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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, b
by 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.
- javiramos 10y ago"A picture (or a video I guess :)) is worth a thousand words"
- quakeguy 10y agoA picture is, a vid not so. But you are right. It helps to explain the situation far more easy than a wall of text could.
- dredmorbius 10y agoIt really depends on the video. Some are exemplary. Some not so much.
- falcolas 10y agoAnd the writer's skill. The writer can add emotion, the videos are sterile in comparison (though that sterility has its own beauty).
- ordinary 10y agoAre you sure we shouldn't take the idiom 'a picture is worth a thousand words' literally?
- dredmorbius 10y agoAll communication takes skill. The value of the montage here is editing down a large set of images and footage to the critical and suffient element. As is writing, or audio, or anything else. I see far too many people who think recording is synonymous with authoring or creating. As Stephen Colbert commented some time back (and many others before him), steganography isn't news. I've been kicking around a lot of ideas concerning narrative, the thread that organises a story -- fictional, expository, explanatory, whatever. P.D. James' quote on what the heart of a novel is, bringing order to mystery, is apropriate as well.
- sxcurry 10y agoAgreed- this is the first time I really understood the sequence of events and the scale of the damage.
- natch 10y agoThese images still didn't even show the dam itself, nor the water being released from the normal pathways in the dam, where they also had a few problems (which I can't describe in detail due to ignorance.. I believe it was related to backup of mud and debris from the spillway problems causing backwash that clogged up some of the main dam works). And yet I agree, this has been the best presentation of the event so far.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThe main spillway was the major pathway. There was also drainage through the hydro plant, with a maximum capacity of slightly less than 20,000 CFS. This is given in Wikipedia's coverage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis#Background https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis#Backgrou...
- maxerickson 10y agoThe power plant is apparently not operable when the spillways are releasing a large volume of water: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785549 There is also the issue they are addressing now where debris has blocked water from exiting the power plant pool, preventing operation of the power plant. If they can get the power plant running things will be much improved, as they will be able to continue to drain the reservoir without further erosion of the main spillway and also until it is below the level of the main spillway (which will stop the small amount of water that is currently leaking through the control gates).
- uxp 10y agoOne of the six turbines went operational sometime yesterday (Friday, Mar 3). They are hoping to get a second online by today. https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/07/engineers-assess-spillway-problem-at-oroville-dam/ https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/07/engineers-assess-spillw...
- tomcam 10y agoYou beat me to it. This was pure mastery in the way it presented information.