Thoughts for some of Northern Cali, Oroville Dam is in trouble and they are evacuating people (1 Viewer)

[12thMan]

So I've been watching this for about five days on Youtube now, not much coverage in the rest of the media.

Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the country and it's made of dirt. Last Tuesday (I think?) a giant hole developed in the spillway for the dam, they stopped water flow and tried to decide what to do, the problem is the lake is very full, they've had very rainy weather, and the snow pack is exceptionally high (record level I think?) so they had no choice but to start the spillway up again and, well, the thousands upon thousands of cubic feet of water rushing down the spill way every second is taking its toll on the earth around it. They haven't been able to take enough water out of the lake and the lake breached the emergency spill way, which is just a wall that the water is rushing over and runs down the dirt hill. An insane amount of erosion has happened, as you might expect with such a situation, and things aren't looking good.

It has gone from tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist/biblical prophecy channels saying it's going to fail and cause a major catastrophe, while all officials have said there is nothing to worry about, to a major problem.

Earlier this afternoon there was a statement released or press conference given where they said the emergency spillway was in no danger, to now saying a collapse is imminent in the next hour and they are now evacuating five or six cities down stream: Oroville and cities below it plus Marysvile and Yorba counties are being evacuated.

That's a lot of people to get out of the way, not to mention the amount of livestock and property that will have to be left behind.

Good luck to all and let's all hope it doesn't get as bad as some are predicting, a lot of people are having a crazy Sunday night right now.



This is the channel that has had some of the best vids of the spillways over the last week, his last upload is showing gridlock in downtown Oroville as everybody is trying to leave. Look at his uploads and watch the progression of the erosion on that hill side where the water is coming over the spillway. Insane.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ0KU-mTVCvaDwcQxIBPybQ

By the way, searching youtube will show you lots of videos over the last week of this, a lot are tied in with some pretty out there channels but plenty of onsite and air footage... Except from today. The FAA set up a no fly zone over the entire area so no new aerial stuff has came out as far as I can see, but check out the videos from the above channel uploaded today, the scope of the erosion is shocking,

 

[bivey]

Thanks Trav.

 

[Mental Nomad]

I'm definitely pulling for the people of under Lake Oroville and hope they'll all be OK, the conspiracy talk doesn't jibe...

I see a lot in the media about it, especially from places like the Sacramento Bee and the LA Times.

The Bee showed drone footage shot during the day.

According to the Oroville Press Conference an hour ago (you can watch the video on the LA Times page), the overflow has come down as the lake has come back down towards capacity (it was overfull), and the rate of erosion has slowed. They're helicoptering bags of rock into the are to reduce further erosion.

It's still good to evacuate as a precautionary... if the auxiliary spillway goes, the downstream rivers can be expected to flood and levees aren't designed to handle a catastrophic failure. Also, if they don't manage to repair the area now... well, there's rain expected on Thursday. It's better for people to make the alternative plans - better safe than sorry.

 

[Mental Nomad]

I hate that this is happening - infrastructure across the country has been neglected for too long; one problem leads to another, and when things are stretched to the breaking point... they can break.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4grYhlWYAE4Xzm.jpg:large

If this happens, it'll fairly rapidly release up to 30 feet of water level off the top of the lake.

 

[Mental Nomad]

Flooding levels downstream in the Feather River are expected to go critical by 5pm PT, Monday.

https://twitter.com/NWSSacramento

 

[12thMan]

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not advocating a conspiracy or anything, I was just pointing out the channels that were saying last week the whole dam was going to collapse are the same ones saying every fish die off is a sign of the coming apocalypse or that Mars is way to low in the sky because of planet x... Just kind of a warning that there is a lot of "noise" in the videos you will find associated with this.

There has been footage in the past few days from local news choppers (the channel 3 video is a good one from yesterday) and I understand why the FAA would want a no fly zone with the amount of flying going on inspecting the dam so I don't think this is a grand conspiracy...but it is real now, and people might be in trouble. I also just heard the press conference where they walked the prediction of a collapse of the emergency spillway back a little, that's good news, but they classified a collapse as imminent an hour or so before that when the evacuation orders were given. If that section of hill where to go it would be 30' of water X the whole reservoir, bad news for a lot of stuff downstream, that's a whole bunch of water.

 

[12thMan]

Also, I had been hearing it for a while but had never bothered to actually check the weather, they are definitely forecasting warm rains starting Wednesday, are there predictions yet on the runoff into the reservoir from that storm? I thought I had heard one of the smart people saying that's going to be the big problem.

Hopefully they can stop the erosion on the emergency spillway and just ride this out with only local flooding from so much water being released. Get through it and get something figured out for that main spillway.

I'm not sure why this story has captivated me for the last week but I think some of it has to do with just being in awe of what nature can do, the problem of what to do with the water and what the water is actually doing to the hill is crazy to me.


In happier times, what it's supposed to look like:

Earlier this week:

Last couple of days:

 

[Mental Nomad]

that's good news, but they classified a collapse as imminent an hour or so before that when the evacuation orders were given

Yeah, when they saw the hillside under the emergency spillway eroding, and saw the pace at which it was eroding, they called the evacuation based on estimates of when it might fail.

In reality, their releases of water from the main spillway and through the normal dam release finally got ahead of the inflows to the lake, and the levels were coming down, reducing the flow... at the same time, the rate of erosion went down sharply. If I put on my engineer's hat, I'd say that that base of that 30-foot earth dam was built of boulders and rock, and topped with dirt. The dirt eroded quickly during the initial pour (the first such pour in about 50 years), but when it cut back to where there was more rock, the erosion slowed.

Still, better safe than sorry, and the amount of flow already out of the lake means that downstream flooding is forecast for tomorrow. So, better safe than sorry!

At least the main dam is secure. That spillway looks bad, to be sure, but it's good that it doesn't mean the main dam is in danger of failing. Whole different level of calamity!

 

[12thMan]

Yeah, the amount of "shocking", "media blackout", and "cover up" labels associated with these videos on youtube, not to mention the people saying the entire dam was going to collapse, gets old and starts detracting from the real story. When they issued the evacuation today and said the emergency spillway was going to fail within the hour it shocked me. It's good to hear it's not as bad as first thought this evening. I like youtube for stuff like this just because of the alternate angles and more footage you get, but this was nowhere near a media black out, they were just reporting "there's nothing to worry about" coming from the officials so people start talking like they were trying to cover it up.

Such a blessing and a curse everybody being able to self publish, the amount of information you can gather is great but it comes at the price of everybody getting a bullhorn, which, in a lot of cases, is not so great.

I agree with you about the infrastructure in this country as well, living in Western Washington it's pretty scary to read the reports on what would happen to all the elevated roads and bridges in this area in a major earthquake. The region would be paralyzed for a long time in a big one, it's pretty sobering. Things like that need to be addressed, it's going to bite us hard soon it seems.

 

[DrStrange]

I encourage anyone who is potentially in a disaster area to avoid using Facebook, YouTube or other social media outlets as a source of definitive news. I agree the videos are really interesting, just not what I would recommend using when deciding whether to evacuate as recommended or stay home and ignore the warnings. Please use statements from the official emergency outlets to guide your decisions.

It is the nature of disaster warnings that leads to lots more false warnings than actual disasters. If there is one chance in a hundred that tens of thousands of people might die, a prudent leader should sound the warning knowing that he/she is going to be the butt of a lot of jokes ninety-nine times and be the hero once. It seems well worth your while to flee a flood zone to avoid a 1% chance of death. Maybe that is just me being chicken, but that risk is enormous relative to the background risk of death in any given week. [ I am using a 1% risk factor as an example. I don't know what the actual risks were. ]

In defense of the engineering of the dam - - - The dam was built from 1961-1968 and likely engineered in the 1950s. There is no reason that I know of to think the dam itself or its regular spillway(s) are at risk. The problem is the emergency spillway. It has never been used before and is failing. Maybe that means someone cut corners to save money. Maybe a contractor cheated the government and put in below spec materials. Maybe the engineering studies in the 1950s said the risk of an emergency overflow was trivial and thus the emergency spillway was built more as an afterthought. It even could be that seismic events, erosion or other earth moving events compromised the spillway. We will have to see what the future investigations turn up.

My guess is the work done in the 1960's was done to spec and the problem lays in failure to spend money on upgrades that current standards suggest were needed. In short the dam was "grandfathered" in and was not required to meet current design standards. It should be noted that California has very high standards for dams, knowing that the area is prone to earthquakes. This dam is likely better engineered than almost any similar project in the world, even though it is 50 years old.

The issue that bugs me is that we had forewarning about emergency spillway. While the dam likely met the standards of the 1950s and 1960's, we have learned better methods. The exact failure that is happening was forecast by engineers a decade ago. This issue was raised in 2005, but no level of government stepped in to fund the work. Now that disaster has struck, we will pay more to fix the damage than the cost of preventative upgrades even if no one gets killed. We should count our blessings in this matter. Change a few facts and toss in a little more bad luck, then we would be facing one of the worst man-made disasters in American history.

DrStrange, who is a civil engineer, but not that kind of civil engineer.

 

[bivey]

Made CNN now. Is that real news?

 

[Mental Nomad]

It seems well worth your while to flee a flood zone to avoid a 1% chance of death.

Yes.

Maybe that is just me being chicken

No.

My guess is the work done in the 1960's was done to spec and the problem lays in failure to spend money on upgrades that current standards suggest were needed.

I'm sure that plays a strong part, but I also find it likely that the initial panic during the one-hour period during which they feared the failure of the emergency spillway was imminent was driven by some ignorance of the original spec and work.

From the outside, we can't know for sure, but from my background, I find it very likely that the original engineering carefully considered various types of substrate for various aspects of the earthworks under the emergency spillway. The external cover would have had loose soil, which is very vulnerable to erosion during an event - but the external cover would likely have been fairly cosmetic. It eroded (quickly), but the rate of erosion rapidly decreased as the channel wore back into different substrates with different compaction during construction, with different water flows, etc. It's even possible to me that this behavior was anticipated in the original design, but those involved with the original design thinking are long gone from the management of the project.

All that being said - I agree with the evacuation call, regardless. Now, the bigger concern, as they work to manage the situation, is that emergency fatigue sets in and people get complacent and leave themselves in harm's way if things go south.