Posted on 02/12/2017 4:26:47 PM PST by janetjanet998
Edited on 02/12/2017 9:33:58 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The Oroville Dam is the highest in the nation.
Juan Browne video walks through images & analysis of the Independent Failure Analysis Report (CCRM report, Robert Bea, Center for Catastrophic Risk Management).
California water officials say they have awarded a contract to repair Oroville Dam’s two damaged spillways to a Nebraska construction company.
The Department of Water Resources announced Monday that Kiewit Corp. of Omaha was awarded a $275 million contract to repair the state’s second largest reservoir.
Kiewit made the lowest bid of the three companies but its offer is still higher than the $231 million estimated by the department. The department said Saturday it estimated repair costs at $220 million but corrected that figure on Monday after finding an error.
Officials have said they want to have the work done by Nov. 1.
AP
Thanks for keeping us up to date. Much appreciated.
Many many thanks for your work here and I am glad that Mr. Bea was able to use your graphics !!!
Your post is a keeper!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3524221/posts?page=3160#3160
Please excuse as I Opine…
Sure enough, DWR has a new PR tact to the revelation of a 78 page Expert's Spillway Failure Prelim Report. Responding by Email to SacBee, DWR's spokesperson is downplaying -almost "dismissing"- the key facts of "original design drawings", as a part of Robert Bea's report. Ignored by DWR, is the tremendous supporting evidence of a huge volume of the forensic photographs & his insightful engineering analysis. This new PR messaging tact is very similar to a technique called "FUD" - whereby a messaging strategy of "Fear Uncertainty Doubt" is engaged in an attempt to neutralize a "spot on analysis". DWR is effectively trying to cast dispersions of "uncertainty" & "doubt" on the report by claiming DWR has access to the true forensic facts, evidence, and other information, just "ignore" the report's use of "original design drawings", as DWR has "better information".
"Never mind, that there are over 5 linear miles of cracks in the entire spillway from nearly every single drain line run….Don't believe that these cracks are observable from outer space via satellite images…. Ignore the photographs of all the patching on these miles of cracks…. Don't look at the slab that fractured precisely at a drain line run left open for the world to see in DWR's own photographic evidence... Forget about the "jetting" & gushing sidewall drains where large volumes of damaging erosive underflow occurred under the spillway slabs…. Don't listen to Dam Safety Experts who have been sounding warnings & alarms to dam owners for years about "hydraulic jacking" from Stagnation Pressure... Forget that our own DWR photos reveal the dangerous Stagnation Pressure issue in spades…. Forget about the turbulent brown water erosion of the eroded & weathered rock & substrate images as the spillway was dying…. You are "seeing things" if you see some of the drains not working….Who are you going to believe?…. Us (DWR) or your lying eyes (the mountain of report's photographic evidence)?…. [after all, the report had the audacity to show original design drawings that just so happen to match the report's 70+ pages' mountain of photographic evidence.]"
Deny, Deflect, FUD, Deny. How about a new PR tactic? Come clean… it's called honesty….. End of "Opine".
= = DWR's response: SacBee article: (emphasis mine): “The forensics analysis team is reviewing thousands of documents and recent geotechnical information taken from the spillway,” Mellon said in an email. “They will base their analysis not on original design drawings but on actual construction – there is a difference – and all of the facts, which are being collected and evaluated. … We look forward to the team’s final report, which will be made public.”
= = end clip
== SacBee & Robert Bea's comments: (emphasis mine): "Bea’s 78-page report, which he has shared with The Sacramento Bee and other media outlets, says the spillway was undermined by a variety of factors, including thin concrete, the presence of “soils and incompetent rock” below the concrete and evidence of water undermining that material. Bea’s findings dovetailed with the conclusions made last month by four consultants advising the state on Oroville’s repairs. Subsequent reports by those consultants have been sealed, along with several other documents connected to the Oroville recovery effort. Bea said he’s troubled that federal and state officials are citing terrorism concerns to block access to these reports. Greater third-party scrutiny could help guide the $275 million repair job at Oroville and point to flaws in other dams, he said. “In essence, their fear for security is something that was largely built up in their own minds as a defensive measure,” said Bea, a retired engineer whose credentials include conducting an independent investigation into why the levees around New Orleans failed in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina.
= = end clip
Expert performed autopsy on Oroville spillway collapse. Here’s what he found.
Robert Bea & the Center of Catastrophic Risk Analysis (CCRA) is performing a notable public service in their work & including sharing information & time with the media. I believe there will be political "heat" brought to bear on CCRA as this is a direct threat to leadership all of the way to the top in the CA Governorship. Since the US taxpayer may be on the hook for these disaster mitigating costs, this story needs to get national attention, especially to the US public.
You asked and I happened to be catching up and saw your request... You are welcome.
Ping for later
the lake only fell about 6 inches yesterday and inflows are still 28000 or so...
lake at 861.52 feet...
more rain expected tonight may stall the fall further but after that it looks like a dry spell
bottom line: the lake isn’t falling as fast as expected when they opened the spillway last friday
inflows expected at 20,000 cfs at this time and lake level around 858.5 the power plant should be up and running at half capacity this weekend
https://twitter.com/KCRAMax/status/852625562229129216/photo/1
OROVILLE DAM MANAGERS MADE MISSTEPS IN HANDLING CRISIS, AP REPORTS
http://abc30.com/weather/oroville-dam-managers-made-missteps-in-handling-crisis/1891590/
Wow, I think we all collectively owe a debt of gratitude to EarthResearcher and other members of this forum who have collectively brought these dam issues to light! With the mainstream media now openly publishing Professor Bea’s report, it looks like the cat’s finally out of the bag.
Prof Bea appears to use many of the same pictures, diagrams, and assessments that were brought up in this forum and at Metabunk. Perhaps great minds think alike, with the rest of us just in awe. Bea’s report is light on techno-babble and heavy on pictures, so it appears configured for direct public consumption.
I had a buddy who was a infamous EECS professor at Berkeley. He got offered 50% more to move east to the Ivy League, but didn’t take it. I asked him: what motivates UCB Professors? Not money, not fame, but “impact”. I think Bea’s report was written for maximum public impact.
His paper, like much of EarthReasercher’s assessments, calls heavily on DWR’s own dam reports. It will be difficult for DWR to publicly claim: “hey, we don’t know how this happened”, when their own (now openly published) reports say otherwise in a publicly consumable format. Their next press conference may not be so cordial. If the press catches on to FCO, Hyatt, and Dam issues as well - things could get testy.
Since there were dam field engineers who recently worked on the spillway repair, one must assume they were aware of the issues. How could you look at the volume of water spurting out those drains, and not wonder: is that healthy? But these issues were most probably grandfathered in when they got hired, and they were probably told that the politics were way too FUBAR to change them.
So, thinking back to when I was a Junior Civil Engineer, eager to change the world, how would one go about it? Assuming that GPR and bore-hole camera inspection were not included in the HQ configured contract, what Q&D field test could be done assess if the drains were actually repaired functionally?
A simple minded field test would be to just fill the upstream drain vent tube with water. If it immediately came down the sidewall nozzle, then the subsurface horizontal drain tube must be OK. If it half filled, and then slowed down, you’d know there was a clog, and approximately where. If you poured in huge volumes of water, you’d know that the side drains had large under-slab voids. If you plugged the output port, creating a backup head, the water would either migrate to an adjacent drain, or perk up as wet spots through cracks in the slab. This could help identify unknown slab fissures, and/or validate various sealing efforts. This doesn’t require any extensive technology, and could have been done 50 years ago.
Question to EarthReasercher and other informed experts: why not just do simple pressure tests of spillway drains? Couldn’t they do this for the remaining spillway and/or new construction? Wouldn’t the volume/flowrates they get help validate their GPR and borehole camera based subslab flow modeling?
For the new spillway construction, and even for the sections of the old spillway that they don’t have time to replace, it would seem useful to place pressure and flow meters in each output nozzle. These could sense relative changes in flow, and perhaps turbidity, before they became visually apparent. I’d go with bluetooth enabled adriunos, which could run for a year or so off batteries, and would be simpler, cheaper, and more real-time than monitoring by camera alone.
For the new sections of spillway, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to include a bunch of embedded sensors, say pressure, flow, turbidity, temperature, and perhaps others? Many would undoubtedly fail over 50-100 years, but one could either put in a lot of redundancy, or make them accessible via access tubes for upgrade/replacement.
Are new dam installations configured for the Internet of Things? The time to add something like would be before construction begins. Sensing problems before they happen is much easier/cheaper than repairing them afterword. DWR might soon be more susceptible to informed outside input.
From the article:
-
“There’s always been an understanding that, man,
you don’t want to use that emergency spillway,
because when you do, it’s going to be a mess,”
said Jerry Antonetti, a retired engineer
who was a construction inspector for
one of the dam’s power plants
when the dam was built in the 1960s.
The simple presence of so much gushing water in the side discharge drains + the 5 miles of linear cracks in the spillway top to bottom along the thin concrete drain lines should have triggered a massive "Stagnation Pressure Failure" alarm years ago. Other dams ripped up their spillways and completely replaced them from far smaller indicators (Ground Penetrating Radar "voids" + underslab erosion).
No tests required. Experts had been warning dam owners for years over spillways busting up from Stagnation Pressure. Oroville's spillway was a sieve in the seams, joints, and 5 miles of cracks. All of these extreme danger "busting up" sign were there. It almost took a determined effort, by engineers and/or mgmt to purposefully ignore such dramatic sign of imminent failure.
It's called "looking out for ants when elephants are walking by".
more and more evidence IMO that the models they use to predict inflow into the lake are too low
if you look at the data from last summer there is actually negative inflow per hour most of the summer which obviously in not correct
I noticed they made an adjustment to the hourly inflow calculations that made more sense back in FEB..but i hope the models are not based on bad past flawed data
for example i have been paying attention to the NWS river forecast on the feather river upstream..and it has been pretty much right on with predicted flows during this last storms
but the model from last Friday from DWR predicts 20,000 cfs at this time and its around 30,000
Also notice that the values given for “RIV REL” (total river release)
are often lower than the values given for “OUTFLOW”.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryF?ORO
https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-spillway-failure.t8381/page-41
New
I emailed the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley about this and got the following response (quoted verbatim from the email I received):
Content from external source
Hi Aron Z,
Rune Storesund (ccd this email) forwarded your email to me.
you are correct about the source of the photographs you cited. i obtained these from the metabunk forum web site.
due to limitations on the time i could devote to producing my preliminary report (all done pro-bono), i was not able to cite the many sources i used to obtain the photographic documentation included in the report.
i found the metabunk forum web site to be very useful in helping me develop a basic understanding of how and why the spillway failures developed. i would appreciate it if you could communicate my apology and reason for not citing the metabunk source for the photographs you cited.
Bob Bea
—
Robert Bea
Professor Emeritus
Center for Catastrophic Risk Management
University of California Berkeley
I went through the Bea Report. Hadn’t been for us at FR and Metabunk, he wouldn’t have a report.
Weather conditions in the upper FR basin are predicted to be in the high 60’s to mid 70’s over the next few days. The ground is saturated and most of the lakes are spilling at a very high rate. I expect the in flow to Oroville to spike Saturday afternoon into Sunday. They had better be prepared to spill every drop of water they can since the current spill rate is barely staying ahead of the inflow.
Agreed. Lots of solid info here and at Metabunk
I believe the total river release is the diversion dam just downstream....
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