9 ms·

Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in price to $500M

102 points by DrScump 9y ago

jackfoxy 9y ago
All in all, pretty impressive engineering project, correcting engineering defects dating back more than 50 years.
pdkl95 9y ago
I'm not surprised at the cost, given the nature of the project. Filling in the massive canyons that were cut when the spillway failed has taken an incredible amount of RCC (roller compacted concrete) and man-hours of difficult,dangerous labor. Last I heard the project is still zero injuries, which is really impressive. The blancolirio channel that nraynaud mentioned has a lot of very impressive reporting and flyover footage, and the CA DWR itself has also been posting regular drone footage[1], which I highly recommend for a sense of scale. The spillway is a lot larger than it looks like from most of the overview photos. The closeup drone footage that includes the repair crew shows how massive the structure really is. It's supposed to be able to handle 270,000 cfs outflow (the outflow that damaged the old spillway was "only" ~100,000 cfs). I'd also like to point out this[2] video from blancolirio, which shows just how close the emergency spillway was to being undercut. Yah, this repair is going to be expensive, but it's good to see that proper repairs are being done. Some things are worth the money; the central valley flooding would be a lot worse. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4AGuQ5gMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4AGuQ5gMo
- jessriedel 9y ago
  If no one gets injured on a $500M project, safety standards are almost certainly too stringent.
  - jychang 9y ago
    I feel like this comment is callous, but unfairly downvoted. All projects contain risk. Getting out of bed and taking a shower involves risk, you can slip and fall. The larger the project, the larger the sample size and the more statistical considerations for risk should be managed. Modern western society has greatly lost all tolerance of risk. One difference that struck me for risk culture, compared to the past, is old footage of the 1955 Le Mans disaster: after the catastrophic crash, bystanders themselves helped carry bodies away from the scene, and clean up wreckage. This calmness and social damage tolerance in the process of a disaster is very different from a modern "evacuate and let the professionals handle it" attitude, and I think this is an example of a clear shift in social tolerance of risk. I wonder if the Apollo project would have worked today, instead of in the 1960s. At the scale of an infrastructure project of half a billion dollars, we're not talking about something so big that zero injuries safety standards are bad. However, as you get larger projects, it is statistically impossible to keep risk at 0; I'm not sure how willing modern society is to accept that injuries on large projects is inevitable. Elsewhere in this thread, user JumpCrisscross comments about comparing the cost overrun to the second bid. Following up that comment, the top response is something along the lines of "nobody was injured, so showering the contractor with money is ok". This attitude is prevalent in modern society, and it doesn't really get questioned. Let's pose a hypothetical scenario: If a person has their leg broken, let's say a platform caused someone to fall and hurt their back. Would that amount of damage be worth a $250million additional cost? Think of the amount of social good you can do with $250million. At what level does society overvalue the reduction of risk? This is an important question to ask. Let's not even talk about minor injuries. Let's say 1 person died. If you walk up to a random person, tell them that they have the opportunity to die; BUT their immediate family would receive $125 million dollars, and $125million would be donated to the charity of their choice. I suspect a very large percentage of people would actually be willing to take that offer. And yet, giving an extra $250million to a contractor to build something is considered "worth it" to the general public if no injuries were reported. At which point does society overvalue reducing risk?
    - arethuza 9y ago
      So what value would you put on someone being killed or maimed to save some money? Because that is exactly the calculation you are proposing should happen.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    Considering that even 100 years ago, such a project would have figuratively (and sometimes literally) mixed a good bit of blood into the mortar, yeah. Having worked a little bit of industrial construction in a past life, it's amazing anything gets done at all, if you do follow all the rules. And even then all it takes is one slipup to get somebody hurt.
  - amptorn 9y ago
    Are you volunteering?
  - decker 9y ago
    In that case, what's the "correct" number of deaths that safety standards should target per $1M spent?
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      The statistical value of a human life in the US is ~$10M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life Serious injuries are some fraction of that, e.g., ~$1M for a limb. The correct tradeoff between safety and cost obviously depends on the marginal cost to increase safety, which is known to the project leaders but not us, but I'd be surprised if the optimal number wasn't between 5% and 25% of total cost. 5% of $500M is $25M, so for a project of this size I'd expect, as a lower bound, at least one death and a dozen serious injuries. To be clear: by not making this trade off and by spending huge amounts of money to ensure such tiny injury rates, we are wasting resources that could be spent on saving lives at the rate of $10M/life. Indeed, this number is the key threshold by which the EPA decides which environmental interventions to fund, or the NHTSA decides which traffic safety measure to take.
theyregreat 9y ago
My folks live in the nearby area not downstream. That’s what happens when preventative maintenance is ignored by reactive bureaucrats. Pennywise, ... Here’s one of the YT channels that’s been following the progress, filming and combining DWR footage. https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio
mathattack 9y ago
Lots of patterns here similar to large IT overruns.
nraynaud 9y ago
For the people interested the blancolirio YouTube channel does an incredible job reporting on the dam. https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio
- WestCoastJustin 9y ago
  Highly recommended. He is much much better than any news channel / newspaper article you'll read about the topic. He's pretty awesome.
- UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
  He keeps referencing a "plunge pool" half way down the new slipway. Does anyone happen to know what the purpose of the plunge pool is?
  - imcrs 9y ago
    I think it's the natural depression that eroded where the water first comes off the top half of the chute.
    - nraynaud 9y ago
      I watched everything and I confirm, it’s what was the crack, and it doesn’t exist anymore, it’s filled in. At about the same place the are putting an aeration feature to mix air in the water and make it less destructive to the concrete downstream.
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
    It's simply where the water from the broken spillway plunged down into the hillside. They talk about two plunge pools (upper and lower), basically two different depressions in the stable bedrock. They do not have a purpose, but are rather just the result of the disaster.
- robertelder 9y ago
  I'll second that. I've been checking in on his videos every once in a while ever since the original Oroville dam crisis.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Kiewit, the Nebraska-based construction firm that has the main contract to rebuild the main spillway and emergency spillway at Oroville, the nation’s tallest dam, estimated in its winning bid in April that the work would cost at least $275 million. But the price tag has now grown to at least $500 million Out of curiosity, what was the runner-up bid? Is there no mechanism to re-open bidding when the circumstances change? What prevents me from bidding $1 and then busting it to $1 billion after winning?
- nraynaud 9y ago
  I'm not saying the economic aspect is very good, but I would make 2 points: they are more or less on time, and nobody got hurt. That probably desserve a shower of money. Those people were using the biggest dry ice making machine in the world to try to pour not too shitty a concrete on schedule, next to a blasting zone, under a leaking gate (yeah, the gate is leaking it just stopped leaking because the water is lower than the gate now), under high voltage power lines, without anyone getting hurt.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Those are good points, the Crystal Springs Dam earthquake retrofit in San Mateo County is almost fifteen years into the scheduled five year earthquake retrofit. :)
    - amluto 9y ago
      I thought the dam retrofit itself was done and the remaining work is just road work.
      - stevenwoo 9y ago
        You are right but the work is ten years overdue from the first estimate on the first sign they put up next to the Crystal Springs trailhead where the road is closed to traffic. Eventually they covered up the last two digits on the year number sign last time I checked with replaceable numbers like the days without accident sign in the nuclear power plant that is Homer Simpson's workplace.
m0llusk 9y ago
cost of not repairing is still higher
- pstuart 9y ago
  And of course the cost of proper maintenance would have been much less.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  Well... obviously... otherwise why would they be doing it?
- thevardanian 9y ago
  Yes. However don't let that kind of thing open for exploit. People tend to like these kinds of disasters as opportunity to make hefty profits.
mrb 9y ago
The total construction cost of the Oroville dam, ending in 1968 was $480 million. Inflation-adjusted, that's $3.5 billion in 2017. $500 million just to repair the spillway seems excessive... See table 8 in http://www.water.ca.gov/swpao/docs/bulletins/bulletin132/Bulletin132-69.pdf http://www.water.ca.gov/swpao/docs/bulletins/bulletin132/Bul...
- crooked-v 9y ago
  Modern safety standards in construction are much more stringent than late-60s safety standards in construction.
  - Amygaz 9y ago
    And modern requirement for additional administrative roles and salaries, both directly and indirectly linked to that business, have probably more to do with inflation...
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Yet there's no way you'd ever build Oroville today for 3.5bn. It seems inflation in large scale civil engineering has gone up at least a factor of ten more than general inflation.
narrator 9y ago
They should do an ICO to raise money to fix it. Citizens shall pay for their water in ETH to the token holders. Kidding, but in 20 years I might not be.
uoaei 9y ago
Why is this on HN? Whenever non-tech posts are put up on HN, they're ruthlessly hounded. What does this article have to do with tech that absolves it? The fact that it comes from San Jose's newspaper?
- _ph_ 9y ago
  It is a tech related post, especially an engineering related process. And beyond the importance of the Oroville dam for California, the repairs are an interesting case in project management. They have a fix deadline (Nov. 1) and not meeting the deadline was not an option. And it looks like they are making the deadline, what an achievement!
  - uoaei 9y ago
    That's quite a stretch, though, don't you realize? The H in HN stands for "hacker". I fail to see the connection to any "hacking" here in the article other than maybe "hacking bureaucracy to make a dam", but you must see the incredible lengths to which one must stretch the notion of hacker-related ideas to apply to this article. There are other non-SWE-related topics that certainly qualify, like overcoming natural barriers in engineering a la the Iceland forest article that was posted a couple days ago. This news article in OP is little more than a status update about something that affects California's water infrastructure and nothing else.
- dang 9y ago
  Non-tech posts aren't ruthlessly hounded. There are many non-tech posts and the intellectually interesting ones are warmly welcome. People who think otherwise need to read the HN guidelines—the mandate of the site is in the first paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
napa15 9y ago
500 million? Wow. Can't they just lay down a big pipe and decrease the water level that way? Seems to me like just about any solution would be cheaper than 500 million...
- dragandj 9y ago
  The spillway is a sort of a big half-pipe.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Largest syphon tube in the World?
Amygaz 9y ago
I feel like this thread is ignoring the main point, which is that preventative maintenance would have been cheaper. Also, when this thing started falling, they could have stopped it earlier, which would have resulted in cheaper repair, but no... Sure we would not have awesome drone footages, and I like the discussions on worker's risk and contractor down-biding, but at the end of the day it's a lot of money for something preventable. Same can be said of worker's riks, health care, environment, retirement.

102 points by DrScump 9y ago

All in all, pretty impressive engineering project, correcting engineering defects dating back more than 50 years.

I'm not surprised at the cost, given the nature of the project. Filling in the massive canyons that were cut when the spillway failed has taken an incredible amount of RCC (roller compacted concrete) and man-hours of difficult,dangerous labor. Last I heard the project is still zero injuries, which is really impressive. The blancolirio channel that nraynaud mentioned has a lot of very impressive reporting and flyover footage, and the CA DWR itself has also been posting regular drone footage[1], which I highly recommend for a sense of scale. The spillway is a lot larger than it looks like from most of the overview photos. The closeup drone footage that includes the repair crew shows how massive the structure really is. It's supposed to be able to handle 270,000 cfs outflow (the outflow that damaged the old spillway was "only" ~100,000 cfs). I'd also like to point out this[2] video from blancolirio, which shows just how close the emergency spillway was to being undercut. Yah, this repair is going to be expensive, but it's good to see that proper repairs are being done. Some things are worth the money; the central valley flooding would be a lot worse. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4AGuQ5gMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4AGuQ5gMo

jessriedel 9y ago
If no one gets injured on a $500M project, safety standards are almost certainly too stringent.
- jychang 9y ago
  I feel like this comment is callous, but unfairly downvoted. All projects contain risk. Getting out of bed and taking a shower involves risk, you can slip and fall. The larger the project, the larger the sample size and the more statistical considerations for risk should be managed. Modern western society has greatly lost all tolerance of risk. One difference that struck me for risk culture, compared to the past, is old footage of the 1955 Le Mans disaster: after the catastrophic crash, bystanders themselves helped carry bodies away from the scene, and clean up wreckage. This calmness and social damage tolerance in the process of a disaster is very different from a modern "evacuate and let the professionals handle it" attitude, and I think this is an example of a clear shift in social tolerance of risk. I wonder if the Apollo project would have worked today, instead of in the 1960s. At the scale of an infrastructure project of half a billion dollars, we're not talking about something so big that zero injuries safety standards are bad. However, as you get larger projects, it is statistically impossible to keep risk at 0; I'm not sure how willing modern society is to accept that injuries on large projects is inevitable. Elsewhere in this thread, user JumpCrisscross comments about comparing the cost overrun to the second bid. Following up that comment, the top response is something along the lines of "nobody was injured, so showering the contractor with money is ok". This attitude is prevalent in modern society, and it doesn't really get questioned. Let's pose a hypothetical scenario: If a person has their leg broken, let's say a platform caused someone to fall and hurt their back. Would that amount of damage be worth a $250million additional cost? Think of the amount of social good you can do with $250million. At what level does society overvalue the reduction of risk? This is an important question to ask. Let's not even talk about minor injuries. Let's say 1 person died. If you walk up to a random person, tell them that they have the opportunity to die; BUT their immediate family would receive $125 million dollars, and $125million would be donated to the charity of their choice. I suspect a very large percentage of people would actually be willing to take that offer. And yet, giving an extra $250million to a contractor to build something is considered "worth it" to the general public if no injuries were reported. At which point does society overvalue reducing risk?
  - arethuza 9y ago
    So what value would you put on someone being killed or maimed to save some money? Because that is exactly the calculation you are proposing should happen.
- megaman22 9y ago
  Considering that even 100 years ago, such a project would have figuratively (and sometimes literally) mixed a good bit of blood into the mortar, yeah. Having worked a little bit of industrial construction in a past life, it's amazing anything gets done at all, if you do follow all the rules. And even then all it takes is one slipup to get somebody hurt.
- amptorn 9y ago
  Are you volunteering?
- decker 9y ago
  In that case, what's the "correct" number of deaths that safety standards should target per $1M spent?
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    The statistical value of a human life in the US is ~$10M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life Serious injuries are some fraction of that, e.g., ~$1M for a limb. The correct tradeoff between safety and cost obviously depends on the marginal cost to increase safety, which is known to the project leaders but not us, but I'd be surprised if the optimal number wasn't between 5% and 25% of total cost. 5% of $500M is $25M, so for a project of this size I'd expect, as a lower bound, at least one death and a dozen serious injuries. To be clear: by not making this trade off and by spending huge amounts of money to ensure such tiny injury rates, we are wasting resources that could be spent on saving lives at the rate of $10M/life. Indeed, this number is the key threshold by which the EPA decides which environmental interventions to fund, or the NHTSA decides which traffic safety measure to take.

theyregreat 9y ago

My folks live in the nearby area not downstream. That’s what happens when preventative maintenance is ignored by reactive bureaucrats. Pennywise, ... Here’s one of the YT channels that’s been following the progress, filming and combining DWR footage. https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio

mathattack 9y ago

Lots of patterns here similar to large IT overruns.

nraynaud 9y ago

For the people interested the blancolirio YouTube channel does an incredible job reporting on the dam. https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio

WestCoastJustin 9y ago
Highly recommended. He is much much better than any news channel / newspaper article you'll read about the topic. He's pretty awesome.
UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
He keeps referencing a "plunge pool" half way down the new slipway. Does anyone happen to know what the purpose of the plunge pool is?
- imcrs 9y ago
  I think it's the natural depression that eroded where the water first comes off the top half of the chute.
  - nraynaud 9y ago
    I watched everything and I confirm, it’s what was the crack, and it doesn’t exist anymore, it’s filled in. At about the same place the are putting an aeration feature to mix air in the water and make it less destructive to the concrete downstream.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
  It's simply where the water from the broken spillway plunged down into the hillside. They talk about two plunge pools (upper and lower), basically two different depressions in the stable bedrock. They do not have a purpose, but are rather just the result of the disaster.
robertelder 9y ago
I'll second that. I've been checking in on his videos every once in a while ever since the original Oroville dam crisis.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> Kiewit, the Nebraska-based construction firm that has the main contract to rebuild the main spillway and emergency spillway at Oroville, the nation’s tallest dam, estimated in its winning bid in April that the work would cost at least $275 million. But the price tag has now grown to at least $500 million Out of curiosity, what was the runner-up bid? Is there no mechanism to re-open bidding when the circumstances change? What prevents me from bidding $1 and then busting it to $1 billion after winning?

nraynaud 9y ago
I'm not saying the economic aspect is very good, but I would make 2 points: they are more or less on time, and nobody got hurt. That probably desserve a shower of money. Those people were using the biggest dry ice making machine in the world to try to pour not too shitty a concrete on schedule, next to a blasting zone, under a leaking gate (yeah, the gate is leaking it just stopped leaking because the water is lower than the gate now), under high voltage power lines, without anyone getting hurt.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Those are good points, the Crystal Springs Dam earthquake retrofit in San Mateo County is almost fifteen years into the scheduled five year earthquake retrofit. :)
  - amluto 9y ago
    I thought the dam retrofit itself was done and the remaining work is just road work.
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      You are right but the work is ten years overdue from the first estimate on the first sign they put up next to the Crystal Springs trailhead where the road is closed to traffic. Eventually they covered up the last two digits on the year number sign last time I checked with replaceable numbers like the days without accident sign in the nuclear power plant that is Homer Simpson's workplace.

m0llusk 9y ago

cost of not repairing is still higher

pstuart 9y ago
And of course the cost of proper maintenance would have been much less.
chrisseaton 9y ago
Well... obviously... otherwise why would they be doing it?
thevardanian 9y ago
Yes. However don't let that kind of thing open for exploit. People tend to like these kinds of disasters as opportunity to make hefty profits.

mrb 9y ago

The total construction cost of the Oroville dam, ending in 1968 was $480 million. Inflation-adjusted, that's $3.5 billion in 2017. $500 million just to repair the spillway seems excessive... See table 8 in http://www.water.ca.gov/swpao/docs/bulletins/bulletin132/Bulletin132-69.pdf http://www.water.ca.gov/swpao/docs/bulletins/bulletin132/Bul...

crooked-v 9y ago
Modern safety standards in construction are much more stringent than late-60s safety standards in construction.
- Amygaz 9y ago
  And modern requirement for additional administrative roles and salaries, both directly and indirectly linked to that business, have probably more to do with inflation...
ComputerGuru 9y ago
Yet there's no way you'd ever build Oroville today for 3.5bn. It seems inflation in large scale civil engineering has gone up at least a factor of ten more than general inflation.

narrator 9y ago

They should do an ICO to raise money to fix it. Citizens shall pay for their water in ETH to the token holders. Kidding, but in 20 years I might not be.

uoaei 9y ago

Why is this on HN? Whenever non-tech posts are put up on HN, they're ruthlessly hounded. What does this article have to do with tech that absolves it? The fact that it comes from San Jose's newspaper?

_ph_ 9y ago
It is a tech related post, especially an engineering related process. And beyond the importance of the Oroville dam for California, the repairs are an interesting case in project management. They have a fix deadline (Nov. 1) and not meeting the deadline was not an option. And it looks like they are making the deadline, what an achievement!
- uoaei 9y ago
  That's quite a stretch, though, don't you realize? The H in HN stands for "hacker". I fail to see the connection to any "hacking" here in the article other than maybe "hacking bureaucracy to make a dam", but you must see the incredible lengths to which one must stretch the notion of hacker-related ideas to apply to this article. There are other non-SWE-related topics that certainly qualify, like overcoming natural barriers in engineering a la the Iceland forest article that was posted a couple days ago. This news article in OP is little more than a status update about something that affects California's water infrastructure and nothing else.
dang 9y ago
Non-tech posts aren't ruthlessly hounded. There are many non-tech posts and the intellectually interesting ones are warmly welcome. People who think otherwise need to read the HN guidelines—the mandate of the site is in the first paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

napa15 9y ago

500 million? Wow. Can't they just lay down a big pipe and decrease the water level that way? Seems to me like just about any solution would be cheaper than 500 million...

dragandj 9y ago
The spillway is a sort of a big half-pipe.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Largest syphon tube in the World?

Amygaz 9y ago

I feel like this thread is ignoring the main point, which is that preventative maintenance would have been cheaper. Also, when this thing started falling, they could have stopped it earlier, which would have resulted in cheaper repair, but no... Sure we would not have awesome drone footages, and I like the discussions on worker's risk and contractor down-biding, but at the end of the day it's a lot of money for something preventable. Same can be said of worker's riks, health care, environment, retirement.