California Drought

[Egon]

Throw out some juicy irrelevant facts/gossip and keep the attention from focusing on what the other hand is doing. Is that what it's all about???

The Drought & Spillway topic??

 

[turnkey4099]

Throw out some juicy irrelevant facts/gossip and keep the attention from focusing on what the other hand is doing. Is that what it's all about???

The Drought & Spillway topic??

Seems to be. This was an interesting thread until ***** politics got into it.

 

[TemporaryKubotaOwnerMark]

...and how many of you have actually has service from the VA. I thought not.

I have. It was bad. That was in the early 80s. It's been bad a long time, and it's not the fault of the administration that happens to be in office at the time.

It's just that lately they have been caught lying a lot.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Can we get back on topic?

How much snow melt do they expect? And how will it impede the repairs?

 

[California]

Can we get back on topic?

How much snow melt do they expect? And how will it impede the repairs?

I don't know the specifics but in general the Spring snowmelt and particularly, warm rain on snow, a little later in the year, are the peak runoff season instead of the peak occurring in the winter rainy season. We're not out of this yet.

They need to open the river and get the generating plant running at full output - 14k cfs - which is approximately the same quantity that was going over the emergency spillway for a couple of days. It will probably also be essential to use the main, damaged spillway again at 50 or possibly 100 cfs to dump water if huge snowmelt comes down from the mountains in a warm rainstorm. For now its wait and see. It all depends if the weather cooperates and runoff is gradual and steady, or extreme like what happened in February. Nobody knows.

Another constraint is the Feather River downstream from this mess is rated 150 cfs maximum before the levees start to fail so releasing water at an even steady rate is better than dumping at emergency volume later.

As for repairs - I don't think they can do more than band-aid stuff until summer when the flood control season is over.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

I don't know the specifics but in general the Spring snowmelt and particularly, warm rain on snow, a little later in the year, are the peak runoff season instead of the peak occurring in the winter rainy season. We're not out of this yet.

They need to open the river and get the generating plant running at full output - 14k cfs - which is approximately the same quantity that was going over the emergency spillway for a couple of days. It will probably also be essential to use the main, damaged spillway again at 50 or possibly 100 cfs to dump water if huge snowmelt comes down from the mountains in a warm rainstorm. For now its wait and see. It all depends if the weather cooperates and runoff is gradual and steady, or extreme like what happened in February. Nobody knows.

Another constraint is the Feather River downstream from this mess is rated 150 cfs maximum before the levees start to fail so releasing water at an even steady rate is better than dumping at emergency volume later.

As for repairs - I don't think they can do more than band-aid stuff until summer when the flood control season is over.

Thanks for the info.

 

[California]

Another aspect - SF Chronicle.

Riverbanks collapse after Oroville Dam spillway shut off - San Francisco Chronicle

Summary when nothing came down the river, saturated banks downstream collapsed.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Another aspect - SF Chronicle.

Riverbanks collapse after Oroville Dam spillway shut off - San Francisco Chronicle

Summary when nothing came down the river, saturated banks downstream collapsed.

Do they know if the spoils are settling or staying in solution and moving downstream?

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Once they get the generators going, that flow will help open up the river at the current debris area.

 

[California]

Spoils: I don't know the specifics for this but in general: in the 1800's, Hydraulic Mining was used all along the Sierras. This used giant 'monitors', jumbo fire nozzles, to make erosion and wash gold down into sluice boxes. Erosion like we've seen in these recent photos was the objective.

This dumped so much spoils, light material, into the rivers that 70 miles downstream from Oroville there are still abandoned 1800's sailing vessels buried under sediment at the Sacramento waterfront. Back then floods buried farmland under infertile mud, and the beds of the rivers loaded up with sediment and became higher, increasing the severity of flooding. The environmentalists of the 1870's got hydraulic mining outlawed because it was imposing huge costs on everyone downstream.

This present event had its strongest effect in the fish hatchery downstream that got overwhelmed with mud so the fish were trucked elsewhere. Farther downstream - I don't know. That stuff won't get flushed down to the ocean very rapidly so there has to be some effect.