Though I posted on Oroville Dam in past years, the story of how it happened and how the problem was solved never stops being fascinating. At least to me.
On February 7th, 2017 while lowering the water level of the reservoir, the main spillway experienced a failure. This presented as an "unusual" disturbance pattern in the water down the spillway. The gates were closed to see what was going on and it was clear that the spillway was failing. I want to say catastrophically, but they did manage to avoid a full scale catastrophe of a dam failure. I think it was a near miss.
While they were trying to understand what was going on with the main spillway, the water level rose to above the level of the emergency spillway. On February 11th water poured over the emergency spillway. That was the first time that had happened in the history of the dam. The land in front of the emergency spillway began to erode immediately. 200,000 people were evacuated, and eventually the main spillway was reopened. You can find more on the near disaster at the following link. The Oroville Dam Near-disaster: The Cost of Ignoring Infrastructure from the 357 Magnum Archives. It was posted in 2019
Anyway, Practical Engineering, a YouTube channel I quite like, recently published a good, 20 minute video on the rebuilding of the main spillway and the emergency spillway.
This is the video from Practical Engineering on Rebuilding the Oroville Dam Spillways.
It's amazing how fast something can be rebuilt when the state says "go ahead and ignore all the laws we've passed that slow down construction projects, like environmental impacts, etc".
ReplyDeleteYou could not build the California Aqueduct system today. You would never get approval for a single dam.
DeleteThe upside to that would be that Los Angeles wouldn't have enough water to support what we know and despise as LA. (What Tool called the "hopeless fucking hole we call L.A." in the song "Ænema")