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Images and video showing extent of Oroville dam damage

848 points by JabavuAdams 10y ago

lvspiff 10y ago
Seeing what was done here in the matter of days make you realize how things like the Grand Canyon formed over millions of years - then wonder how it isn't bigger. Can't imagine the wealth of knowledge that has been been gained by just watching the erosion patterns as the failure evolved.
- arethuza 10y ago
  As far as I understand it the Grand Canyon is an example where the river (roughly) stayed in the same place it was the land that uplifted around it. There are examples where rivers are much older than the mountains they pass through - like the Susquehanna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_River
  - euyyn 10y ago
    The land might have uplifted, but the river still had to carve the same depth nonetheless. I don't think the land happened to raise just on both sides of the river and not below it.
    - arethuza 10y ago
      Yes, of course the river has to erode away the rising land but it is staying roughly where it is rather than digging down through land that isn't rising.
  - Theodores 10y ago
    Tell me about it! I was cycle-touring in the USA many decades ago and maps back then were Rand McNally, not Google... So it was always a matter of guessing where the hills were. So, I get to Colorado, cycling down through Four Corners with the 'Mittens' etc, hope to get to the camp sites in Grand Canyon. So I follow the 'Little Colorado'. My geography skills told me that the road going next to the river would be going downhill, but I wasn't thinking properly!!! So I follow the Little Colorado expecting an easy drift into camp but instead I have a gale force headwind and serious bits of uphill. So I didn't get there and I had to sleep in the tent held up by rocks with no let up in the wind, with an electrical storm to follow, one where I was the highest metal object around... Next morning I woke up rough and set off on my bike, literally 1/2 mile away up the road were a group of cycle tourists from Yugoslavia and they pitched up in one of the roadside stalls. Had I not given in so easily the previous night I would have had a fun time meeting up with them and drinking properly... I was also oblivious to the time zone change so the next day came with a 'free' hour too. I did go down to the very bottom of the Canyon and up the other side to continue my cycle tour of the wonderful U.S.A. These crazy dams (every river is dammed) were a huge part of my time there, riding across them and camping by them.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  There are two factors that increase the erosion: First, you went from a prolonged severe drought to a very intense rainfall in a very short amount of time, extremely not helped by the massive surface runoff when the emergency spillway was put in use. I don't know all of the geological processes involved, but the upper soil layers were probably made far more mobile and less stable by the drought. Second, the massive erosion is happening on a slope, whereas the Grand Canyon is (comparatively) flat. A steeper gradient means less force is needed to set sediment in motion. If you want impressive floods, the Bonneville and Missoula floods are the largest known floods in history. Imagine floods with hundreds or thousands of times the flow rate of Niagara Falls, which cumulatively scoured the Columbia river region by hundreds of feet.
  - chx 10y ago
    Yeah, the ice age water flows were quite something: similar to the spillway in question just slightly bigger, a natural spillway of Lake Agassiz, River Warren have first cut the Traverse Gap, a mile wide and 130 feet gap into the Big Stone moraine and then created a riverbed five miles wide (!!!) and 250 feet deep.
- sib 10y ago
  For comparison, check out the Missoula Floods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods) in eastern Washington... "U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jim O'Connor and Spanish Center of Environmental Studies scientist Gerard Benito have found evidence of at least twenty-five massive floods, the largest discharging ≈10 cubic kilometers per hour (2.7 million m³/s, 13 times the Amazon River). Alternate estimates for the peak flow rate of the largest flood include 17 cubic kilometers per hour and range up to 60 cubic kilometers per hour."
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    The specific mechanisms of those is pretty fascinating: During glaciation periods, ice dams would form, creating massive headwaters. The dams themselves would fail, as Hemming way, gradually, then suddenly: water would first start trickling through, then both erode and melt the dam, until its integrity was compromised and the entire face would fail. Fascinating geology and scarily impressive traces. Makes me wonder what will happen on Greenland or Antarctica.
    - ntelson1s 10y ago
      We're about to see a new piece of ice cleave off about the size of Delaware in Antartica. As ridiculous as that is, I think the most worrisome part is that it will further destabilize the ice shelf and the rate of it falling apart is only supposed to increase by this.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        As such things go, the West Antarctic Peninsula calving is not particularly significant in terms of being or enabling large-scale changes in sea level. The shelf is a shelf, that is, it is already floating in the ocean, and its status as solid or liquid doesn't affect net sea levels. The peninsula itself is a long and thin landmass, which contains relatively little ice. Loss of the shelf does not, of itself, create the risk of greatly accellerated large scale icecap loss. The symbolic and scientific significance are large. This is an exceedingly large ice mass, it may persist for years, possibly decades, in the Southern Ocean. It may pose a threat to shipping (though there's comparatively little through the region), and may have impacts on local biology and ecosystems (habitat loss, habitat gain, habitat change). The mechanisms of loss, calving, migration, persistence, and of resulting changes to land-based glacial flow, will be fascinating. But in terms of portending a drastic increase of ice flows local to it, the calving has little impact, as compared to, say, a shelf loss proximate to the primary Antarctic land mass -- the Ross or Weddel shelves, for example, which have behind them a thousand kilometers and more of kilometer-thick ice. That will be an interesting occurrence. Or the formation and destruction, say, of ice dams, on the Antarctic continent or Greenland, creating meltwater pools, perhaps hundreds of kilometers in extent, and suddenly releasing those, as the dams erode, into the oceans. Similar mechanisms created a badlands landscape in eastern Washington State as the prehistoric Lake Missoula formed and drained, perhaps dozens of times, releasing cubic kilometers of water in massive scours. A similar mechanism, probably in Canada, triggered a catastrophic sea-level rise, measured as I recall in meters, over the course of days to a month. That would also make for an interesting news cycle. Contextualisation of these types of events in the press is exceedingly poor, with a small handsful of exceptions. I've already mentioned Brad Plumer's Vox coverage in this thread, he's among the exceptions.
- ne0n 10y ago
  You might like this analysis of the Auburn Upstream Cofferdam Failure. There's lots of interesting information about planned erosion and dam failure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmwo5nsWfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmwo5nsWfQ
  - emmelaich 10y ago
    That was fantastic. Hypnotic even.
sikhnerd 10y ago
Don't miss the March 1 update by the same guy also : https://imgur.com/gallery/6IyCi https://imgur.com/gallery/6IyCi Really amazing to see
patrickg_zill 10y ago
Oro = "gold" ville = "town" California had a gold rush - part of the gold mining was done using "hydraulic mining", where you use water to scrub away rock and direct it into a channel for the runoff to be run through mining equipment. Be sure, there are plenty of gold prospectors downstream panning or perhaps even using metal detectors in the areas where the waters have receded, looking for golden flakes ("flour") and nuggets. I don't know the exact law in CA but in general you can use human-powered methods without mechanical assistance, to pan for gold (basically what looks like a pie-pan which has ridges inside to catch the heavier gold).
- socialentp 10y ago
  That was my thought exactly, but I was less eager to share. Gold is often found in association with serpentine (I would bet that has something to do with it being California's state rock) and I saw a lot of serpentine in that gouge caused by the side offshoot. Oroville is not too far from Sutter Mill, where gold was first discovered in California. The Feather River is one of the main river systems in what is known as the 'Mother Lode' area of California (yes, that is where that phrase comes from).
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    minor footnote: serpentine is interesting as the state rock and a host for gold, and also as a host for chrysotile asbestos. there was some discussion five or ten years back about changing California's state rock to something else because of that. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14rock.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14rock.html
- yuhong 10y ago
  From http://cw39.com/2017/03/03/californias-oroville-dam-possibly-washing-up-gold/ http://cw39.com/2017/03/03/californias-oroville-dam-possibly... : "Camp dug up $1,500 worth of nuggets while strolling the area and another digger found 75 ounces of gold worth $350,000."
albeebe1 10y ago
I really like the way those videos were presented. Silently, looping, laid out one on top the other, each with a one line description. If that was one long video i would have kept jumping backwards to rewatch all the scenes. Final thought, drone footage continues to blow me away.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Agreed, this is a superb way to present this information. I hope others take note!
- danbruc 10y ago
  I generally tend to think AR und VR are heavily overhyped and I don't believe they will become the next big thing. But I surely hope that we will be able to use VR to better convey the dimensions of things, their size, depth, steepness, and height, things that are almost impossible to convey on normal screens.
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  I agree. I found myself watching some of the videos over and over, and skipping others with only a cursory glance. The text was easy to read. When I watch videos with text I find myself pausing a lot. And nothing is more annoying than trying to rewind a long video to re-watch a 5 second clip: I'm always overshooting and wasting a ton of time. Reminds me of the "multimedia" of the 90s. :)
  - peacelilly 10y ago
    Life Pro Tip: In youtube, you can use the hotkeys 'j', 'k', and 'l' to jump back 10 seconds, pause, and jump forward 10 seconds. It's very convenient. If you want to rewind a minute, hit 'j' 6 times quickly.
- 0003 10y ago
  I feel like I learned more from watching these videos than I did on many of the numerous news articles written at the time. Granted, they were after the fact, but wow.
ufo 10y ago
That is the plan for the Oroville dam, moving forward?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I don't have an official source, but the spillway will be rebuilt. It can be completely closed for an extended period once the rain/melt up season is over. I guess they might have to prepare a diversion to do it, if the work cannot be completed in months. The water management and power provided by the dam pretty much guarantee it will be repaired and continue operating.
- dzdt 10y ago
  I wonder if they will reroute the main spillway down its new channel. That looks like it might be easier than trying to fill the hillside back up all the way to the previous level.
  - zodPod 10y ago
    Plus it clearly prefers that route!
  - Animats 10y ago
    No way. Too close to the base of the dam itself. If anything, it might be rerouted northwest, away from the dam.
- knowaveragejoe 10y ago
  This guy has provides of detail and decent footage about what's already been done and the plans for the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ It's really quite impressive, the scope of the project and how quickly resources have been mobilized to solve the issue.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    Wow, that escalated quickly compared to the imgur videos above...!
maxerickson 10y ago
When the evacuation was announced I sort of hastily pasted into a chat channel that the dam was going to fail. The main dam of course did not fail, but looking at the recent photos, the overall system sure did fail. I hadn't realized the extent to which the spillway had continued to erode.
- mikeash 10y ago
  There's basically no chance of the main dam failing. A failure of the emergency spillway is basically the worst case scenario. For the main dam to fail, water would have to get over the top, and the emergency spillway ensures that the lake stays below that level. A failure of the emergency spillway would still be quite destructive, of course.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Sure, I understand, I've posted as much in previous discussions here. Having the main spillway continue to erode is pretty clearly a failure state of the dam system.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      No argument there. I just wanted to clarify on the dam failure and why it definitely won't happen, in case you weren't aware or other readers weren't.
    - oasisbob 10y ago
      ...a failure state of the dam system. One thing I'm really impressed with is how many redundancies are built in to dams, and how their failures are intended to be gradual and not catastrophic and sudden with a full release of the reservoir contents. ie, use the water to generate electricity. If that's not enough outflow, use the spillway. If the spillway isn't enough, the emergency spillway will drain more. There's even another contingency (with more details), described here, that I haven't heard anywhere else: http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2017/02/14/oroville-dam-site/#comment-214014 http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2017/02/14/oroville-dam-s... > The emergency spillway is not auxiliary, and i don’t believe any competent geologist present during it’s construction would have considered its use as anything but a last ditch effort. It was designed as a fail-safe to prevent the loss of the main dam during the event of a half a million cfs inflow to the lake during a 200 to 1000 year event. The ogee weir extending from the main spillway gates was likely built to protect the main spillway gates. The bedrock was excavated deeper below the ogee weir to find more competent bedrock than the concrete wall extending northwards from the ogee weir, which was built to protect the ogee weir. The lack of concrete in the far NW corner of the parking lot where we saw considerable erosion and helicopters lowering bags of rocks into is not lack of foresight, but designed weakness built into a weak structure. The parking lot is built on highly weathered bedrock and is designed to function as a sacrificial plug located as far from the dam itself as possible, similar to the Auburn coffer dam failure of 1986. As headcutting progresses into the parking lot, water at elevation 900 and above is skimmed off. Once headcutting reaches the lake, then downcutting commences, “safely” lowering the lake till competent bedrock is found, maybe a hundred feet down, leaving the vast majority of the lake still in the lake and Oroville dam still standing, no matter the magnitude of the storm.
ruminasean 10y ago
Wow. This was gorgeous, thorough and horrifying. Thanks for posting.
OrwellianChild 10y ago
I'm trying to understand context around the design of the dam spillway vs. historical rainfall and usual flow... Was this way more rain than it was designed for? Or was it structural failure within design tolerances that caused all the damage?
- madenine 10y ago
  From my understanding, it wasn't so much the rainfall/flow as it was the damage to the spillway. If the spillway doesn't experience structural failure, there's no problem. But it did, so flow through the spillway had to be reduced, which led to the emergency spillway coming into play and they had to continue using the damaged spillway, failure or not.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  As I understand it, the initial failure happened while it was operating inside of design tolerances. The unusually wet year and failure of the emergency spillway then forced them to run the main spillway at a high rate despite the damage.
  - trevyn 10y ago
    I don't believe the emergency spillway actually failed, just that they were afraid it might, and the results of that would be pretty catastrophic.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I guess it ends up depending on how failure is defined for a given context. It didn't fail in the sense that the area still holds back water. It did fail in the sense that they believed it to be unsafe to continue using it.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  This is my understanding: the regular spillway suffered damage while it was being used, and had to be shut off. I don't think it's clear whether that was due to some kind of oversight or it "just happened". If the damage had not occurred, everything would've been fine, but it forced the use of the earthen emergency spillway, which eroded faster than anticipated. There had been calls to upgrade the emergency spillway to concrete, but these were not pursued for reasons of cost. So it was a combination of unexpected damage to the regular spillway and inadequate construction for the emergency one.
zodPod 10y ago
Once the water goes away, the scene is reminiscent of something from Minecraft when someone gets too TNT happy... This is nuts thanks for sharing OP!
ghubbard 10y ago
The videos these clips are taken from can be found on the California Department of Water Resources YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos
- ghubbard 10y ago
  Juan Browne has a good series of video blogs about what is/has been going on at the Oroville dam. In this video from 1st March he visits the site and surrounding areas and talks with some of the engineers working on the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ
ben1040 10y ago
That scour reminds me of what happened after the Taum Sauk hydroelectric reservoir in Missouri failed in 2005, which sent 20 feet of water down a small mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_Station#/media/File:Tscompare.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
wgyn 10y ago
The Oroville Dam is really a crazy undertaking when you consider: 1) it primarily serves to move water all the way from north of Sacramento to San Joaquin Valley / Southern California, 2) despite generating some amount of electricity, it actually consumes 3/4 of that energy just in transporting the water (over mountain ranges). More generally, the State Water Project (of which the dam is a part) is the largest electricity consumer in the state of California. Source: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-California-Natural-History-Guides/dp/0520260163 https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-California-Natural-Histo... (kind of "dry", but extremely informative)
- oxide 10y ago
  Wow! I had no idea the state actually piped water down like that, over mountain ranges no less. or even that the dam served that purpose. thanks for sharing.
- floatrock 10y ago
  That's actually kinda beautiful from an infrastructure point of view -- the infrastructure is self-sufficent and powered using it's own energy. Or more accurately, it jiu-jitsu's the potential energy in the system to redistribute the resource in a more optimal way (optimal defined as "best for the human economy of california")
- zengid 10y ago
  Quite an interesting (and somewhat infuriating) history. Cadillac Desert [1] is also an excellent chronicle of water projects in the west. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244 https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...
nkkollaw 10y ago
Nature is pissed off.
getpost 10y ago
So they built a big strong dam and a "protected" it with a smaller, weaker dam. Seriously, what was the rationale for this design? No criticism or Monday morning quarterbacking here. I'm genuinely curious what the original engineers were thinking.
- getpost 10y ago
  Looks like oasisbob answered, thanks!
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Specifically here, and it's an excellent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785435
danbruc 10y ago
Does anybody happen to know why the water flows down the spillway in waves? Best seen right in the first GIF. I am curious what the mechanism behind that is. Is this a general phenomenon of water flowing down an inclined plane or is it caused by other oscillations, waves on the reservoir, resonances in the outlet system, or something along that line?
- jwmerrill 10y ago
  Not an answer for this particular case, but there are lots of named hydrodynamic instabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_stability#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_stability#Applica...
- dandelany 10y ago
  It seems they are called "roll waves" and happen naturally in this circumstance: http://cee.usc.edu/assets/027/88403.pdf http://cee.usc.edu/assets/027/88403.pdf "The uniform, free surface, turbulent water flows down an inclined, wide, rectangular open channel may become unstable spontaneously, if some sufficient conditions are satisfied. As a result, steady hydraulic conditions are interrupted, including the water depth (or pressure) and flow velocity. When the channel is sufficiently long, the small instabilities on the water surface will develop to a series of intermittent shock-like waves separated by sections of the gradually varying flow."
- hexane360 10y ago
  It basically signifies a loss of energy. You can think of it in the context of collisions, except with a continuous distribution of fluid instead of a discrete distribution of objects. We know that momentum (mv) is always conserved. In this context, we can replace mass with cross-sectional area, because mass in a given cross-section is proportional to the area. V is flow velocity in length/time. So momentum is flow in length^3/time. Energy is 1/2mv^2. If you lose energy, mv is constant and m*v^2 decreases, meaning that v must decrease and m must increase. In this context, that means that the flow is slower with a larger area. This corresponds to an "inelastic collision". In fluid dynamics this is a hydraulic jump. In this situation, most of the energy loss is near the surface, so you end up with moving hydraulic jumps on top of a laminar flow. This doesn't really happen in natural situations, because riverbeds generally aren't this smooth.
marze 10y ago
What isn't discussed much in the press is how close they came to the largest dam disaster in US history. As you can see from the pictures, the "bedrock" under the emergency spillway erodes quickly, even with a modest amount of water flowing over it. How would it have handled a flow 100x larger, if the spillway structure had collapsed? It could have easily eroded down 100 or 200 feet under the intense flow. That would have discharged 50% of the total reservoir volume, destroying tens of billions in real estate and possibly killing thousands. Fortunately, the dam inflow slowed enough, combined with the main spillway outflow, to stop flow over the emergency spillway before it collapsed. So lucky.
- iobase 10y ago
  Living in San Jose - I'll admit that I quickly checked how high my place was above sea level.
  - iobase 10y ago
    Just moved here. I just realized after looking at a map, it's clear a dam failure would have had little to no impact on the sea level closest to San Jose.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    You have a lot more to fear from the Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek (the latter also fed by Anderson Lake spillover).
- natch 10y ago
  Yes I think they were utterly bonkers to assume that a failure of the emergency spillway would be limited to "only" the top 30 feet of water. It seems likely that the torrent would have quickly cut down deeper than just the bottom of the wall.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I think this was intentional. A friend of mine who was a geologist working for the Park Service before he got the coding bug and I hired him in the dot com days told be while this was going on, "You know they are lying right?" I asked about that and he pointed out that the dam was failing, and we were watching it fail. He pointed out the spillway shooting sideways and the amount of progress it had made in just the couple of days between the emergency spillway issue and then. He drew a line on the screen showing how the water cuts away the rocks and that the material above falls in, and becomes like sanding bits in the water flow to cut away still more rock. He estimated that two more weeks of rain at the levels we had experienced would result in total failure. None of which the press was reporting. And we talked about why that might be. And other than the loss of life (which could be minimized by an evacuation order) there wasn't a whole lot they could do. They certainly couldn't repair the dam while water was flowing out of it. But at the same time they would have a several days at least of knowing it was going to fail before it actually did because of the amount of material that would need to be removed. He suggested that it was in everyone's best interest to keep the panic and stress levels low until they needed to be higher. And I can't say I disagreed although felt it would be really annoying to have my stuff washed away when folks knew it was a possibility and didn't even offer me the chance to move it first. So cross your fingers for a sunny March and a slow melt of the Sierra snow pack.
jmspring 10y ago
Currently living up in the Sierras along the Feather River, it's no surprise the amount of water that went rushing down into the Oroville reservoir. Even at about 4500 feet, you had about 3-4 feet of snow that ended up being melted by a significant amount of rain. That is quite a bit of water rushing down that way. Interesting times and the videos are quite educational.
abpavel 10y ago
A classical "we've found a problem. let's fix it later, when it will be too late" approach to infrastructure. I'm sure there will be dozens of "good reasons" why the repairs could not have been done in time, but the theme of the approach to infrastructure problems is disheartening.
dredmorbius 10y ago
As I've commented at length just now, this is an excellent set of visualisations of the damage, and history, of this story. It exceeds all media coverage I've seen of the event (though I've not canvassed all of that coverage). I'd like to also present Wikipedia's article on the Oroville Dam Spillway Crisis of 2017, which is another example of exemplary coverage, and what's been a consistent model for me for vastly better coverage of ongoing large-scale events since the Boxing Day Earthquake and Tsunami of 2004, the first time I'd followed a major story by way of Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis In roughly 25 paragraphs, plus an SVG image essay showing the progression of the damage, apparently original work by a Wikipedia editor, this spells out the background, event, development, implications, and history of the failure. Both the Imgur essay and the Wikpedia article are vastly more informative than any news coverage I've seen. In the case of Wikipedia, much of that comes from its ability to synthesize information from multiple sources and place it in a coherent context. But in both cases, much of the value also comes from a focus on what I see as the salient factors, and an avoidance of fluff. Taking a quick second look at the Wikipedia page, the one fault I'd give it is that for someone immediately affected by evacuation orders, there is insufficient information about what routes were recommended or deprecated. For that, some local news accounts (I'd read the Sacramento Bee and SF Chronicle's coverage in particular) was perhaps more useful, but only just. I'd put hard to the press just what they see their mission as in reporting on such events. Because, much as I appreciate the media, they fell down here. Addendum: Brad Plumer, at Vox, has previously caught my attention as an exceptionally good reporter. His article explaining the Oroville Dam crisis is cited by Wikipedia, and is itself also excellent. I'm calling it out specifically as an example of How to Do Coverage Right: http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/13/14598042/oroville-dam-flood-evacuation http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/13/14598042/oro...
frik 10y ago
Lot's of infrastructure was built in 1950s/60s/70s. A reminder if we let rot our infrastructure, it's not good at all. (not implying it's the case with Oroville dam, haven't followed all news articles) Many concrete and steel structures have a limited life-time of 60-100 years (or so). Big infrastructure projects were built with ease back then, compare it too overblown "paper work" nowadays (not speaking about engineering, but bureaucracy). We should really look how asian countries excel at building infrastructure nowadays (they nowadays build multi-level highways and bridges in no time with ease, whereas building a bridge/tunnels in the west takes many years and cost way too much) and look back in history how to maintain infrastructure well over a timeframe of a few centuries. How many 1950s/60s/70s structures (big things like skyscrappers, dams, bridges, tunnels, subways, etc) are a risk, need repair or are beyond repair and need a replacement - is there a map? Is there a documentation about this topic or some interesting research in this field?
- frik 10y ago
  actually the imgur.com comments were very insightful one of several recommended videos about the topic, this one is quite funny even if it's very real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&feature=youtu.be&t=17m44s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&feature=youtu.be...
deleted 10y ago
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olivermarks 10y ago
the latest is that the banks of the Feather river have collapsed after the huge amounts of water receded. Amazing the power of water... "With high water no longer propping up the shores, the still-wet soil crashed under its own weight, sometimes dragging in trees, rural roads and farmland, they said. “The damage is catastrophic,” said Brad Foster, who has waterfront property in Marysville (Yuba County), about 25 miles south of Lake Oroville. The farmer not only saw 25-foot bluffs collapse, but also lost irrigation lines to his almonds. “When the bank pulled in,” he said, “it pulled the pumps in with it. It busted the steel pipes.” http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Riverbanks-collapse-after-Oroville-Dam-spillway-10976144.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Riverbanks-collap...

848 points by JabavuAdams 10y ago

Seeing what was done here in the matter of days make you realize how things like the Grand Canyon formed over millions of years - then wonder how it isn't bigger. Can't imagine the wealth of knowledge that has been been gained by just watching the erosion patterns as the failure evolved.

arethuza 10y ago
As far as I understand it the Grand Canyon is an example where the river (roughly) stayed in the same place it was the land that uplifted around it. There are examples where rivers are much older than the mountains they pass through - like the Susquehanna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susquehanna_River
- euyyn 10y ago
  The land might have uplifted, but the river still had to carve the same depth nonetheless. I don't think the land happened to raise just on both sides of the river and not below it.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Yes, of course the river has to erode away the rising land but it is staying roughly where it is rather than digging down through land that isn't rising.
- Theodores 10y ago
  Tell me about it! I was cycle-touring in the USA many decades ago and maps back then were Rand McNally, not Google... So it was always a matter of guessing where the hills were. So, I get to Colorado, cycling down through Four Corners with the 'Mittens' etc, hope to get to the camp sites in Grand Canyon. So I follow the 'Little Colorado'. My geography skills told me that the road going next to the river would be going downhill, but I wasn't thinking properly!!! So I follow the Little Colorado expecting an easy drift into camp but instead I have a gale force headwind and serious bits of uphill. So I didn't get there and I had to sleep in the tent held up by rocks with no let up in the wind, with an electrical storm to follow, one where I was the highest metal object around... Next morning I woke up rough and set off on my bike, literally 1/2 mile away up the road were a group of cycle tourists from Yugoslavia and they pitched up in one of the roadside stalls. Had I not given in so easily the previous night I would have had a fun time meeting up with them and drinking properly... I was also oblivious to the time zone change so the next day came with a 'free' hour too. I did go down to the very bottom of the Canyon and up the other side to continue my cycle tour of the wonderful U.S.A. These crazy dams (every river is dammed) were a huge part of my time there, riding across them and camping by them.
jcranmer 10y ago
There are two factors that increase the erosion: First, you went from a prolonged severe drought to a very intense rainfall in a very short amount of time, extremely not helped by the massive surface runoff when the emergency spillway was put in use. I don't know all of the geological processes involved, but the upper soil layers were probably made far more mobile and less stable by the drought. Second, the massive erosion is happening on a slope, whereas the Grand Canyon is (comparatively) flat. A steeper gradient means less force is needed to set sediment in motion. If you want impressive floods, the Bonneville and Missoula floods are the largest known floods in history. Imagine floods with hundreds or thousands of times the flow rate of Niagara Falls, which cumulatively scoured the Columbia river region by hundreds of feet.
- chx 10y ago
  Yeah, the ice age water flows were quite something: similar to the spillway in question just slightly bigger, a natural spillway of Lake Agassiz, River Warren have first cut the Traverse Gap, a mile wide and 130 feet gap into the Big Stone moraine and then created a riverbed five miles wide (!!!) and 250 feet deep.
sib 10y ago
For comparison, check out the Missoula Floods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods) in eastern Washington... "U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jim O'Connor and Spanish Center of Environmental Studies scientist Gerard Benito have found evidence of at least twenty-five massive floods, the largest discharging ≈10 cubic kilometers per hour (2.7 million m³/s, 13 times the Amazon River). Alternate estimates for the peak flow rate of the largest flood include 17 cubic kilometers per hour and range up to 60 cubic kilometers per hour."
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The specific mechanisms of those is pretty fascinating: During glaciation periods, ice dams would form, creating massive headwaters. The dams themselves would fail, as Hemming way, gradually, then suddenly: water would first start trickling through, then both erode and melt the dam, until its integrity was compromised and the entire face would fail. Fascinating geology and scarily impressive traces. Makes me wonder what will happen on Greenland or Antarctica.
  - ntelson1s 10y ago
    We're about to see a new piece of ice cleave off about the size of Delaware in Antartica. As ridiculous as that is, I think the most worrisome part is that it will further destabilize the ice shelf and the rate of it falling apart is only supposed to increase by this.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      As such things go, the West Antarctic Peninsula calving is not particularly significant in terms of being or enabling large-scale changes in sea level. The shelf is a shelf, that is, it is already floating in the ocean, and its status as solid or liquid doesn't affect net sea levels. The peninsula itself is a long and thin landmass, which contains relatively little ice. Loss of the shelf does not, of itself, create the risk of greatly accellerated large scale icecap loss. The symbolic and scientific significance are large. This is an exceedingly large ice mass, it may persist for years, possibly decades, in the Southern Ocean. It may pose a threat to shipping (though there's comparatively little through the region), and may have impacts on local biology and ecosystems (habitat loss, habitat gain, habitat change). The mechanisms of loss, calving, migration, persistence, and of resulting changes to land-based glacial flow, will be fascinating. But in terms of portending a drastic increase of ice flows local to it, the calving has little impact, as compared to, say, a shelf loss proximate to the primary Antarctic land mass -- the Ross or Weddel shelves, for example, which have behind them a thousand kilometers and more of kilometer-thick ice. That will be an interesting occurrence. Or the formation and destruction, say, of ice dams, on the Antarctic continent or Greenland, creating meltwater pools, perhaps hundreds of kilometers in extent, and suddenly releasing those, as the dams erode, into the oceans. Similar mechanisms created a badlands landscape in eastern Washington State as the prehistoric Lake Missoula formed and drained, perhaps dozens of times, releasing cubic kilometers of water in massive scours. A similar mechanism, probably in Canada, triggered a catastrophic sea-level rise, measured as I recall in meters, over the course of days to a month. That would also make for an interesting news cycle. Contextualisation of these types of events in the press is exceedingly poor, with a small handsful of exceptions. I've already mentioned Brad Plumer's Vox coverage in this thread, he's among the exceptions.
ne0n 10y ago
You might like this analysis of the Auburn Upstream Cofferdam Failure. There's lots of interesting information about planned erosion and dam failure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmwo5nsWfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmwo5nsWfQ
- emmelaich 10y ago
  That was fantastic. Hypnotic even.

sikhnerd 10y ago

Don't miss the March 1 update by the same guy also : https://imgur.com/gallery/6IyCi https://imgur.com/gallery/6IyCi Really amazing to see

patrickg_zill 10y ago

Oro = "gold" ville = "town" California had a gold rush - part of the gold mining was done using "hydraulic mining", where you use water to scrub away rock and direct it into a channel for the runoff to be run through mining equipment. Be sure, there are plenty of gold prospectors downstream panning or perhaps even using metal detectors in the areas where the waters have receded, looking for golden flakes ("flour") and nuggets. I don't know the exact law in CA but in general you can use human-powered methods without mechanical assistance, to pan for gold (basically what looks like a pie-pan which has ridges inside to catch the heavier gold).

socialentp 10y ago
That was my thought exactly, but I was less eager to share. Gold is often found in association with serpentine (I would bet that has something to do with it being California's state rock) and I saw a lot of serpentine in that gouge caused by the side offshoot. Oroville is not too far from Sutter Mill, where gold was first discovered in California. The Feather River is one of the main river systems in what is known as the 'Mother Lode' area of California (yes, that is where that phrase comes from).
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  minor footnote: serpentine is interesting as the state rock and a host for gold, and also as a host for chrysotile asbestos. there was some discussion five or ten years back about changing California's state rock to something else because of that. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14rock.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14rock.html
yuhong 10y ago
From http://cw39.com/2017/03/03/californias-oroville-dam-possibly-washing-up-gold/ http://cw39.com/2017/03/03/californias-oroville-dam-possibly... : "Camp dug up $1,500 worth of nuggets while strolling the area and another digger found 75 ounces of gold worth $350,000."

albeebe1 10y ago

I really like the way those videos were presented. Silently, looping, laid out one on top the other, each with a one line description. If that was one long video i would have kept jumping backwards to rewatch all the scenes. Final thought, drone footage continues to blow me away.

mikeash 10y ago
Agreed, this is a superb way to present this information. I hope others take note!
danbruc 10y ago
I generally tend to think AR und VR are heavily overhyped and I don't believe they will become the next big thing. But I surely hope that we will be able to use VR to better convey the dimensions of things, their size, depth, steepness, and height, things that are almost impossible to convey on normal screens.
canadian_voter 10y ago
I agree. I found myself watching some of the videos over and over, and skipping others with only a cursory glance. The text was easy to read. When I watch videos with text I find myself pausing a lot. And nothing is more annoying than trying to rewind a long video to re-watch a 5 second clip: I'm always overshooting and wasting a ton of time. Reminds me of the "multimedia" of the 90s. :)
- peacelilly 10y ago
  Life Pro Tip: In youtube, you can use the hotkeys 'j', 'k', and 'l' to jump back 10 seconds, pause, and jump forward 10 seconds. It's very convenient. If you want to rewind a minute, hit 'j' 6 times quickly.
0003 10y ago
I feel like I learned more from watching these videos than I did on many of the numerous news articles written at the time. Granted, they were after the fact, but wow.

ufo 10y ago

That is the plan for the Oroville dam, moving forward?

maxerickson 10y ago
I don't have an official source, but the spillway will be rebuilt. It can be completely closed for an extended period once the rain/melt up season is over. I guess they might have to prepare a diversion to do it, if the work cannot be completed in months. The water management and power provided by the dam pretty much guarantee it will be repaired and continue operating.
dzdt 10y ago
I wonder if they will reroute the main spillway down its new channel. That looks like it might be easier than trying to fill the hillside back up all the way to the previous level.
- zodPod 10y ago
  Plus it clearly prefers that route!
- Animats 10y ago
  No way. Too close to the base of the dam itself. If anything, it might be rerouted northwest, away from the dam.
knowaveragejoe 10y ago
This guy has provides of detail and decent footage about what's already been done and the plans for the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ It's really quite impressive, the scope of the project and how quickly resources have been mobilized to solve the issue.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  Wow, that escalated quickly compared to the imgur videos above...!

maxerickson 10y ago

When the evacuation was announced I sort of hastily pasted into a chat channel that the dam was going to fail. The main dam of course did not fail, but looking at the recent photos, the overall system sure did fail. I hadn't realized the extent to which the spillway had continued to erode.

mikeash 10y ago
There's basically no chance of the main dam failing. A failure of the emergency spillway is basically the worst case scenario. For the main dam to fail, water would have to get over the top, and the emergency spillway ensures that the lake stays below that level. A failure of the emergency spillway would still be quite destructive, of course.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Sure, I understand, I've posted as much in previous discussions here. Having the main spillway continue to erode is pretty clearly a failure state of the dam system.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    No argument there. I just wanted to clarify on the dam failure and why it definitely won't happen, in case you weren't aware or other readers weren't.
  - oasisbob 10y ago
    ...a failure state of the dam system. One thing I'm really impressed with is how many redundancies are built in to dams, and how their failures are intended to be gradual and not catastrophic and sudden with a full release of the reservoir contents. ie, use the water to generate electricity. If that's not enough outflow, use the spillway. If the spillway isn't enough, the emergency spillway will drain more. There's even another contingency (with more details), described here, that I haven't heard anywhere else: http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2017/02/14/oroville-dam-site/#comment-214014 http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2017/02/14/oroville-dam-s... > The emergency spillway is not auxiliary, and i don’t believe any competent geologist present during it’s construction would have considered its use as anything but a last ditch effort. It was designed as a fail-safe to prevent the loss of the main dam during the event of a half a million cfs inflow to the lake during a 200 to 1000 year event. The ogee weir extending from the main spillway gates was likely built to protect the main spillway gates. The bedrock was excavated deeper below the ogee weir to find more competent bedrock than the concrete wall extending northwards from the ogee weir, which was built to protect the ogee weir. The lack of concrete in the far NW corner of the parking lot where we saw considerable erosion and helicopters lowering bags of rocks into is not lack of foresight, but designed weakness built into a weak structure. The parking lot is built on highly weathered bedrock and is designed to function as a sacrificial plug located as far from the dam itself as possible, similar to the Auburn coffer dam failure of 1986. As headcutting progresses into the parking lot, water at elevation 900 and above is skimmed off. Once headcutting reaches the lake, then downcutting commences, “safely” lowering the lake till competent bedrock is found, maybe a hundred feet down, leaving the vast majority of the lake still in the lake and Oroville dam still standing, no matter the magnitude of the storm.

ruminasean 10y ago

Wow. This was gorgeous, thorough and horrifying. Thanks for posting.

OrwellianChild 10y ago

I'm trying to understand context around the design of the dam spillway vs. historical rainfall and usual flow... Was this way more rain than it was designed for? Or was it structural failure within design tolerances that caused all the damage?

madenine 10y ago
From my understanding, it wasn't so much the rainfall/flow as it was the damage to the spillway. If the spillway doesn't experience structural failure, there's no problem. But it did, so flow through the spillway had to be reduced, which led to the emergency spillway coming into play and they had to continue using the damaged spillway, failure or not.
maxerickson 10y ago
As I understand it, the initial failure happened while it was operating inside of design tolerances. The unusually wet year and failure of the emergency spillway then forced them to run the main spillway at a high rate despite the damage.
- trevyn 10y ago
  I don't believe the emergency spillway actually failed, just that they were afraid it might, and the results of that would be pretty catastrophic.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I guess it ends up depending on how failure is defined for a given context. It didn't fail in the sense that the area still holds back water. It did fail in the sense that they believed it to be unsafe to continue using it.
Analemma_ 10y ago
This is my understanding: the regular spillway suffered damage while it was being used, and had to be shut off. I don't think it's clear whether that was due to some kind of oversight or it "just happened". If the damage had not occurred, everything would've been fine, but it forced the use of the earthen emergency spillway, which eroded faster than anticipated. There had been calls to upgrade the emergency spillway to concrete, but these were not pursued for reasons of cost. So it was a combination of unexpected damage to the regular spillway and inadequate construction for the emergency one.

zodPod 10y ago

Once the water goes away, the scene is reminiscent of something from Minecraft when someone gets too TNT happy... This is nuts thanks for sharing OP!

ghubbard 10y ago

The videos these clips are taken from can be found on the California Department of Water Resources YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos

ghubbard 10y ago
Juan Browne has a good series of video blogs about what is/has been going on at the Oroville dam. In this video from 1st March he visits the site and surrounding areas and talks with some of the engineers working on the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilkU_ivYTqQ

ben1040 10y ago

That scour reminds me of what happened after the Taum Sauk hydroelectric reservoir in Missouri failed in 2005, which sent 20 feet of water down a small mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_Station#/media/File:Tscompare.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...

wgyn 10y ago

The Oroville Dam is really a crazy undertaking when you consider: 1) it primarily serves to move water all the way from north of Sacramento to San Joaquin Valley / Southern California, 2) despite generating some amount of electricity, it actually consumes 3/4 of that energy just in transporting the water (over mountain ranges). More generally, the State Water Project (of which the dam is a part) is the largest electricity consumer in the state of California. Source: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-California-Natural-History-Guides/dp/0520260163 https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-California-Natural-Histo... (kind of "dry", but extremely informative)

oxide 10y ago
Wow! I had no idea the state actually piped water down like that, over mountain ranges no less. or even that the dam served that purpose. thanks for sharing.
floatrock 10y ago
That's actually kinda beautiful from an infrastructure point of view -- the infrastructure is self-sufficent and powered using it's own energy. Or more accurately, it jiu-jitsu's the potential energy in the system to redistribute the resource in a more optimal way (optimal defined as "best for the human economy of california")
zengid 10y ago
Quite an interesting (and somewhat infuriating) history. Cadillac Desert [1] is also an excellent chronicle of water projects in the west. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244 https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...

nkkollaw 10y ago

Nature is pissed off.

getpost 10y ago

So they built a big strong dam and a "protected" it with a smaller, weaker dam. Seriously, what was the rationale for this design? No criticism or Monday morning quarterbacking here. I'm genuinely curious what the original engineers were thinking.

getpost 10y ago
Looks like oasisbob answered, thanks!
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Specifically here, and it's an excellent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785435

danbruc 10y ago

Does anybody happen to know why the water flows down the spillway in waves? Best seen right in the first GIF. I am curious what the mechanism behind that is. Is this a general phenomenon of water flowing down an inclined plane or is it caused by other oscillations, waves on the reservoir, resonances in the outlet system, or something along that line?

jwmerrill 10y ago
Not an answer for this particular case, but there are lots of named hydrodynamic instabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_stability#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodynamic_stability#Applica...
dandelany 10y ago
It seems they are called "roll waves" and happen naturally in this circumstance: http://cee.usc.edu/assets/027/88403.pdf http://cee.usc.edu/assets/027/88403.pdf "The uniform, free surface, turbulent water flows down an inclined, wide, rectangular open channel may become unstable spontaneously, if some sufficient conditions are satisfied. As a result, steady hydraulic conditions are interrupted, including the water depth (or pressure) and flow velocity. When the channel is sufficiently long, the small instabilities on the water surface will develop to a series of intermittent shock-like waves separated by sections of the gradually varying flow."
hexane360 10y ago
It basically signifies a loss of energy. You can think of it in the context of collisions, except with a continuous distribution of fluid instead of a discrete distribution of objects. We know that momentum (mv) is always conserved. In this context, we can replace mass with cross-sectional area, because mass in a given cross-section is proportional to the area. V is flow velocity in length/time. So momentum is flow in length^3/time. Energy is 1/2mv^2. If you lose energy, mv is constant and m*v^2 decreases, meaning that v must decrease and m must increase. In this context, that means that the flow is slower with a larger area. This corresponds to an "inelastic collision". In fluid dynamics this is a hydraulic jump. In this situation, most of the energy loss is near the surface, so you end up with moving hydraulic jumps on top of a laminar flow. This doesn't really happen in natural situations, because riverbeds generally aren't this smooth.

marze 10y ago

What isn't discussed much in the press is how close they came to the largest dam disaster in US history. As you can see from the pictures, the "bedrock" under the emergency spillway erodes quickly, even with a modest amount of water flowing over it. How would it have handled a flow 100x larger, if the spillway structure had collapsed? It could have easily eroded down 100 or 200 feet under the intense flow. That would have discharged 50% of the total reservoir volume, destroying tens of billions in real estate and possibly killing thousands. Fortunately, the dam inflow slowed enough, combined with the main spillway outflow, to stop flow over the emergency spillway before it collapsed. So lucky.

iobase 10y ago
Living in San Jose - I'll admit that I quickly checked how high my place was above sea level.
- iobase 10y ago
  Just moved here. I just realized after looking at a map, it's clear a dam failure would have had little to no impact on the sea level closest to San Jose.
- DrScump 10y ago
  You have a lot more to fear from the Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek (the latter also fed by Anderson Lake spillover).
natch 10y ago
Yes I think they were utterly bonkers to assume that a failure of the emergency spillway would be limited to "only" the top 30 feet of water. It seems likely that the torrent would have quickly cut down deeper than just the bottom of the wall.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I think this was intentional. A friend of mine who was a geologist working for the Park Service before he got the coding bug and I hired him in the dot com days told be while this was going on, "You know they are lying right?" I asked about that and he pointed out that the dam was failing, and we were watching it fail. He pointed out the spillway shooting sideways and the amount of progress it had made in just the couple of days between the emergency spillway issue and then. He drew a line on the screen showing how the water cuts away the rocks and that the material above falls in, and becomes like sanding bits in the water flow to cut away still more rock. He estimated that two more weeks of rain at the levels we had experienced would result in total failure. None of which the press was reporting. And we talked about why that might be. And other than the loss of life (which could be minimized by an evacuation order) there wasn't a whole lot they could do. They certainly couldn't repair the dam while water was flowing out of it. But at the same time they would have a several days at least of knowing it was going to fail before it actually did because of the amount of material that would need to be removed. He suggested that it was in everyone's best interest to keep the panic and stress levels low until they needed to be higher. And I can't say I disagreed although felt it would be really annoying to have my stuff washed away when folks knew it was a possibility and didn't even offer me the chance to move it first. So cross your fingers for a sunny March and a slow melt of the Sierra snow pack.

jmspring 10y ago

Currently living up in the Sierras along the Feather River, it's no surprise the amount of water that went rushing down into the Oroville reservoir. Even at about 4500 feet, you had about 3-4 feet of snow that ended up being melted by a significant amount of rain. That is quite a bit of water rushing down that way. Interesting times and the videos are quite educational.

abpavel 10y ago

A classical "we've found a problem. let's fix it later, when it will be too late" approach to infrastructure. I'm sure there will be dozens of "good reasons" why the repairs could not have been done in time, but the theme of the approach to infrastructure problems is disheartening.

dredmorbius 10y ago

As I've commented at length just now, this is an excellent set of visualisations of the damage, and history, of this story. It exceeds all media coverage I've seen of the event (though I've not canvassed all of that coverage). I'd like to also present Wikipedia's article on the Oroville Dam Spillway Crisis of 2017, which is another example of exemplary coverage, and what's been a consistent model for me for vastly better coverage of ongoing large-scale events since the Boxing Day Earthquake and Tsunami of 2004, the first time I'd followed a major story by way of Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis In roughly 25 paragraphs, plus an SVG image essay showing the progression of the damage, apparently original work by a Wikipedia editor, this spells out the background, event, development, implications, and history of the failure. Both the Imgur essay and the Wikpedia article are vastly more informative than any news coverage I've seen. In the case of Wikipedia, much of that comes from its ability to synthesize information from multiple sources and place it in a coherent context. But in both cases, much of the value also comes from a focus on what I see as the salient factors, and an avoidance of fluff. Taking a quick second look at the Wikipedia page, the one fault I'd give it is that for someone immediately affected by evacuation orders, there is insufficient information about what routes were recommended or deprecated. For that, some local news accounts (I'd read the Sacramento Bee and SF Chronicle's coverage in particular) was perhaps more useful, but only just. I'd put hard to the press just what they see their mission as in reporting on such events. Because, much as I appreciate the media, they fell down here. Addendum: Brad Plumer, at Vox, has previously caught my attention as an exceptionally good reporter. His article explaining the Oroville Dam crisis is cited by Wikipedia, and is itself also excellent. I'm calling it out specifically as an example of How to Do Coverage Right: http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/13/14598042/oroville-dam-flood-evacuation http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/2/13/14598042/oro...

frik 10y ago

Lot's of infrastructure was built in 1950s/60s/70s. A reminder if we let rot our infrastructure, it's not good at all. (not implying it's the case with Oroville dam, haven't followed all news articles) Many concrete and steel structures have a limited life-time of 60-100 years (or so). Big infrastructure projects were built with ease back then, compare it too overblown "paper work" nowadays (not speaking about engineering, but bureaucracy). We should really look how asian countries excel at building infrastructure nowadays (they nowadays build multi-level highways and bridges in no time with ease, whereas building a bridge/tunnels in the west takes many years and cost way too much) and look back in history how to maintain infrastructure well over a timeframe of a few centuries. How many 1950s/60s/70s structures (big things like skyscrappers, dams, bridges, tunnels, subways, etc) are a risk, need repair or are beyond repair and need a replacement - is there a map? Is there a documentation about this topic or some interesting research in this field?

frik 10y ago
actually the imgur.com comments were very insightful one of several recommended videos about the topic, this one is quite funny even if it's very real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&feature=youtu.be&t=17m44s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8&feature=youtu.be...

deleted 10y ago

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olivermarks 10y ago

the latest is that the banks of the Feather river have collapsed after the huge amounts of water receded. Amazing the power of water... "With high water no longer propping up the shores, the still-wet soil crashed under its own weight, sometimes dragging in trees, rural roads and farmland, they said. “The damage is catastrophic,” said Brad Foster, who has waterfront property in Marysville (Yuba County), about 25 miles south of Lake Oroville. The farmer not only saw 25-foot bluffs collapse, but also lost irrigation lines to his almonds. “When the bank pulled in,” he said, “it pulled the pumps in with it. It busted the steel pipes.” http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Riverbanks-collapse-after-Oroville-Dam-spillway-10976144.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Riverbanks-collap...