What it takes to maintain and rebuild infrastructure. Not sexy or exciting, just necessary for modern life to be maintained. Politicians love to ignore it, and then are shocked to discover that it doesn't last forever.
In May of 2020 during a substantial storm, the Edenville Dam in Michigan breached. This caused the Sanford Dam to overflow, and also be damaged. Several other dams in the area were also damaged in the storm, including the Forest Lake Dam near Omer, Michigan. While the dam held, the spillway was extensively damaged, and had to be rebuilt.
This is a relatively small dam, as dams go. It is 48 feet high, 800 feet long with a storage capacity of 7,440 acre-feet of water.
The video below is long at 25 minutes, but the first 5 or 10 minutes shows the difference in construction of the spillway after the repairs, and as originally built, and there is a section at about 3 minutes in that shows the damage to spillway after the 2020 storms. I find the upgrades to slow the energy in the flowing water to be fascinating, but then I like this kind of engineering.
This is Jordan Mowbray's video Forest Lake Dam Complete! - Dam is Repaired and Forest Lake is Full!
Most of the news articles from 2020 that I had linked in various posts are either gone, or moved behind paywalls. Here is a post that includes an engineer's video of what happened on 19 May 2020. The Failure of Edenville Dam and the Cascade Failure of Sanford Dam
A go9d parallel is the Oroville Dam disaster from a number of years back. Those issues were known about for decades but were pencil whipped and ignored by the California Department of Water Recources.
ReplyDeleteThat is what inspired Jordan M. to start his channel and cover the rebuilding effort. I should probably say that Juan Browne is the one who inspired him.
DeleteMy hometown is Hesperia, MI. In 1976 we had floods in September that threatened to take out our small dam on the White River. 16 years old at the time, myself and a bunch of the rest of the guys in my class and a few others, all in all about 20 or so of us, helped fill sandbags for most of the night.
ReplyDeleteThey cut a temporary drainage ditch around the dam to let the water go around and avoid taking the dam out. A year or so later the federal government and the state government kicked in enough money to rebuild the dam using modern methods, a thing that now is a source of pride. They also added a walkway so that fishermen and women can get down to the river, which flows through the middle of town.
Our little dam was built in the 1920's or so and was used for hydroelectricity. Now it is strong enough to withstand most flooding that gets thrown at it. Now I hear from some friends in my hometown that the state is considering demolishing several dams in the state, with the one in Hesperia on the list. I guess the reason is to help with the fishing further up from our town, but it will have the effect of harming our trout and salmon runs in the spring and fall.
Politics at it's finest here in Michigan.
There may be some issues around maintenance. A dam built in 1920 is not up to modern safety standards - the current standards are fairly new (like the 1990s) but a lot of changes were made to the standards since the 1950s. The dam probably also has maintenance issues, because our infrastructure has not - for the most part - been maintained.
DeleteThe original dam was built in the 20's. It was replaced in the mid 1980's, completely new.
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