31–40 of 75 posts
Our family is bunch of armchair hydrologists. Every random few months we trek from Bay area to Oroville to count the bathtub rings and study the drought situation. Recently we trekked to see the newly formed Tulare Lake. FWIW, Tulare lake ain't evaporating for another 2 years. Imagine the same size storm repeats for 10+ years.
Why should we imagine that?
- The devastating 1862 flood the article mentions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862 ) extended far beyond California - into British Columbia, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and Mexico
- With zero major dams available (to fail), the 1862 flood destroyed ~1/4 of all taxable property in California, and killed ~1% of the human population of California. (Today, 1% of that population would be ~400,000 people killed.)
- The 1862 flood is obvious in ocean sediment records, as a thick gray layer. Similar thick layers occur every ~120 years, and one of those is ~10X as thick as the 1862 sediment layer. The NYTimes is very annoyingly short of details here, but I found at least a paywalled version of the sediment research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00253...
Could one make a damn self repairing by using coolant lines and woodfibers aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete ? I imagine it similar to the bodies repair facilities, using the electricity from the damn to uphold cooling?
Even if this was technologically feasible, maybe the cost would be prohibitive. It would be much cheaper to not build the dam in the first place or close it, or just build alternative energy sources (solar, wind, etc.)
This discussion was about failing damns or spillways and how to repair them. Solar can fall to strong wether events too and damns provide base grid power.
Its could also be added after construction. A set of pipes of coolant lines and warmed woodslushie that become a temporary solution to a catastrophic development.
Its basically installing a industrial sized ac and a wood slushie sprinkler system.
Was hoping to hear more about other dams, the article focuses on Oroville. Lake Berryessa for instance is a concrete dam, much more like hoover than Oroville. It was built before they realized there was a nearby active fault, the Green Valley Fault. Lake Oroville (in the NYT article) is the 14th largest lake in California, Berryessa is #11. Lake Oroville does hold twice as much water when full though The big concern…
If you look at a terrain map [1] it looks like things flatten out a lot not far below the dam. As you say, bad for Winters and Davis, but not "terrifying wall of water" bad for much else downstream.
Quite a bit of that area is already water (the Delta), and we've seen during the heavy rains during 2017 (the period the article refers to) how the land around it can take a lot of flooding.
I've driven down the road from the dam to Winters, and the chutes I think would act like a giant water cannon. I wouldn't have high hopes for Winters. Driving down that road, I kept thinking "why would anyone buy real estate here?" - yet people do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we imagine that?
Storms have increased in size and severity quite a bit of the past 30 years (sources abound, it’s reasonably easy to google).
Just yesterday (literally) they were mentioning on a Swiss radio I was listening to, that the quantity of water falling in the Alps above 2500m was going to double in the comings years, due to high intensity storms created by climate change.
(So not sure why you are getting down-voted..)
I recently read "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of water issues in the west and California in particular. A great portion of the book is devoted to dams. The gist of it is that many dams of questionable utility were constructed throughout the 20th century due to pork barrel politics and the unstoppable bureaucratic engines of the Bureau of Reclamation and…
The spillway reconstruction was expensive and time-consuming, but at least it didn't fail that time. The issue was a lack of investment in remediation repairs and improvements, and a lack of planning for extreme event flows. In the long term, California is unprepared and fucked in terms of dwindling water supply and damaging storms and forest fires from climate change. That's why I left.
Funny thing no one talks about. Maybe theory. Probably not. The Sacramento river, if flooded by say the dam failure of Oroville, could reach Stockton. If that happens the city would be a foot or two underwater. Little does anyone know there are contingency plans to literally blow the levees along the river and flood the nearby (mostly) farming land.
Counting from a nominal roof top or street level?
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I recently read "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of water issues in the west and California in particular. A great portion of the book is devoted to dams. The gist of it is that many dams of questionable utility were constructed throughout the 20th century due to pork barrel politics and the unstoppable bureaucratic engines of the Bureau of Reclamation and…
The spillway reconstruction was expensive and time-consuming, but at least it didn't fail that time. The issue was a lack of investment in remediation repairs and improvements, and a lack of planning for extreme event flows. In the long term, California is unprepared and fucked in terms of dwindling water supply and damaging storms and forest fires from climate change. That's why I left.
The problem is it’s also the most currently affected. Mostly due to historic forestry mismanagement (which they’ve corrected but it takes time to make an impact) and the maliciously incompetent behavior of PG&E.
Most of the East Coast is going to be a mess. Same with states near the Gulf. Texas can’t even function now in climate fluctuations without having its grid collapse.
California has its issues, but they’re largely caused over water rights being improperly managed due to unrestrained agricultural usage. Fix that and they have much a ton fewer issues.