airline ticket and the overall commute time cuts small percentages off of driving. Usage of the train will be minimal, just like Amtrack who requires massive federal funds each year to operate.
Every penny of that train is deficit spending by the Government with minimal private investment because private companies see the investment as a loss. The ones who have invested are doing so banking on the loss.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Even reservoirs made for other purposes have the same impact. Not sure why you didn't catch on to that.
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.
No it is not weather, because:
A) it happens every year since decades, but 20 to 30 years go we had winters like you have, hint: latitude
B) the birds are supposed to have flown south, as they used to do when we had real winters
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh, and you are dead wrong on the your methane also, but nice attempt with the 'might'. its almost as if you dont know that normal land with mammals living on it also produce methane, and that lake bottoms are notoriously anaerobic..
You didn't even try to check, did you? Here is one source of many.
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
Scientists rarely use stock photos of any kind in their publications, so you're not responding, just insinuating and deflecting.
There's actually 2 things going on.
The existing spillway is made of concrete, and suffered some structural damage.
Here is an image of the damage, from a couple of days ago, and here is that same spillway today.
The lower half of the spillway is probably completely gone. The raging water might erode up to the level of the dam, but that's not likely.
The actual problem was the emergency spillway, which is an earthen bank to the left (looking up to the dam) of the regular spillway.
You can see the damage in this image. Note that one of the eroded canyons reaches almost up to the level of the water.
If the erosion had reached the emergency spillway it would have burst, releasing a whole lot of water downstream.
Here's a closeup, and note the middle lower portion of the image. We were that close to a breech.
That didn't happen, and the waters are now below emergency levels.
However, the situation is rather precarious and the emergency spillway could still burst. There's still a lot of water still coming in to the reservoir, which is being frantically lowered.
(And yes, I wrote "Hyperloop" when I meant "High Speed Rail" above.)
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.
This is not symmetrical — what you demand is that I prove a negative. It is equivalent to demanding from a man claiming to be single an affidavit from every woman, stating, she is not his wife.
There are plenty of patently failed predictions by Climate Scientists, but that does not prove, none have come true. All you need to prove me wrong is find a couple of successful ones. And yet, you can't...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In the 20+ years since "Global Warming" became "a thing", there should by now be plenty of successful predictions. If you can cite just 3, I'll concede, that the discipline is not entirely hopeless.
Both happened before — and I do offer citations.
Yeah, and asteroids are passing closer and closer more and more often — must be all of that bovine meteorism (pun intended).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Not sure why you're bringing up Trump in this discussion.
If you think this has something to do with Trump, you're just a partisan hack. The real question you should be asking is why California ignored this for decades(there were problems in the 1980's that were ignored). Why the state threw money at illegals and pet projects, then insuring their infrastructure was sound. And at the end of the day who's going to be responsible. I'll give you a hint: It won't be the feds or Trump. This is all directly on the hands of California, their in-action, and their mismanagement.
Om, nomnomnom...
Climate change predicts a lot of things such as more extreme weather events becoming more common.
The California drought is the worst that's happened in the state in the last 1000 years.
If anything, many of the predictions were overly conservative.
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that sea level would rise 2mm/year. It's actually rising 3.3mm/year. They predicted that the arctic ice sheet would melt in 50-70 years in 2006. It's now predicted to melt by 2052.
Here are some predictions that came true:
1. The sea level is rising in most places, though at the high end (or higher) than original predictions (3.2mm/year vs 2mm).
2. The sea level fell near Greenland as predicted due to the loss of mass and the gravitational pull of that mass.
3. Extreme weather events were predicted to become more common with climate change. This is happening as "about 25% of moderate daily hot extremes can be attributed to warming.".
4. The predicted radiative forcing effect from CO2 has been observationally confirmed.
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