The folks who live in the North don't want to have our rivers run dry and to be in unending drought because our water is going to Southern California, where they have made a lot of desert from what was historically marshland, and having made it a desert continue to try to farm it.
The government folks also had the design drawings and specifications. The main thing you get from a visual inspection is an answer to these two questions: Is it built as specified? Are there material failures?
We will probably eventually find out why it was inadequate. Today, we know it was inadequate but we don't know if it was underdesigned or if it was not built as specified.
Stand next to I-5 somewhere between Patterson and Castaic. Or just look at it on Google Maps satellite view. Those vehicles are going 70 MPH and there are more than enough to fill lots of trains, and we have Highway 99 and 101 as well. Plus all of the jets between Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose and LAX, Ontario Caliifornia, John Wayne Orange County, Bob Hope Burbank, Long Beach. Say a dozen per hour.
I don't think the cost is "ballooning out of control". It's much lower than a highway of similar capacity would cost. But there's lots of expensive land and construction on the right of way.
That's said with great certainty and absolutely no detail:-)
Something obviously made the main spillway fail. It should not have been insufficient design, it might have been execution.
Secondarily, it was always the case that if the emergency spillway was opened, it was going to wash down the hillside below it. That's why it was only an emergency spillway.
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.
It is indeed unusual when the highest dam in the United States fills up from near zero to overflowing within two months. That's not just a little rain shower.
It's really easy to say that from your easy chair. I've actually toured a good deal of Calfiornia's tremendous water system. It looks pretty well maintained.
Nobody knew that the spillway was structurally insufficient. Nor did anyone know that the Cypress Avenue overpass was going to fall.
I think you missed the joke. Our probable Trump fan thought that California was in the process of seceding - meaning leaving the United States. Which it isn't, at least not yet. But being a Trump fan, he hadn't ever learned the difference between secession and success!
I think we were close to undermining the weir on the emergency spillway, causing an uncontrolled release because the weir could not then be shut, but not a dam breach. To breach the dam, the concrete face of the dam has to fail, not just a piece of the berm behind it.
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.
Actually, if you compare it to automobiles and jet trips it is going to replace, and the fact that we won't have to add more lanes onto I-5 and more gates and runways onto our airports because of it, it reduces resource usage significantly.
Also, if you are trying to say we should spend the money on water storage, no thank you. We already have a problem that the Central Valley has been tremendously overfarmed, and throwing water storage at that problem isn't going to solve it. That was marshland before the farmers came, and the loss of that hydrological buffer made our water problems much worse.
I was at this reservoir less than a year ago, and it was nearly empty. It filled to the brim in two months. This probably corresponds to a 400-year flood (one not expected to occur more than once in 400 years) if anyone even thought about such a thing happening.
Although there was a filing by a number of ecological groups (one of which I used to volunteer for extensively), those groups did not know that there was a structural problem in the dam spillway. The state was very definitely not warned about that by those groups or anyone else. The groups felt that the spillway capacity could be overrun. That has not happened. The spillway failed due to a construction issue. Had it not failed, its capacity would have been adequate.
California hasn't spent on the hyperloop. Caliifornia has spent on a high-speed rail, which it desperately needs dispite the whining of farmers who wish the public to build yet more free water storage for them so that they can continue to farm what they have already made into a desert.
California's central valley was swampland before the farmers came. The removal of that hydrological buffer makes the long droughts that we suffer much worse.
When it says "low earth orbit" you can assume that it will not contribute to space junk. Low earth orbits intersect the thin edge of the atmosphere and they thus degrade on their own due to atmospheric drag. Higher orbits are the problem ones.
Whether it is aldehyde-rich foods like cheap-oil deep-fried foods, or high fructose diets shitting on blood sugar balance, or a simple lack of INFECTION in our foods, which our immune system depends on to function properly.
Well, let's consider where these things were in our diets before industry. Aldehydes are the basis of many plant fragrances which plants use to manipulate animals (and us) because scents can attract, repel, give pleasure, and have more subtle manipulative effects. Fructose is the only type of sugar in fruit. Plants have their own evolutionary "agenda" and most have evolved poisons, for example gluten is in grain because the seeds that sickened rodents with it survived without as many being eaten and thus had an evolutionary advantage. Plants are not intrinsically healthy for us and we are in a continual evolutionary war with them as they develop new poisons and we develop ways to cope with them. This is not to say that we do not eat too much fructose, we probably do, but it is no new thing to be blamed on industry. But you are ignoring the main reason that we have ill health as a population: because we live to unnaturally advanced ages. Your body was simply not designed to live this long and you would naturally have succumbed to injury or infection by around the age of 30.
Then we get to "lack of infection in our foods". This one seems entirely from left field, we have no shortage of immune challenges. Clean food is very far from so clean that it eliminates them.
The solar system on my RV runs the 'fridge, so we cool our food "next to" solar panels. We heat it with clean natural gas, which warms every bit as much as we'd like it to warm, and doesn't smell, period.
It's definitely over-stating to say the solar companies are "mostly failed". Solyndra failed. It was an investment in US semiconductor manufacturing, so having it fail is a shame, but some portion of investments will fail.
And unfortunately there isn't any clean coal. Unpleasant facts don't go away just because you choose not to believe them.
The New Mexico Spaceport facility of SpaceX was never activated. SpaceX retired the Grasshopper at McGregor and they never started the F9-Reusable phase 2 flight tests, since the final tests of that were done with customer boosters after their missions. SpaceX is doing all of the engine tests of Falcon 9 boosters at McGregor. But they are not allowed to free-fly at McGregor any longer (local parents got upset when they had to destruct the last F9R - their school is only 3 miles away). So, when the time comes to test the Dragon 2 propelled landing or the huge Mars rocket, that site may be activated. There is also some potential that they can run these tests out of Boca Chica and over water.
ULA has a great record of not recently blowing up rockets that have a 1960's heritage, at three times the cost of SpaceX. But their main effort has been to drive costs up rather than down.
Not considering fixed costs. The costs of all of the things other than the rocket itself that go into making the rocket, flying the mission, and recovering the rocket. It will only be possible to amortize these costs if the launch volume is sufficient. This is why SpaceX must now approach a cadence of 2/month and that eventually gets higher.
At this point someone who once took economics will ask if the market for launches is elastic. In other words, "if SpaceX builds it faster, will customers come faster?" Probably yes. Getting away from 15-year satellite lifetimes is the first thing we'll see. A 5-year satellite replacement cycle will be much more practical. Think about having to use a laptop from the year 2002, and you'll understand. And additional market changes follow that one.
Actually, the current design issue is not known to limit reuse, however there is a "block 5" design which is being done to incorporate what they have learned about reuse and SpaceX is not interested in learning the block 4 reusable lifetime with block 5 starting to come out. Musk claims this is the last F9 redesign, which is waaaaay optimistic considering that they've not flown crewed missions yet and they are bound to run into some qualification issues before the first crewed mission and as experience is gained.
There is always going to be some sort of problem with a design. The current issue is cracks in the turbopump impeller and housing. The cracks do not grow large enough to cause the part to break, and the engine is designed to be robust to turbopump cracks - it keeps working. However, NASA has requested a redesign that doesn't crack for crewed use, and SpaceX will provide that.
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The folks who live in the North don't want to have our rivers run dry and to be in unending drought because our water is going to Southern California, where they have made a lot of desert from what was historically marshland, and having made it a desert continue to try to farm it.
You have to be here and actually look to know just how much of that stuff we have.
The government folks also had the design drawings and specifications. The main thing you get from a visual inspection is an answer to these two questions: Is it built as specified? Are there material failures?
We will probably eventually find out why it was inadequate. Today, we know it was inadequate but we don't know if it was underdesigned or if it was not built as specified.
Stand next to I-5 somewhere between Patterson and Castaic. Or just look at it on Google Maps satellite view. Those vehicles are going 70 MPH and there are more than enough to fill lots of trains, and we have Highway 99 and 101 as well. Plus all of the jets between Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose and LAX, Ontario Caliifornia, John Wayne Orange County, Bob Hope Burbank, Long Beach. Say a dozen per hour.
I don't think the cost is "ballooning out of control". It's much lower than a highway of similar capacity would cost. But there's lots of expensive land and construction on the right of way.
That's said with great certainty and absolutely no detail :-)
Something obviously made the main spillway fail. It should not have been insufficient design, it might have been execution.
Secondarily, it was always the case that if the emergency spillway was opened, it was going to wash down the hillside below it. That's why it was only an emergency spillway.
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.
It is indeed unusual when the highest dam in the United States fills up from near zero to overflowing within two months. That's not just a little rain shower.
It's really easy to say that from your easy chair. I've actually toured a good deal of Calfiornia's tremendous water system. It looks pretty well maintained.
Nobody knew that the spillway was structurally insufficient. Nor did anyone know that the Cypress Avenue overpass was going to fall.
I think you missed the joke. Our probable Trump fan thought that California was in the process of seceding - meaning leaving the United States. Which it isn't, at least not yet. But being a Trump fan, he hadn't ever learned the difference between secession and success!
I think we were close to undermining the weir on the emergency spillway, causing an uncontrolled release because the weir could not then be shut, but not a dam breach. To breach the dam, the concrete face of the dam has to fail, not just a piece of the berm behind it.
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.
Actually, if you compare it to automobiles and jet trips it is going to replace, and the fact that we won't have to add more lanes onto I-5 and more gates and runways onto our airports because of it, it reduces resource usage significantly.
Also, if you are trying to say we should spend the money on water storage, no thank you. We already have a problem that the Central Valley has been tremendously overfarmed, and throwing water storage at that problem isn't going to solve it. That was marshland before the farmers came, and the loss of that hydrological buffer made our water problems much worse.
California is indeed very successful!
I was at this reservoir less than a year ago, and it was nearly empty. It filled to the brim in two months. This probably corresponds to a 400-year flood (one not expected to occur more than once in 400 years) if anyone even thought about such a thing happening.
Although there was a filing by a number of ecological groups (one of which I used to volunteer for extensively), those groups did not know that there was a structural problem in the dam spillway. The state was very definitely not warned about that by those groups or anyone else. The groups felt that the spillway capacity could be overrun. That has not happened. The spillway failed due to a construction issue. Had it not failed, its capacity would have been adequate.
California hasn't spent on the hyperloop. Caliifornia has spent on a high-speed rail, which it desperately needs dispite the whining of farmers who wish the public to build yet more free water storage for them so that they can continue to farm what they have already made into a desert.
California's central valley was swampland before the farmers came. The removal of that hydrological buffer makes the long droughts that we suffer much worse.
When it says "low earth orbit" you can assume that it will not contribute to space junk. Low earth orbits intersect the thin edge of the atmosphere and they thus degrade on their own due to atmospheric drag. Higher orbits are the problem ones.
Well, let's consider where these things were in our diets before industry. Aldehydes are the basis of many plant fragrances which plants use to manipulate animals (and us) because scents can attract, repel, give pleasure, and have more subtle manipulative effects. Fructose is the only type of sugar in fruit. Plants have their own evolutionary "agenda" and most have evolved poisons, for example gluten is in grain because the seeds that sickened rodents with it survived without as many being eaten and thus had an evolutionary advantage. Plants are not intrinsically healthy for us and we are in a continual evolutionary war with them as they develop new poisons and we develop ways to cope with them. This is not to say that we do not eat too much fructose, we probably do, but it is no new thing to be blamed on industry. But you are ignoring the main reason that we have ill health as a population: because we live to unnaturally advanced ages. Your body was simply not designed to live this long and you would naturally have succumbed to injury or infection by around the age of 30.
Then we get to "lack of infection in our foods". This one seems entirely from left field, we have no shortage of immune challenges. Clean food is very far from so clean that it eliminates them.
You can make a whole universe, and it fits just fine until inflation.
The solar system on my RV runs the 'fridge, so we cool our food "next to" solar panels. We heat it with clean natural gas, which warms every bit as much as we'd like it to warm, and doesn't smell, period.
It's definitely over-stating to say the solar companies are "mostly failed". Solyndra failed. It was an investment in US semiconductor manufacturing, so having it fail is a shame, but some portion of investments will fail.
And unfortunately there isn't any clean coal. Unpleasant facts don't go away just because you choose not to believe them.
The New Mexico Spaceport facility of SpaceX was never activated. SpaceX retired the Grasshopper at McGregor and they never started the F9-Reusable phase 2 flight tests, since the final tests of that were done with customer boosters after their missions. SpaceX is doing all of the engine tests of Falcon 9 boosters at McGregor. But they are not allowed to free-fly at McGregor any longer (local parents got upset when they had to destruct the last F9R - their school is only 3 miles away). So, when the time comes to test the Dragon 2 propelled landing or the huge Mars rocket, that site may be activated. There is also some potential that they can run these tests out of Boca Chica and over water.
There used to be active users with three-digit UIDs.
ULA has a great record of not recently blowing up rockets that have a 1960's heritage, at three times the cost of SpaceX. But their main effort has been to drive costs up rather than down.
Not Las Cruces, Boca Chica, Texas.
Not considering fixed costs. The costs of all of the things other than the rocket itself that go into making the rocket, flying the mission, and recovering the rocket. It will only be possible to amortize these costs if the launch volume is sufficient. This is why SpaceX must now approach a cadence of 2/month and that eventually gets higher.
At this point someone who once took economics will ask if the market for launches is elastic. In other words, "if SpaceX builds it faster, will customers come faster?" Probably yes. Getting away from 15-year satellite lifetimes is the first thing we'll see. A 5-year satellite replacement cycle will be much more practical. Think about having to use a laptop from the year 2002, and you'll understand. And additional market changes follow that one.
Actually, the current design issue is not known to limit reuse, however there is a "block 5" design which is being done to incorporate what they have learned about reuse and SpaceX is not interested in learning the block 4 reusable lifetime with block 5 starting to come out. Musk claims this is the last F9 redesign, which is waaaaay optimistic considering that they've not flown crewed missions yet and they are bound to run into some qualification issues before the first crewed mission and as experience is gained.
There is always going to be some sort of problem with a design. The current issue is cracks in the turbopump impeller and housing. The cracks do not grow large enough to cause the part to break, and the engine is designed to be robust to turbopump cracks - it keeps working. However, NASA has requested a redesign that doesn't crack for crewed use, and SpaceX will provide that.