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Thanks for the great work you and the other contributors continue to make to this thread.

We are in a much needed lull and the media has gone back to sleep.

I’m impressed with the amount of rubble they have been able to move since shutting down the spillway. It’s also encouraging to see the generators slowly coming back on line.

However, it is certain to rain again and the snow is certain to melt. It seems certain the spillway must be used again this spring, quite possibly for several MONTHS straight.

We all hope the emergency repairs they are still in the process of making will hold up. Although I’m not a civil engineer, I know a bit about how to build things and how to find out if they really work (my undergraduate engineering degree was in a specialized area of electrical engineering).

In this case we have a shocking level of deferred maintenance, apparently flawed original design, and a patchwork of desperate emergency repairs to make up for it. The list of unknowns in this repair is so long that every engineer I know would expect something unforeseen to happen when it is put to the test.

What they have done WILL be put to the test some time this spring. The odds are very high that something unexpected will happen when it is. The REAL test will be how successful they are responding when it happens.

Based on what I have seen once they finally got serious about things, I suspect they will also overcome whatever unexpected setback is coming. I was not so optimistic two weeks ago.