California Drought

[California]

Oroville spillway repairs:

Bee article today on Who Pays?
Who will pay for Oroville Dam spillway work? | The Sacramento Bee
(This has some of the best photos I have seen).

The federal government has put up some disaster-relief money. Nobody knows who will pay the rest of the emergency repair costs, or for the needed improvements.

The system's primary purpose (and cost) is to send water to Southern California. The water contractors who re-sell the water to agribusiness and to entire cities have powerful lobbyists so I expect it will be hard to get money out of them. Another purpose of the dam is flood protection for residents nearby, presumably paid from the State treasury but there's no budgetary process or source of funds to buy the very expensive needed improvements.

 

[coldsteelva]

Tell the people to move. Let nature have it's way...if/when the dam fails, let the floodplain return to floodplain - no houses

 

[California]

Tell the people to move. Let nature have it's way...if/when the dam fails, let the floodplain return to floodplain - no houses

Not acceptable to the tens of millions of people in SoCal who need the water sent down there. Or to the powerful agribusiness interests along the way who operate on cheap subsidized water. Flood protection for the locals is just an afterthought.

 

[coldsteelva]

I'm just saying perhaps we should stop paying billions to make inhospitable, dry, desert environments suitable for habitation or farming. Attempting to alter nature is a futile endeavor. Oroville and the others are likely one major quake away from failure anyway since the original 'science' used to engineer them was faulty. no pun intended.

 

[houstonscott]

Not acceptable to the tens of millions of people in SoCal who need the water sent down there. Or to the powerful agribusiness interests along the way who operate on cheap subsidized water. Flood protection for the locals is just an afterthought.

Let them pay the bill if they benefit.

 

[houstonscott]

Gov. Jerry Brown keeps Oroville Dam repair costs hidden, state lawmakers say Gov. Jerry Brown keeps Oroville Dam repair costs hidden, state lawmakers say | Fox News

 

[flusher]

Figure that the repair will cost twice the winning bid. After all this is government contracting.

 

[California]

And four times the original estimate. We (internal audit branch) in a California Large Public Agency were asked to investigate why project development never got the cost estimates right. I finally included in the report, with examples, that final costs measured post-construction equaled 4 x the initial proposed cost at the initial, conceptual stage of selecting among possible projects that had taken place many years before. Your Tax Dollars At Work. But this is the case across nearly anything at huge scale. Military procurement, space program, and the most recent I can think of was ATT promised, and got taxpayer funding for, fiber to everywhere in the US. They got the money, now years later little of that ever got built or turned on.

Some projects are so large they are beyond the ability of humans to anticipate everything. Then add, in this case, the recent generation of managers there who probably aren't as bright as those who designed the Oroville complex, and the results we saw are inevitable.

 

[orezok]

Some people say that we shouldn't farm in the desert. Perhaps we should go to areas with abundant rain fall and plow under some cities to make room for farms :laughing:

 

[kloudbuster]

I agree, plow those cities