I wrote:
For what it's worth, I'm a retired safety engineer. OSHA is necessary.; there are employers who would put their workers at extreme risk. And the regulations go through a review process where industry weighs in.
Cold Rain wrote:
Hearing reports of other dams beginning to experience pressure. There are numerous reports of flooding, power outages, sinkholes, mudslides, and trees down throughout the state. Looks like several more storms are still on tap before they get a break. This would be a really bad time for a strong quake out there.
You may think these regulations are great and that’s a choice you have to make. The point was you need to understand that you are using violence against others to enforce your choices. You can wrap it in as much “save the children” propaganda as you want, but ultimately, all of these regulations are enforced by men with guns. All of us need to understand that fact.
Now, you may make the choice to says it’s worth it, but I would say if you are not personally willing to use violence against another for these regulations, then you shouldn’t be asking someone else to use violence for you. Understanding this make you much more likely to work things out in a voluntary manner. To promote community and good behavior by example, communication, non violent methods such as supporting those businesses that do it right.
Wendy S. Delmater wrote:
Every last one of the OSHA regulations was written in someone's blood.
Wendy S. Delmater wrote:
Then give the regulations teeth. People's lives are at stake.
Or how about we stop stealing from people to build projects like this. It might not have ever been built because it's easy to do unsustainable, bad things when it's other peoples money. At least if was a private entity we would have someone to criminally charge. Someone who was directly responsible that would pay. At most we will see some low level flunky get fired and a huge tax increase to deal with this mess. No lessons will be learned.
richcabot wrote:
https://mises.org/blog/who-will-be-blamed-if-oroville-dam-fails
Wendy S. Delmater wrote:
How does all this apply to the situation at Oroville? Maybe some sort of oversight is needed to see that Federal funds meant for maintenance of structures like the dam get used for that purpose. Make THAT a regulation under, oh, I don't know..the Department of Energy or Fish & Wildlife - I don't care who. Then give the regulations teeth.
From Mises article linked by richcabot wrote:
As The Mercury News has reported, 12 years ago, both California and federal officials refused to consider a demand that California heighten precautions and maintenance standards at the Oroville Dam. In response to the demands, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said the dam's emergency features were perfectly fine and that the emergency spillway "was designed to handle 350,000 cubic feet per second and the concerns were overblown."
There’s a lot to worry about when a disaster strikes your community. You have to make sure that your friends and neighbors are going to be okay. You have to make sure that you have plenty of food, water, and medical supplies. You may even have to prepare to evacuate your home and leave most of your valuables behind. And while you’re focused on making sure that you and your loved ones are prepared to ride out that disaster, you can rest assured that there will always be some predatory person in your community who is preparing to take advantage of your situation. That’s the ugly truth about disasters, natural and man-made, that everyone needs to understand. When everyone else is panicking or gathering supplies or hunkering down or running away, there’s always someone watching the chaos and thinking “there’s an opportunity for me here.” And that’s a pretty good lesson to be learned from the Oroville evacuation that occurred last week. While every sane person was fleeing the city, a few were busy screwing over their neighbors. Most notably, a 33-year-old man was severely injured after his truck was hijacked at gunpoint.Authorities are looking for two people accused of carjacking and running over a man preparing to flee from Oroville when authorities ordered nearly 200,000 people to evacuate. Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea says the victim was loading his vehicle with the engine running when a man and woman armed with a shotgun jumped in, running him over as he attempted to stop them. Honea says the victim was flown to a hospital with serious injuries. Authorities said they are seeking 27-year-old Cody Bowles and 31-year-old Lucia Ripley... According to the Oroville Mercury register, there were multiple looting incidents which have led to the arrests of five different people. Several hours after the evacuation order was given, two people were arrested for breaking into a Dollar General store. Another two individuals were arrested for looting a local market, one of whom was a 16-year-old carrying a shotgun. A fifth individual was arrested after he tried to steal a gun safe from a residence, and drive off with it in a four wheeler. During the evacuation there were a total of 240 911 calls, many of which were for crimes in progress.
Government severely misjudged strength of Oroville emergency spillway, sparking a crisis
“There is no way to rationalize running water down a hillslope with deep soils and a forest on it and weak bedrock,” said Jeffrey Mount, a UC Davis emeritus professor of geology and expert on California water.
Pretty, thanks for the map/data re: lake levels. Don Pedro looks full!
I’ve been talking with a friend who used to run a hedge fund. He’s well connected in that world. I asked him who would be the winners and losers, and how to play this out financially. It’s possible that there’s money to be made here because the risk may not be priced in. As hard as it is to believe, some people trust the government that all will be OK.
Here’s what I came up with and his responses. Please contribute your thoughts and suggestions. Somebody is going to make a ton of money when this thing fails, it might as well be us.
Insurance companies
Clearly there will be tremendous losses when properties get flooded. This may be a shorting opportunity.
Matt: Find a California-only insurer, that way they don’t have the benefit of a national risk pool, as State Farm does. Don’t pick the biggest or stongest one, you want a 3rd tier company, one that’s not well positioned to survive a big hit.
REITs that own safe apartment buildings
Matt: Every apartment within 20 miles of the flood zone will be immediately filled with displaced residents. Rents will go up shaply, but only as leases expire. This is typically a 1 year term, but people’s leases expire every month. Therefore it will take a year to fully incorporate the new high rent rates, but it will start happening immediately and continuously until all of the old leases are renewed at the higher rates.
Replacement power producers
Matt: California routinely cheats on their own emissions standards. The 819 MW (1,490 GWH annually (source)) will be replaced by burning natural gas, very likely in-state due to the cheating. If they adhered to their CO2 rules they would import the power from Arizona and Nevada, but that likely won’t happen.
Agriculture
As with the prior 4 years of drought, there will be haves and have-nots. The have nots (junior water rights holders) will get nothing, going bankrupt. The haves (senior water rights holders) will enjoy much higher crop prices with relatively stable costs, because they continue to give away the remaining water far below free market prices. My brother who lives in Hanford (south of Fresno) says that the Oroville water supplies farmers further south. He is looking into who will be the winners and losers when the Oroville water goes offline.
What else?
Net inflow minus net outflow. (source) You can see the rate of reduction slowing as the discharge is slowed over the last few days, along with recent rain.
Finally, some intelligent discussion of the Oroville Dam crisis. Instead of the moronic blame-it-on-Mexicans nonsense going around. The engineering discussion is great. Thank you. As an aviator I can relate to the cranky pessimist approach to risk that was spoken of. I don’t like flying with overly optimistic pilots : -) “The history of aviation safety is written in blood” is one of our sayings too. (I saw it stated in the context of this topic earlier.)
Juan Browne puts out a very low budget update of Oroville dam conditions daily. He combines older video and current website screen shots with his commentary. He has a good pulse of the problems being faced. This video is just under 8 1/2 minutes and well worth the time to watch. He says he will get Press credentials soon and be able to get access to the dam and authorities. I certainly hope so!
Grover
Sand Puppy - as I look at that video I notice two things:
The water is muddier than before. Less clear…yellowed…so there seems to be continued or renewed erosion?
The gap that water chewed looks a LOT larger.
That’s going to be a very big hole to fill!
But the unclear water worries me the most. I wonder if the reduced spillway volumes were due to bets being hedged?
Maybe fingers crossed for less rain, while trying to slow some new erosion that was worrying?
Just guessing here…
Note that almost none of the water is making it all the way down the spillway. The vast majority is going out the breach on the south side, across the eroded hillside, down to the river below. Also you can see yellow material in the water cascade, indicating further erosion.
According to the DWR realtime Oroville dam data page, the main spillway is still flowing at 55,000 CFS, the same as it has been doing for about 24 hours now.
The beeping is good, that indicates that equipment is working at the base (camera vantage point), presumably to clear the debris so they can restart the power plant and avert any flood damage to same from an overly high water level in the tail race.
Hopefully once they get the power plant going again they can resume the 100,000 CFS flow down the main spillway, on the assumption that it’s eroded everything that can be eroded at that flow rate (but the yellow water belies that). That would get the lake down to the level of the main spillway intake quickly (813.6’). From there the power plant can drain 14,000 CFS and make 819 MW. That will allow the lake to be drained as much as possible before the next big rains and / or snow melt hit and refill it.
Grover wrote:
Juan Browne puts out a very low budget update of Oroville dam conditions daily. He combines older video and current website screen shots with his commentary. He has a good pulse of the problems being faced. This video is just under 8 1/2 minutes and well worth the time to watch. He says he will get Press credentials soon and be able to get access to the dam and authorities. I certainly hope so!
Grover
Part of my job is threat modeling & risk analysis. For many years I’ve been noodling around with the idea that any big, capital-intensive project carries with it a unique risk, that of fraud. I believe that’s virtually ignored, overlooked, or at minimum heavily discounted when risk assessments are performed.
For example, at Oroville the cost of mitigating the risk of either spillway was large, so the incentive to cover it up, ignore it, downplay it, etc. was big. The risk therefore persisted.
At Fukushima, the same thing happened. The risk was that the spent fuel rods absolutely had to be kept submerged, yet they were stored far above ground, where a leak would leave them uncovered. By contrast, the diesel emergency generators absolutely had to be kept dry, yet they were positioned at the lowest point, susceptible to flooding. The cost of mitigating these risks was high, both in dollars and reputation damage, so they persisted.
I believe that this is something that needs to be discussed among all interested stakeholders and added to the formal risk assessment protocols. Has anybody heard of any efforts in this direction?
Water behaves in weird ways sometimes. By reducing the flow, the water velocity also gets reduced. As a result, the water falls will impact the rocks in the breached spillway area in a slightly different location. The bedrock experiences a different force profile. It doesn’t surprise me that there is more temporary erosion. The water is running yellow rather than chunky brown. Although not good, it ain’t bad either.
As I understand it, the goal is to get the reservoir down to 850’. That gives them freeboard of 50’ for flood water storage. Once they’re down to that level, they will need to adjust the outflow to match the inflow. That may be why they’ve reduced the spillway flow over time. Once they’ve reached their goal, they may reduce flow drastically to give equipment access to clean up the debris in the river channel. They may even cut off the spillway completely to get a look at the spillway breach and ascertain the likely damage that more than 100K CFS flows would cause.
We’ll wait and see.
Grover
When looking at spillway designs my husband and I ran across the work of Viktor Schauberger. The man is not an ace at everything, has a bit of cult following, and much of what he suggests is not verifiable but modern engineers still use some of his designs. (The guy was involved in the 3rd Reich so, not real popular but some–only some–of the science seems sound.) He also designed log flumes based on the principle that water tends to make vortices due to the shear force cause by the differences in flow velocities and directions… caused by temperature, friction, and pressure.
The basic concept is that you put something down the center of the spillway to minimize or eliminate cavitation to lessen stress on the spillway.
That spillway design is interesting, and patented. http://www.rexresearch.com/schaub/schaub.htm
A design-in-use based on one of his concepts. hyperbolic funnels, can be seen here http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/18/glory-glory-water-spills-into-glory-hole-at-lake-berryessa/