California
Super Star Member
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2004
- Messages
- 14,956
- Location
- An hour north of San Francisco
- Tractor
- Yanmar YM240 Yanmar YM186D
Actually - and I'm digging around in memory, somebody correct this if you have the real facts - February 2017 was the SECOND time Oroville Reservoir experienced extraordinary input necessitating emergency measures.
The first time for extraordinary, unanticipated input was some 25 years ago. They opened the regular spillway and dumped huge outflows, avoiding overtopping the emergency spillway but causing havoc downstream. This probably ran at maximum rated capacity for all the levees downstream all the way to San Francisco Bay. A few minor levees failed.
I remember this because I had occasion to visit Caltrans' District 3 Equipment Shop downstream from Marysville a couple of months later. The levee behind the shop had suddenly collapsed, submerging all the equipment parked there. Pickups, dump trucks, loaders, towed compressors for jackhammers, snowplows, farm-type tractors set up for mowing next to highways, well-drilling rigs, portable power and lighting plants, campers and trailers for portable jobsite offices, pretty much the same fleet you would expect in a huge rentals yard. Plus the equipment maintenance shop itself and its parts inventory. (Also a shopping mall and semi-rural neighborhood nearby.)
The guy I went to see told me he had been the only one in the building in the early evening. He suddenly realized there was water rising out back and got the heck out of there.
I asked what they did with all the submerged equipment. He said they simply pressure washed them, replaced all fluids, then put them back in service. It would be too costly to replace everything at once and they had no budget to do that. They expected that the lifetime for some units would be much shorter due to the contamination, an acceptable cost. I got the impression that the cleanup cost them substantial labor but it wasn't nearly as expensive as I had expected to hear.
I had never tied together my memory of that event, to its causes upstream, until I recently read some background related to the recent event.
The first time for extraordinary, unanticipated input was some 25 years ago. They opened the regular spillway and dumped huge outflows, avoiding overtopping the emergency spillway but causing havoc downstream. This probably ran at maximum rated capacity for all the levees downstream all the way to San Francisco Bay. A few minor levees failed.
I remember this because I had occasion to visit Caltrans' District 3 Equipment Shop downstream from Marysville a couple of months later. The levee behind the shop had suddenly collapsed, submerging all the equipment parked there. Pickups, dump trucks, loaders, towed compressors for jackhammers, snowplows, farm-type tractors set up for mowing next to highways, well-drilling rigs, portable power and lighting plants, campers and trailers for portable jobsite offices, pretty much the same fleet you would expect in a huge rentals yard. Plus the equipment maintenance shop itself and its parts inventory. (Also a shopping mall and semi-rural neighborhood nearby.)
The guy I went to see told me he had been the only one in the building in the early evening. He suddenly realized there was water rising out back and got the heck out of there.
I asked what they did with all the submerged equipment. He said they simply pressure washed them, replaced all fluids, then put them back in service. It would be too costly to replace everything at once and they had no budget to do that. They expected that the lifetime for some units would be much shorter due to the contamination, an acceptable cost. I got the impression that the cleanup cost them substantial labor but it wasn't nearly as expensive as I had expected to hear.
I had never tied together my memory of that event, to its causes upstream, until I recently read some background related to the recent event.
