When the levee breaks....Lake Oroville dam in trouble.

[TX Foilhead]

If that theory was true I dont think the lake elevation would continue to be rising like it has been all day.

That's sort of what happens, but because the water coming in is so far from the dam it doesn't work that way. The level of the lake where the water is coming in is higher that the water at the dam, maybe 3 or 4 ft over how ever many miles between the 2 so it takes a while for that inflow to cause something to happen at the dam.

It a easy to see here on my lake. It's only 26 miles long and during a flood when they start trying to move water through it quickly there may be 6 or 7 feet from one end to the other. Once they get it all going they can run 45000cfs past my neighborhood and keep every thing between the sea walls. When the lake is just sitting a week get a storm that dumps 2000cfs out of one of the creeks I've seen that go halfway across same peoples back yards.

It looks like by 9:00 or so the level should start to drop, I betting the 7:00 level is almost the same as it was at 6:00.

 

[Pelon]

I thought this video of the New Bullards Bar spillway overflowing was kind of cool!

[video=youtube;JaGEpFz5-Eo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaGEpFz5-Eo[/video]

 

[GRADS]

I thought this video of the New Bullards Bar spillway overflowing was kind of cool!

[video=youtube;JaGEpFz5-Eo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaGEpFz5-Eo[/video]

Holy fook! Never seen Bullards Bar that full. I've launched there where we were basically launching at the base of the dam.:eek

 

[Cray Paper]

Like calling people ignorant, but not knowing the difference between your & you're ?

Does my grammar error diminish the point I was trying to make? It doesn't in my world. Were you one of the hypocrites that was bitching about not holding water back last year? The way my mind works, is this. Decision making is judged, abject procedures like spelling is secondary. That is what is wrong with this country right now. "I don't like how it was said so I'm gonna cry a fucking river and show this fool I can spells better". Do you feel better know? Are you going to address the obvious point I made even though it came with zero collage education?

 

[GRADS]

The Emergency.....errr.....Auxiliary spillway.

 

[thetub]

[video=youtube_https;meqLQz6acXA]https://youtu.be/meqLQz6acXA[/video]

kinda crazy to see how much water has filled

 

[Cray Paper]

This as an amazing thread that covers this major event in US history like no other. Doesn't matter how we got here, what is happening is unprecedented in the modern media era. There is no hiding what is happening or what it looks like. No spin, just reality. I feel for the decisions makers, they have so much to consider. Looks like clearing the over flow was the correct thing to do as well as throttling down the damaged outfall and letting the overflow was the correct call. It all depends on the upcoming weather if this decision was correct. The decision makers have brass balls. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the history books and or cable TV shows that try to understand what happened so that it doesn't happen again. What a difficult job it must be to operate a dam.

 

[Terminal Velocity]

People have been calling for more reservoirs for years but the clown's that run this state would rather build a train and welcome illegals with welfare and free education....Fucking idiots.

They don't need resorvoirs they need detention basins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_basin. A big ass hole that stores water and releases it at a controlled pace. Las Vegas has been building these for 20 years to control flooding. Essentially a shit load of water inflows, starts to fill, but only a certain amount can pass. If it fills it over tops, ok but it's still controlling the amount of flow into an area aka oroville.

 

[Hardly Satisfied]

Very cool video, Thanks for Sharing . That's a lot of water.

 

[bowtiejunkie]

So, it appears the emergency spillway doesn't have any outflow meters as outflow has been 55,xxx cfs since hours before the spill over. Wonder what cfs it is flowing.

The lake hasn't topped out yet; I hope they are able to get enough water out before next round of storms.

 

[Willie B]

... I have a couple hours of video shot from my Hallett flat bottom that covers most of the shoreline of Lake Oroville when it was at a level that I thought was full..from what I see now what I shot was with the lake definitely not full...I'm not sure where the video is I didn't do anything with it but if I can find it... if this whole thing really turns to shit I will edit it down so everyone can see what boating on Lake Oroville used to be like...

 

[Terminal Velocity]

To expand on Irocdaves post, It is an amazing thread, it's one of the few that has stayed the most on topic I'd say. But we on RDP are armchair quarterbacking, me included, were making conclusions based on limited knowledge provided by some pictures, some second and even third hand information provided by the media.
The shitty part of this Whole thing is, the people in the trenches that are doing there best to make decisions based on experience, history and even gut feeling to try and solve a crisis or at minimum reduce the damages are the ones that are going to be ultimately held responsible. Sure you might see an upper manager on a televised circus, getting grilled about why this happened, how could you let this happen etc. the panel is going to say you should have done this, you should have done this. Personally that's BS these people are dealing with something that has never happened before, it's easy to blame and come up with solutions or what should've happened after shit has gone down and there's time to reflect.
Me personally, I've been going back and looking at what I posted to see what I thought, vs what happened and try to learn from it for my future development in civil engineering.

 

[HST4ME]

The O/B Church Reverend got a pretty cool shot from the lake of the infinity pool. Cops didn't think much of it. :thumbsup

 

[GRADS]

The O/B Church Reverand got a pretty cool shot from the lake of the infinity pool. Cops didn't think much of it. :thumbsup

Pics or it didn't happen.

 

[HST4ME]

Go look for yourself.

 

[GRADS]

Go look for yourself.

I have no idea who the eggbeater reverend is or where to look.

 

[HST4ME]

 

[HST4ME]

 

[GRADS]

Biggest infinity edge ever!

 

[zhandfull]

So, it appears the emergency spillway doesn't have any outflow meters as outflow has been 55,xxx cfs since hours before the spill over. Wonder what cfs it is flowing.

The lake hasn't topped out yet; I hope they are able to get enough water out before next round of storms.

I read somewhere today from the DWP the emergency spillway was flowing 6,000 to 12,000cfs. They said yesterday it would flow 20,000cfs at twenty four inches of sheet flow ( 903' elevation). 55,000 plus 12,000 should be pretty close to inflow numbers now. Lake elevation will probably start dropping in next few hours slowly.

 

[Willie B]

The O/B Church Reverend got a pretty cool shot from the lake of the infinity pool. Cops didn't think much of it. :thumbsup

... outboard church has a lot of juice in town...cops are not going to bother him...they might wave a finger at him and go no no no no but that's about it..

 

[Sleek-Jet]

To expand on Irocdaves post, It is an amazing thread, it's one of the few that has stayed the most on topic I'd say. But we on RDP are armchair quarterbacking, me included, were making conclusions based on limited knowledge provided by some pictures, some second and even third hand information provided by the media.
The shitty part of this Whole thing is, the people in the trenches that are doing there best to make decisions based on experience, history and even gut feeling to try and solve a crisis or at minimum reduce the damages are the ones that are going to be ultimately held responsible. Sure you might see an upper manager on a televised circus, getting grilled about why this happened, how could you let this happen etc. the panel is going to say you should have done this, you should have done this. Personally that's BS these people are dealing with something that has never happened before, it's easy to blame and come up with solutions or what should've happened after shit has gone down and there's time to reflect.
Me personally, I've been going back and looking at what I posted to see what I thought, vs what happened and try to learn from it for my future development in civil engineering.

I don't think anyone is going to have to answer for much. The simple fact is that more water is coming into the lake than can be taken out in a controlled manner. The spillway coming apart didn't help things, but I doubt there is anything anyone could have done about it. And when the damage was found, they assessed it, looked at what was coming and made the decision to sacrifice the spillway to let as much water out as possible. That is pretty sound emergency planning.

The emergency spillway was there because some engineer somewhere figured that at some point the other two water exits weren't going to keep up. Instead of overflowing the dam, the water washes downstream where the engineer wanted it. Not without damage or erosion, but the dam infrastructure isn't in danger.

 

[buck35]

Lake level seems to have peaked at 3am and now slowly dropping. At 902.55 as of 6am.be interesting to see what the hillside looks like now after the flow stops.

 

[parker ed]

So what's happening down stream with all the water going over the emergency spillway?

 

[t&y]

So what's happening down stream with all the water going over the emergency spillway?

There is a video one page back with shots from a private plane. Dark brown river with a little flooding, but it didn't look like it did any real damage to anything other than the spillway as of now.

 

[shueman]

Found these on the "Church" this morning ...







Read that the main concern is the Power House ...

 

[460]

View attachment 538846

 

[Pelon]

These guys don't look concerned!

[video=youtube;v91OzzFVEJQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v91OzzFVEJQ[/video]

 

[zhandfull]

These guys don't look concerned!

[video=youtube;v91OzzFVEJQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v91OzzFVEJQ[/video]

Those guys were great. The hot weather girl was also spot on with her report. Coverage was better than netwoks channels! Lol..

 

[wzuber]

I wonder how those guys feel working below the emergency spillway in that photo? That's gotta have ya puckered a little ya think? All these various pics of the lake, water flows, infinity edge are both beautiful and intrepid feeling at the same time knowing what potential disaster is looming in the fringe. Great thread, many thanks to all providing the info.

 

[Ziggy]

Those guys were great. The hot weather girl was also spot on with her report. Coverage was better than netwoks channels! Lol..

The hot weather girl has same name as my daughter

 

[Ziggy]

Found these on the "Church" this morning ...

View attachment 538842

View attachment 538843

View attachment 538844

Read that the main concern is the Power House ...

Cool pics.:thumbup:
.
Sure seems like these guys did one hell of a job preventing a possible disaster, scraping all the foliage and grouting in some of the the rip rap at the base of emergency spillway. The entire operation so far went well with the only real apparent problem having been the spillway washout. I say Kudo's to them all.
.
.
And being a devils advocate, I believe we now all understand better why they do the releases of the reservoirs even though we all thought we needed to store more water for our future uses.......I think we'll not whine so much when we see this happening in the future and hopefully not be such smart ass uneducated armchair engineers that know better.

 

[TX Foilhead]

Cool pics.:thumbup:
.
Sure seems like these guys did one hell of a job preventing a possible disaster, scraping all the foliage and grouting in some of the the rip rap at the base of emergency spillway. The entire operation so far went well with the only real apparent problem having been the spillway washout. I say Kudo's to them all.
.
.
And being a devils advocate, I believe we now all understand better why they do the releases of the reservoirs even though we all thought we needed to store more water for our future uses.......I think we'll not whine so much when we see this happening in the future and hopefully not be such smart ass uneducated armchair engineers that know better.

That won't happen, there's always somebody pissed of about something, the trick is to keep more than 50% of them happy at any given time.

 

[Ziggy]

That won't happen, there's always somebody pissed of about something, the trick is to keep more than 50% of them happy at any given time.

Just like politics[emoji23]
.
The other thing I think about is the greenies that want all the dams in the world to go away. I'd like them to imagine what the Feather river on into the Delta would look like if the dams controls weren't in place. With almost triple the amount of water at its peak rushing down. Talk about catastrophe? ?[emoji15] [emoji15]

 

[Pelon]

DWR drone footage from Saturday afternoon. Water is all the way into the parking lot.


[video=youtube;fA52L0eabNo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA52L0eabNo[/video]

 

[parker ed]

DWR drone footage from Saturday afternoon. Water is all the way into the parking lot.


[video=youtube;fA52L0eabNo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA52L0eabNo[/video]

All that water has to be creating havoc down stream, no???

 

[Flying_Lavey]

Does my grammar error diminish the point I was trying to make? It doesn't in my world. Were you one of the hypocrites that was bitching about not holding water back last year? The way my mind works, is this. Decision making is judged, abject procedures like spelling is secondary. That is what is wrong with this country right now. "I don't like how it was said so I'm gonna cry a fucking river and show this fool I can spells better". Do you feel better know? Are you going to address the obvious point I made even though it came with zero collage education?

I remember the discussions you are referring to from last year and I remember very clearly everybody saying they should use the modern weather forecasting capabilities and not so rigidly follow the Army Corps rules and giudelines. Which would have worked for the last few years at least. NOAA has had pretty accurate long term predictions. When the argument was being made before it was "why are they dumping so much water when there aren't any storms predicted in the foreseeable future?" I don't think anybody that has somewhat of a clue about some flood control has any problem with them dumping mass amounts of water when there are a series of storms predicted in the near and not-so-near future.

Cool pics.[emoji106]
.
Sure seems like these guys did one hell of a job preventing a possible disaster, scraping all the foliage and grouting in some of the the rip rap at the base of emergency spillway. The entire operation so far went well with the only real apparent problem having been the spillway washout. I say Kudo's to them all.
.
.
And being a devils advocate, I believe we now all understand better why they do the releases of the reservoirs even though we all thought we needed to store more water for our future uses.......I think we'll not whine so much when we see this happening in the future and hopefully not be such smart ass uneducated armchair engineers that know better.

I still think they should rely on modern weather forecasting more. They may have released more water at the beginning if they did this year and would hold more back in other years when there isn't forecasted to be much substantial rainfall.

 

[Flyinbowtie]

Wow...

Anyway here is what I have learned today, actually in the last half hour.
The problems are changing. The amount of debris at the bottom of the wounded spillway is amazing. There is a new "sand bar" at that location, consisting of concrete, boulders, and dirt. This is a problem. They are running heavy equipment down there trying to open it up a bit. The the powerhouse (base of the dam) is still a problem as well. No ETA for reopening it at this point.
The emergency spillway is carving a new river canyon down the side of the hill, and creating a second plug of debris where it enters the river. The next few days the focus will be on getting things cleaned up as much as possible before the next series of storms arrive. The next series isn't projected to bring as much precip as what we just went through. We are hoping it isn't.
Lotta hope going on hereabouts.
At this point they don't even know if rebuilding the existing spillway makes sense, they need to see what they have to work with. They won't know this until the rains end and the snow melt ends and they can handle the necessary outflow from the inflow of the rivers with the repaired powerhouse.
We are talking mid summer.
It would be a engineering and construction feat of epic proportions to repair this in less than two seasons.
And the Governor of California has asked the President of the United States to issue a federal disaster declaration for this and other flooding incidents. Estimates run into the 150 million range for Oroville alone.
I am not a big conspiracy guy, but in my opinion as a guy who has worked a couple of major disaster deals the press coverage and information releases have been nothing short of abysmal.
To keep politics out of this thread I will refrain from further commentary

I've been working all day on various storm related issues here and elsewhere, about 3 hours on the tractor and my back is done. As a personal protest of winter I wore my damn shorts and a Tee shirt today, first time since who knows when. My legs is as white as white can be LOL.
Headed for the shower and about 3 fingers of JD single Barrel

 

[Sleek-Jet]

Modern weather forecasting... LOL...

 

[Pelon]

All that water has to be creating havoc down stream, no???

In one of the DWR press briefings they said they are already staging equipment to clean out the debris in the diversion pool between Oroville Dam and the Thermalito diversion dam. There has to be a lot of debris. Not sure how they are going to do this with 60,000 cfs going by.

The amount of water pouring out of all the Northern California dams is quite impressive, 70,000 cfs at Shasta, 60,000 at Oroville, 80,000 at Folsom, 30,000 at Bollards Bar. In contrast there is only 12,000cfs flowing into Lake Powell right now. I don't think the Colorado has seen 100,000 cfs flow in a few years. What would Parker be like with 150,000 cfs flowing by!

This is the diversion dam.

 

[RCDave]

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10154446654037887&id=122163047886&__tn__=*s

Holy chit. Something major has gone wrong....

 

[spectra3279]

[video=youtube;uux0bjzSh7Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uux0bjzSh7Y[/video]

That looks like some prime Australian jet boat water.

 

[GRADS]

SHIT IS GETTING REAL! They told Oroville to evacuate in the next 60 minutes. They are expecting an emergency spillway failure. This is not good.

 

[hallett21]

Shit failing in the next hour?

 

[Old Texan]

So what's happening down stream with all the water going over the emergency spillway?

That to me could be the real event in this deal. There is one helluva a lot of water and no sign of it lessening plus more rain in the next week. I live within a 1/2 mile of the Brazos here in TX that came far out of it's banks last spring. All because of up country heavy rains. From what I've seen of this incident, it's far bigger than what we went through and the downstream watershed will get it all within the next couple weeks. We had damage in the billions and it just touched outlying Houston metro areas, not through as heavily populated as what I believe the Sacramento flow down the middle of as it goes to sea.

I've tried to follow this event and RDP has the best coverage. Sadly no national media seems to be giving details on what looks to me like perhaps on of the major inland floods to hit the US in decades.

With the rain already fallen, plus the potential for more and the spring thaw after a heavy snow season, this whole event may just be beginning.......Hope the heel my observations are wrong.

 

[RCDave]

http://khsl.web.franklyinc.com/stor...lying-levels-of-oroville-and-areas-downstream

The emergency spill way is in danger of collapsing.

They increased the flows out of the auxiliary spillway to 100,000 cfs

 

[Old Texan]

SHIT IS GETTING REAL! They told Oroville to evacuate in the next 60 minutes. They are expecting an emergency spillway failure. This is not good.

You got any links G? I can't find anything other than what you folks post.

Good grief I hope the dam isn't in trouble.......:yikes

 

[Flyinbowtie]

IF YOU HAVE FAMILY IN LOWER OROVILLE THEY NEED TO EVACUATE. CHICO FAIRGROUNDS IS OPEN. EMERGENCY SPILLWAY IS GOING TO FAIL.

 

[TX Foilhead]

Powell gets some good flows in May and June. I don't think Havasu or Parker has to worry about flooding when you consider how much water would be required to fill Powell and Mead, it would take multiple years of record snow falls in a row just to do that.

 

[GRADS]

This is bad, very bad.