https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTyCPPqv5pc
This video shows the wide spillway with water flowing over it for a few seconds at the very beginning. Is this the emergency spillway? I’m guessing it is. From other videos this spillway looks to be about 30 feet tall, and has lots of water flowing over, causing erosion.
The main spillway(?) is the long narrow chute and is between the wide spillway and the dam. Yeah - 30’ of water going downstream will be a disaster. And it sounds like only a matter of time.
Yeah, the emergency spillway is to the left of the main spillway. The main spillway is heavily damaged partway down, and as a result, there is a lot of soil erosion heading down.
Water is pouring over the emergency spillway also, because the lake level is above the top of that structure.
Look at post number 86? It is a photo of the dam as it looks at normal. The em spillway is the blue. The regular spillway...or primary if I could call it so, is just to the right-that is the one with the chut that failed.
If you look to the left of the EM spillway, you can see the parking lot, and the water is now over that and running out AROUND the dam proper. That is the area that will fail since I doubt that area was ever set up for this-I.E. compacted ground, reinfoced etc.
I was involved in the Dead River Basin disaster in Marquette Michigan years ago and that dam was built the same way. Keyed with a cement spillway with a earth levy system on the south side. It started over topping because of a dam failure above. The local mining contractors got to it and brought mine rock onto the earth levy to stop the water from breaching that earthen part of the dam. We stopped it..
That was a close one.