Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Oroville aux spill to fail within the next 60 min!!

Will it take out southern Cali.

Ooh. Burn.

You didn't clarify your comment, c ock gobbler.

Just added a pic / drawing to a post above, sorry I didn't put it there first go round,....I THINK that what we're seeing in that hole immediately below that spill wall IS the actual core structure of the "impervious wall".
The minimalist philosophy that defines the engineering of "Earth Filled Dams" DICTATES that that core structure has to have massive weight (overburden) bearing on it from above,.....
....washing it all away is not a very bright idea, and one has to ask, WTF else did they EXPECT that overburden to do ?

GTC

http://jaytaylormedia.com/who-will-be-blamed-if-the-oroville-dam-fails/





"In a lengthy analysis of the political battle to win approval for the dam, historian Marc Reisner recounted how Governor Pat Brown — father of the current governor — repeatedly fabricated numbers about the dam’s true cost in order to hoodwink the voters into approving the enormously expensive project through a bond issue in 1959.

Reisner showed that honest estimates concluded the dam would cost approximately 3 billion dollars — more than 20 billion in 2016 dollars — so Brown simply invented a number of 1.75 billion. Reisner concluded that Brown knew that “not one” state would vote for such a huge bond issue, so Brown hid the real cost. To get it passed, Brown did what politicians always do — he engaged in fear-mongering and suggested to Southern California voters that they’d run out of water without the new dam.

But even these methods nearly failed to get the dam approved. 48 of 50 counties in the state voted against the dam. The measure only passed because southern Californians, long used to cheap, subsidized water, were happy to see the rest of the state go into debt to pay for even more water."

Crossfire, neither spillway is on the earthfill dam.

Interesting that Pat Brown resided over the planning, financing and construction over the dam.

And his son Jerry Brown resided over the maintenance, and both appeared to have failed.

Yup, a 10X and right on the money

again, think cavitation

That headwall and grout curtain are ONLY valid with OVERBURDEN holing em' down.

the main spillway is excavated into rock at the top.

Sycamore

Metamorphic rocks often cause engineering problems, as such rocks are often folded, resulting in tectonized/fractured areas in an otherwise stable rock mass. Also, the particular structure (the geological correct term is texture) of such rocks poses a problem. Metamorphic foliation forms when elongated or plate-shaped minerals (like micas) are forced by tectonic pressure into a same alignment. Between the minerals the parallel surfaces of the foliation form weak zones, prone to break. If such surfaces are tilted entire packets of rock can easily slip and be washed away by water.

Right, syc,....they both sit on solidly agglomerated seam and fault free GRANITE bedrock,the very bones of the fuggin' earth.
....no, wait,....la la land pixie dust poofing makes whatever that schidt is even STOUTER than that.

Thanks for getting us all up to speed.

GTC

I doubt if you will be up to speed on this topic, but I appreciate your occasional willingness to learn.

Current forecast is for three storms in a row.

Light rain

"Light rain

Heavy rain

The dame should be 60 feed down when #3 hits

Imagine this hole



Being exposed to this



Anyone else wonder where the huge boulders in the second phot came from?

Dug up and shoved downhill by the torrent?

Yup, and people do not realize how lucky folks were the Teton Dam collapsed while being filled instead of 130' below the top. The next 100' was a Hell of a lot more water than the first.

There was also similar "bedrock" there that was the problem. And it was volcanic tuff as I recall with better properties than foliated basalt.

That's an interesting statement, since basalt can't be foliated - it's igneous.