Oroville Repair Effort Update! via Freelance Reporter Jim Stone (Video)

This report is from Jim Stone via JimStone.is

1. They got the large scale mining trucks (these are way beyond what is allowed on the road) and used them to rapidly bring in large rocks from a mine somewhere, and with them built an entirely new road across 50 plus foot deep erosion trenches.

2. With that road in place, they managed to get cement trucks back onto the ground at the emergency spillway, and they are pouring concrete as fast as they can.

3. A secondary helicopter effort to bring in rocks to areas that the trucks still cannot get to.

Do I think it will work? Not if the spillway is put to heavy use in the next couple days. But the effort is actually a real effort. I never would have thought they would ever get a road back in, but they did it, and that alone is a major achievement. It was the only way they would ever have a chance. How effective they are with this will all depend upon how much concrete they can manage to lay down, and if they can get it into the key places.

I don’t want to comment on this report, It is too depressing and I am already stressed out.

They cannot drain the dam enough. As of this evening, they have only dropped it 15 feet. They can’t hit the target, which means they had better hope the weather man is wrong.

The main reasons why they can’t run the generators and get rid of water that way:

1. There is too much garbage backflowing from the broken spillway to discharge into. Though I don’t think there is risk of generator damage as long as the intake is clean, they made that decision and shut them down. But there is a bigger reason I think they shut them down: the power lines that go across the natural part of the dam.

2. If there is any chance of the power lines getting washed out, power lines that are providing the load that prevents the generators from overspinning, you can’t run the generators. If those lines toppled, the first thing they’d do is either blow the generators by shorting them out, or blow a protection circuit. If that happened, suddenly none of the generators would have anything holding them back, preventing them from overspinning. The valves are huge, and I doubt they’d close fast enough. You can’t just unload a system that large that is being driven by as much inertia as water has completely and instantly and expect a happy outcome. Even the water itself needs time to slow down, because the column of water in the pipe will have as much or more motion inertia as several semi trucks. You really cannot just slam that off. So the generators are sitting there, idle because it is not safe enough to run them.

3. THIRD REASON – A NEW ONE: The spillway damage has caused so much debris to flow into the river that it has impeded the water flow, caused the water to back up and now the power station is flooded. There is NO CHANCE the power station will ever come back on until this crisis is totally over, and after the power station is no longer flooded there will probably be major repairs needed.

No problem with people going back to Oroville

A reader asked if I thought it was a bad idea to let the people go home. I do not think it was a bad idea at all. They all know the dam is still in danger. I do not believe in mandatory evacuations – I instead believe in telling people the way it is, and let them decide for themselves. Mandatory evacuations are communist.

Right now, there is no imminent danger of dam failure. For there to be imminent danger, they have to have either the main spillway eat much closer to the floodgates, or overtop the emergency spillway. If neither happens the dam will live.

I am not going to play games saying only the man made portion to the right of the floodgate is the dam. To say so is fraud. Part of this dam is man made and part of this dam is natural. It is ALL DAM. If it was not ALL DAM, there would be no emergency spillway, no main spillway, and it would be only a hill out in the desert with no water either. If it holds the water, can fail and let it go, IT IS THE DAM. And I was seriously annoyed with the scam play on words saying “the dam is in no danger, only the spillway is”. That’s lawyer/commie/Hillary speak. No honesty in the statement at all.

Anyway, I am ALL FOR informing the public and letting them make up their own mind. If my home was in the path of this I’d be going back right now, now that they have allowed return, and I’d pack EVERYTHING, including on top of the roof racks – EVERYTHING of value, carefully calculated for what took space and what things cost. I’d park it in the garage to help prevent theft and keep an eye on the situation myself, not waiting for the government to decide for me. Obviously they gave the evacuation warning so late that everyone would have been dead. That was a real show of idiocy.

Hey folks, the emergency spillway is now failing within the hour, PACK UP AND ENJOY A 7 HOUR TRAFFIC JAM. Yep. That was cute.

I still think this dam will fail. They have record water by a long shot, and no way to get rid of it. The emergency spillway absolutely will overtop again unless the hand of God holds back the water and I’d have to see some really nifty helicopter work to believe they could do anything at all about this. The erosion is way too much. Maybe they will be able to control the rains that are coming, but they are going to be toast when all the snow melts.

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