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

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  • #41
My guy came through!

[video=youtube;q2YHGR3kVLk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2YHGR3kVLk[/video]
Published on Feb 12, 2017
The aerial view: California on the brink of disaster from too much water and a dangerous, poorly managed mega-dam!
 
  • #42
watcher9 said:
Watching the live stream.
Since they waited so long, now everyone is having to get out all at once and they are traffic jammed. Good planning??

Adding live link.
http://www.kcra.com/nowcast
Click to expand...

Thank for for the link. Oh, my. Did you see that double line of traffic heading North? How dreadful for these people. How many are under evacuation?

That much water carries a lot of power with it. Wish there was a way to save it since CA weather is often so droughtful. Wow! The white water rushing over the edge looks like Niagra Falls. This is serious.

Let us pray this is not going to be a catastrophic event.
 
  • #43
My god there is a ton of standing water all over the place
 
  • #44
DeDee said:
Thank for for the link. Oh, my. Did you see that double line of traffic heading North? How dreadful for these people. How many are under evacuation?

That much water carries a lot of power with it. Wish there was a way to save it since CA weather is often so droughtful. Wow! The white water rushing over the edge looks like Niagra Falls. This is serious.

Let us pray this is not going to be a catastrophic event.
Click to expand...

Yes,

Watchers link is awesome AND scary- it is mind numbing- does anyone know if all that standing water all over the place is from this or is that from the rain last week?

Seeing how much there is is truly chilling - I thought it was like the raging rapids but there is water all over the place for miles from the helicopter-
 
  • #45
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  • #49
http://fox40.com/2017/02/12/water-no-longer-flowing-over-oroville-dam-auxiliary-spillway/

Officials said late Sunday that water is no longer flowing over the Oroville Dam auxiliary spillway.

Engineers with the Department of Water Resources will be at the dam Monday morning to assess whether their strategy of increasing water flows on the spillway worked.

It is their goal to get more water out of Lake Oroville before more storms move in. The area is expected to get rain on Wednesday or Thursday. They are continuing to release water down the spillway at a rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second.
 
  • #50
Highlights of presser

They want it down 50 feet by wed. Sounds unreal apparently that is really not that big a deal . BUT the damage to the spillway has made this a problem

The spillway is to damaged to do the throw the rocks (40 foot deep hole in the spillway)


[FONT=&quot]The erosion at the head of the emergency spillway threatens to undermine the concrete weir [/FONT]SUnrise tomm will be a great day or ominious. They have been unable to ascertain anything about emergency spillway erossion. This is a very big deal according to him!

It does seem like the media got some stuff mixed up. The degree of erosion on the emergency deal if severe could lead to that whole thing falling over. Not the dam- the emergency.

Its 30 feet wide.

If the spillway can hold on at 100,000 they can drop about 6 inches an hour.

They may have to cut the spill off for a bit to just check out how it looks.

But in some ways they are somewhat trapped - storms are coming and there priority is to get down 50 feet so that the storms can do there thing.

It has been colder which has helped with snow runoff and the inflow is down to 5000 compared to 50000 (not typos!) since yesterday at noon.

I am somewhat surprised that there has not been more talk about Wed in terms of what they expect the inflows to rise to.

The dude that was the water guy was really good, he explained stuff to me at a level I could follow!!

The 50 foot drop can be handled with all the streams etc downhilll

They did talk about upping the spillway to 150 but it sounded kinda like a fantasy until daylight.

It is accurate that the water is not going over the emergency thing any longer.

One interesting thing is there is a large parking lot right next to the emergency thing. It flooded, and evidently, that was NOT suppose to happen. Peroid. So that concerned them a lot as it relates to the severity of the possible erosion under the emergency deal.

Lunesta down the hatch and lets hope sunlight illuminates a tiny, little, small, minuscule, itty bitty little hole at the bottom of the emergency overflow!
 
  • #51
remarkably strong multi-model agreement that a wet (and perhaps very wet) pattern will resume across California, and this time the entire state from San Diego to Eureka will probably get soaked. Yet another impressive eastward extension of the Pacific jet stream will probably bring the storm track right to our doorstep in that timeframe, and at this very early juncture it looks like there could be the potential for strong wind events in addition to heavy rainfall events. That would most likely raise the spectre of significant flood concerns once again.

http://weatherwest.com/archives/5564
 
  • #52
We just can't seem to catch a break with the rain here in CA. It's either drought or flood. Feast or famine. I love my beautiful state and wouldn't live anywhere else. Prayers for all those in harms way. I hope they will evacuate to safety!

Reminds me of the song.......It never rains in California, but girl don't they warn ya....It pours....man it pours! (Albert Hammond)
 
  • #53
A flyover of Lake Oroville in 2015, reservoir 31% full. We were then hoping for an El Nino 2015-2016 rain season. In previous El Nino's, the rain came to California and left Washington and Oregon dry. Didn't happen that season, Washington and Oregon go the rain, well we got a little more than 2014-15. But La Nina and pineapple express storms have finally brought the rains to California.

[video=youtube;pRGngSVnzuM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRGngSVnzuM[/video]
 
  • #54
  • #55
YIKES----190, 000 people have been evacuated from Oroville/Yuba City/Marysville.
 
  • #56
watcher9 said:
Watching the live stream.
Since they waited so long, now everyone is having to get out all at once and they are traffic jammed. Good planning??

Adding live link.
http://www.kcra.com/nowcast
Click to expand...

Seems like it wasn't just bad planning...it was no planning at all based on the quote in one of the posts above.

I don't understand the reluctance of government officials to urge precautions instead of waiting til near disaster. What would be the harm in saying a few days ago "If you are able to leave the area for a few days, we recommend that you do so now, but at this time we are not requiring evacuation. However, now would be the time to pack some belongings, make sure you have vital documents available, gather up medications and pet supplies, and be prepared in case we do have to order an evacuation."
 
  • #57
MzOpinion8d said:
Seems like it wasn't just bad planning...it was no planning at all based on the quote in one of the posts above.

I don't understand the reluctance of government officials to urge precautions instead of waiting til near disaster. What would be the harm in saying a few days ago "If you are able to leave the area for a few days, we recommend that you do so now, but at this time we are not requiring evacuation. However, now would be the time to pack some belongings, make sure you have vital documents available, gather up medications and pet supplies, and be prepared in case we do have to order an evacuation."
Click to expand...

Evacuating hundreds of thousands of people for several days (actually it would have been more than several days, probably a week) is a very big deal. That type of thing is not usually done, unless a disaster is imminent. Not only is it expensive for the local government, but it's a great financial hardship for those who are being evacuated. Most of them will have to pay money for gas and hotels, as well as being out of work, until this gets resolved. Which might be sometime.

I don't really see how they could have handled the evacuation any better. Now how they handled the situation with the dam is another matter.
 
  • #58
Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago

More than a decade ago, federal and state officials and some of California’s largest water agencies rejected concerns that the massive earthen spillway at Oroville Dam — at risk of collapse Sunday night and prompting the evacuation of 185,000 people — could erode during heavy winter rains and cause a catastrophe.

The groups filed the motion with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They said that the dam, built and owned by the state of California, and finished in 1968, did not meet modern safety standards because in the event of extreme rain and flooding, fast-rising water would overwhelm the main concrete spillway, then flow down the emergency spillway, and that could cause heavy erosion that would create flooding for communities downstream, but also could cause a failure, known as “loss of crest control.”

“A loss of crest control could not only cause additional damage to project lands and facilities but also cause damages and threaten lives in the protected floodplain downstream,” the groups wrote.
FERC rejected that request, however, after the state Department of Water Resources, and the water agencies that would likely have had to pay the bill for the upgrades, said they were unnecessary.
Click to expand...

Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago
 
  • #59
Seeing on the news, (fox) that now some are complaining about being evacuated, damned if you do damned if you don't. jmo
 
  • #60
A ramble follows !!!!!

What I have learned in the past couple days is that I was looking at numbers in a "static" manner.

Pardon the pun but this is a super fluid process, because it takes days and days for the water from miles around to arrive.

Its actually identical to an airport! Arrivals (run off) and departures (spillway!)!

Over a four hour period last night it from 40,000 arrivals -to 5200 arrivals.

Because of the spillway damage and fear of stressing it they, at this point in time , are pretty well stuck at 99,000 departures.

Everything went coo coo when they had to turn off the spillway to check out what was going on - so during that timeframe there were no departures!

Mu understanding from the top dog last night is daylight is gonna tell the prognosis. I have the local live on in the background and they are doing a public disservice (again)

No it is not me being a drama queen. They are babbling about how awesome everything is now. Nothing has changed in terms of criticality of the situation until daylight and analysis of how much erosion actually happened to the emergency deal. At this second they know nothing.

 They have to get in there and run all sorts of calculations.

All the news people are using the departures rate as a given. It is nothing predictable at all. That is the whole deal.

They are pushing the damaged spillway cause they had no choice. So the real deal is can the damaged spillway stay at 90000 pressures ? They don't know.

Another fascinating thing is that air temperature fits into this in a big way. It influences snow melt rates in the mountains all around the tributaries that enter the resvoirs!

That has all sorts of variations also. Temps are different on a mountain at 3000 feet compared to 9000.

And.................how hard it rains is a big deal too. A real hard rain on the mountains melts more snow on the mountains compared to a light rain!

It then gets more complicated! Runoff from snowmelt on its way down melts the snow it is going over on the way down!

Ignore media jumping up and down! The world will know once they update and analyze the degree of erosion around the emergency.

A fantasy would be if they could kill the spillway for a bit to determine if they can be releasing more than 90000 - but I think (I don't know) they can't risk that at this point


It has never ever been about the dam itself- ever.

[FONT=&amp]“the integrity of the dam is not impacted” by the damaged spillway [/FONT][FONT=&amp]Water Resources director Bill Croyle told reporters

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]feared the damaged spillway could unleash a 30-foot.....

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]would be re-evaluated at dawn.

[/FONT]State officials are waiting for the light of dawn to inspect an erosion scar on the potentially hazardous emergency spillway at northern California's Oroville Dam.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article132338599.html#storylink=cpy
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT]http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/crews-work-to-seal-california-spillway-that-forced-evacuations/[FONT=&amp]

[/FONT]
 
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