CA - ‘Uncharted territory’ as Lake Oroville rises toward damaged dam

[CARIIS]

Today, all water outlets from Oroville Dam are damaged or inoperable – reducing downstream flood safety for the first time since the dam was completed in 1968.Lake Oroville’s spillway conditions will remain a nail-biter for operators, officials and downstream residents for the remaining months of this wet season and perhaps through spring snowmelt.

California’s flood systems are enormous, elaborate and, so far, mostly functioning well in this extraordinary wet year (Oroville being the big exception). With so much rain and snow, the wettest on record so far, some flooding will happen and some levees and other flood infrastructure will break or be damaged...........

[FONT=&amp]Size matters. Recent flows at for Oroville spillway are 50,000 cfs (cubic feet per second), a modest flood flow. This flow is equivalent to about 200,000 basketballs of volume or [/FONT][FONT=&amp]3.1[/FONT][FONT=&amp] million pounds of water per second. Few structures can resist such assaults for long,

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Complete reports from experts and frank discussion of dam risks, objectives, maintenance and updates are vital for effective long-term flood protection

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]The northern California town of [/FONT][video=youtube;yssSL8iVWhk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yssSL8iVWhk[/video][FONT=&amp] flooded and I-5 partially shut down. Last week, [/FONT]parts of San Jose[FONT=&amp]’s Coyote Creek flooded homes and forced evacuation of 14,000 people. These are sizable local disasters.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]sizable costs to cities, counties and state-wide. Local governments pay most of these costs through utility fees and tax revenues. Tallying such local costs is often neglected, but these costs add up substantially across the state.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]160,000 cfs (five thousand tons of water per second WOW!

[/FONT]Major reservoirs[FONT=&amp] have little empty storage.

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[/FONT]https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/community/2017/03/02/what-weve-learned-from-californias-2017-floods-so-far[FONT=&amp]






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[SophieRose]

Maxwell, seen flooded In the above video, is about 10 miles west of the site of the next proposed California reservoir, Sites Dam.

 

[SophieRose]

Article from 2014
http://www.livescience.com/49225-atmospheric-rivers-double-climate-change.html

California's atmospheric rivers are every bit as big as land-falling hurricanes," Dettinger said.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of water vapor that travel through the sky a mile above the ocean (1 to 2 kilometers). When the moisture-laden air runs into California's mountains, the air cools and water drops out as rain or snow. The rivers average about 250 miles (400 km) wide and can be from 1,240 to 6,000 miles (2,000 to 10,000 km) long. Not just California reaps the rainfall benefits: 90 percent of atmospheric water vapor transported outside the tropics moves through these narrow bands, from England to Antarctica.

Because California relies on atmospheric rivers for 30 to 50 percent of its yearly rain and snow (depending on the region), any change in the frequency or intensity of the huge flows can have a major impact on the state. In fact, the ongoing drought in California is partly due to a high-pressure ridge offshore of the West Coast, which diverted incoming storms and atmospheric rivers, according to weather experts. On the flip side, more than 80 percent of Northern California's floods are linked to atmospheric rivers, Dettinger said.

 

[SophieRose]

CARIIS may have already posted this link. Good for weather, also before and after picture of Oroville Dam from early Feb and late Feb.

https://twitter.com/NWSSacramento?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

 

[SophieRose]

https://phys.org/news/2016-03-atmospheric-river-storms-sierra.html

Only 17 percent of West Coast storms are caused by atmospheric rivers, but those storms provide 30 to 50 percent of California's precipitation and 40 percent of Sierra snowpack, on average. They have also been blamed for more than 80 percent of the state's major floods.

snip

The researchers also quantified the difference between atmospheric river storms that cause rain-on-snow and those that do not, using data from NASA's Atmospheric infrared Sounder, or AIRS, instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite. The rain-on-snow-producing atmospheric river storms were, on average, 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the others.

"That small difference in temperature often determines whether we gain snow or lose snow from a storm," said Guan.

 

[CARIIS]

CARIIS may have already posted this link. Good for weather, also before and after picture of Oroville Dam from early Feb and late Feb.

https://twitter.com/NWSSacramento?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

From your link -- I was under the (wrong!) impression that weather that was coming up was not going really much:

 

[CARIIS]

Since this seems to be the only place where news is news, am I the only one that thinks the snowmelt is going to dwarf what just occurred?

FL: We don't do dams, snow heights, snow melts (snow anything ha!) so I don't really know what it is like and or what happens.

I have a few very simple basics:

Snow is cold water!

When sun and snow say hello snow becomes water!

When snow on top of other snow starts melting the other snow joins in the fun!

Snow is not fond of delightfully tropical 70 degree air!

It is my understanding that when snow is greeted by this air it melts! And turns into ......................water!

Water goes down!

Down is where this entire mess is happening.

For me, when I read that there are 22 feet of snow atop 256 miles of mountains surrounding the abovementioned valley, I see tidal waves?

Am I missing something? What they want novices like me to believe that it is just strolling gently down all these mountains?

Into completely stressed structures? Very bad things happen to aircraft when structures have been stressed!!

Something ain't adding up here .

It strikes me as this amazing collection of equipment and activity (described as being needed for Oct of next year) I scream liars!

I think they know darn well that very risky days are ahead for the next two months

Am I reading this wrong??

 

[CARIIS]

[h=1]Power plant back in operation[/h]
Crews have restarted the critical hydroelectric plant at Oroville Dam, a move that could mean operators don’t have to activate the dam’s badly damaged main spillway even as a winter storm bears down this weekend.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html#storylink=cpy



One of six turbines at the Hyatt Power Plant was operational as of 10 a.m. Friday. The turbine’s outlet allows for 1,750 cubic feet of water per second to exit Lake Oroville, California’s second-largest reservoir.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html#storylink=cpy





One of six turbines at the Hyatt Power Plant was operational as of 10 a.m. Friday. The turbine’s outlet allows for 1,750 cubic feet of water per second to exit Lake Oroville, California’s second-largest reservoir.

by day’s end, 3,000 cfs could be released. That won’t be enough to match the amount of runoff washing into the reservoir from the Sierra Nevada watershed, but Croyle said the state will work to restart four more turbines in the next few days. That would allow the plant to ramp up to its release capacity of 14,500 cfs, enough to largely counter anticipated inflows from the weekend storm.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html#storylink=cpy



Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html#storylink=cpy
The water level in Lake Oroville may rise a few feet from the storm runoff, Croyle said, but it is not expected to climb high enough to be of concern, especially with a period of dry weather likely to follow. The extended dry spell forecast should allow sufficient time to draw lake levels down again using just the hydroelectric plant,

http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html

http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html#storylink=cpy



http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article136267538.html

 

[CARIIS]

also was a seismic angle to the story. As Lake Oroville swung from being at 41% of capacity to 101% in just two months, scientists are asking whether the filling of the reservoir at the fastest rate in at least a generation can produce a damaging earthquake.

There is other well-established evidence for reservoir-caused earthquakes


two microearthquakes were detected last month soon after Lake Oroville began rushing over its emergency spillway.
About a day and a half after officials ordered mass evacuations of more than 100,000 people downstream of Oroville Dam — fearing the collapse of a hillside eroded by the overflowing lake — two tiny temblors were recorded. They struck in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, just before 3 a.m.: a magnitude 0.8, and then a 1.0.

What made the winter of 1974-75 unusual was that water levels had to be reduced to their lowest level since the reservoir was first filled to repair intakes to the hydroelectric power plant.
Months later, there was an unprecedented refilling of the lake that ended in June 1975.
Then the earthquakes started.
Instead of fewer than five earthquakes a month in a zone within 25 miles from the dam, as had been the case for the previous year, June and July suddenly saw more than 10 earthquakes each month.

largest earthquake in the sequence hit: a magnitude 5.7 on Aug. 1, 1975.

That August became a banner month for earthquakes around Oroville Dam — more than 3,000 temblors were recorded, before fading to more than 700 a month later and over 100 by October.

similar to a well-established example of a human-triggered quake seen after the construction of the Koyna Dam in western India in 1962.




Last year, it took five months to fill Lake Oroville; this winter, it took only two months.rapid filling or emptying of a lake can change the weight pushing on a fault, which can make an earthquake more likely, rapid filling, I just think it increases the risk.

Water trickling deep into the earth can increase pressure underground that makes it easier for faults to move,
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-oroville-earthquake-20170302-story.html

ftp://ftp.consrv.ca.gov/pub/dmg/pubs/cg/1982/35_06.pdf

https://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/resDetailOrig.action?resid=ORO

 

[SophieRose]

I don't think this coming storm is an atmospheric river storm but there may be more to come later.

http://www.sierrasun.com/news/lake-tahoe-weather-after-650-inches-of-snow-more-is-coming/

“We are looking for a storm to come in around Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon. It’s a pretty decent cold storm. We are expecting 1 to 2 feet of snow above 7,000 feet with potentially up to 10 to 18 inches below that,” said Zach Tolby, forecaster with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Reno.

According to NWS, a winter storm warning will be in effect for the entire region from 4 p.m. Saturday to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Temperatures on Saturday will range from 27 to 42 degrees, and drop further on Sunday to between 16 and 32 degrees.

snip

“Those really moist, subtropical storms that we’ve been getting a lot of this year,” said Tolby. “There are some pretty good indications that going into 10 days out we could go into a fairly wet pattern with some atmospheric river storms moving into the area.”

 

[CARIIS]

I don't think this coming storm is an atmospheric river storm but there may be more to come later.

http://www.sierrasun.com/news/lake-tahoe-weather-after-650-inches-of-snow-more-is-coming/

“We are looking for a storm to come in around Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon. It’s a pretty decent cold storm. We are expecting 1 to 2 feet of snow above 7,000 feet with potentially up to 10 to 18 inches below that,” said Zach Tolby, forecaster with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Reno.

According to NWS, a winter storm warning will be in effect for the entire region from 4 p.m. Saturday to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Temperatures on Saturday will range from 27 to 42 degrees, and drop further on Sunday to between 16 and 32 degrees.

snip

“Those really moist, subtropical storms that we’ve been getting a lot of this year,” said Tolby. “There are some pretty good indications that going into 10 days out we could go into a fairly wet pattern with some atmospheric river storms moving into the area.”

10 to 18 inches below that,-- it seems like he is talking about that like its no big deal ??

Is 10-18 like an ok amount?

 

[SophieRose]

I want a drone.
Road in Los Gatos in the Santa Cruz Mountains
[video=youtube;jhLYaCOiK1M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhLYaCOiK1M[/video]

 

[SophieRose]

Lots of photos of damage in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lots of landslides with roads gone.
http://imgur.com/a/auE6M?grid

 

[SophieRose]

This is the Yuba River after Jan storms, then at the end it shows what it looked like at the end of Dec. Amazing.

[video=youtube;AsXMIBHxPLY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsXMIBHxPLY[/video]

 

[SophieRose]

Two guys kayaking after the first Feb flood. It starts to get scary about 1:25. Whitewater rafting season begins in April. Someone was telling me that some of the young guides won't have experience with high water because of the long California drought.

[video=youtube;U6hDfMQCT4k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6hDfMQCT4k[/video]

 

[CARIIS]

This is the Yuba River after Jan storms, then at the end it shows what it looked like at the end of Dec. Amazing.

[video=youtube;AsXMIBHxPLY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsXMIBHxPLY[/video]

It unreal !

 

[CARIIS]

There at 2500 out and 26000 in

 

[SophieRose]

[video=youtube;-5d_DI_v0rc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5d_DI_v0rc[/video]

 

[CARIIS]

Breaking now

Hi Sophie -

March 4, 2017:

“The damage is catastrophic,

Riverbanks collapse after Oroville Dam spillway shut off [FONT=&amp]5:39 AM[/FONT]


saw 25-foot bluffs collapse, but also lost irrigation lines to his almonds. “When the bank pulled in,” he said, “it pulled the pumps in with it. It busted the steel pipes.”

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Riverbanks-collapse-after-Oroville-Dam-spillway-10976144.php

 

[CARIIS]

I emailed Shan he will probably go out there later (I hope) so we can see what is not being reported, again.