[Sequoyah101]

I can’t help it. I gotta comment. This is like a farce from a cheap novel. I watched the video and read the article and I’m still LMAO! This “massive effort” is no more than a fart in a whirlwind! These people are truly nucking futs. Who planned this operation, the press agent for gov moonbeam?

1. The baggies of rocks are window dressing
2. This can’t be a surgical effort. It requires mass and quarry stone
3. Why stage from so far away if the helos cost so much?
4. You can haul by truck to hundreds of feet away then if you must helo go from there. The boat ramp parking area looks like a good place for a second staging area and to attack from both sides.
6. This effort is to placate the sheeple. IF they had any sense they would be working to spread the stilling basin or at least create on below the emergency spillway instead of running it into a channel at the abutment of the main spillway
7. Start with a small fleet of dozers and track hoes to push out and lfatten the toe of the area of the emergency spillway all the way across the 1750 foot spread and start dumping and pushing a hell of a lot of quarry stone into the abutment of the main control structure with maybe a layer or two of geofabric draped below the rock?
9. If they were to spread the water and get the velocity low enough across the toe of the emergency spillway it looks like an application for an Fabriform blanket with accelerated grout then some rock.
8. This looks more like a political posturing than engineering. If I were an engineer on this project I’d resign. Better to shovel crap with a spoon than to be humiliated and associated with this kind of kabuki theatre

This country is getting to the point where we can’t even raise a good piss-up in a brewery.

Military grade helicopters? Seriously?

[Swordmaker]

4. You can haul by truck to hundreds of feet away then if you must helo go from there. The boat ramp parking area looks like a good place for a second staging area and to attack from both sides.

Good idea except for one little problem: the road to that boat ramp parking area ran below the dam, across the emergency spillway, and essentially no longer exists for a substantial portion of it. . . it washed away in the first few hours of the catastrophic failure. There is no way to truck rock, heavy equipment, etc., to that location. Perhaps they could boat them there?

[KC Burke]

I will second a lot of the points you make at #63. A lot of this is to just be “doing something.”

[TXnMA]

Your post is the most intelligent and thougthful on this thread. Staging at the lot on the far side of the spillway from the dam (where the erosion is greatest) makes excellent sense.

Also, the use of geotextiles + grout is an excellent suggestion. (If they have any paper mills in the area, they discard thousands of feet of "Dryer felt" [actually super-strong resin-coated open weave fabric] that makes an excellent geotextile.) They have difficulty disposing of it, and would gladly donate & load the scrap fabric onto trucks with their own cranes...

[Repeal The 17th]

"... 4...The boat ramp parking area..."
-
Not sure which parking area you are referring to,
but the big one on the left side (west side) goes underwater
before the lake level reaches the emergency spillway.
So it is not a good staging area...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3524221/posts?page=697#697

[Dustoff45]

Military grade helicopters? Seriously?

When I saw they were using a H-60 Blackhawk then I knew they were not serious.

I want to see a serious effort to get large sets of siphon pipe going across that emergency spillway to get the water below the primary spillway so they can get in and get repairs started.

These people are not problem-solvers (Pioneers), they are placaters (settlers). Their job has been to maintain (sit on) a situation. They have the wrong mindset. The Sheriff probably saw the CHP video that showed all of the fresh erosion below the parking lot and had to act on very limited information. Go back and look at the pictures of Grand Teton dam and take a lesson of how quickly water erosion can get out of control.

[GOPJ]

If they were to spread the water and get the velocity low enough across the toe of the emergency spillway it looks like an application for an Fabriform blanket with accelerated grout then some rock. This looks more like a political posturing than engineering. If I were an engineer on this project I’d resign. Better to shovel crap with a spoon than to be humiliated and associated with this kind of kabuki theatre...

The 'oh so vile ones' in the MSM are impressed with large noisy helicopters... "If it bleeds it leads..."