Don't be surprised if in the coming days the ACOE play a larger role in this.

I don't think I'm cutout to live under a dam. I would always feel like a sword hanging over my head.

quote:

Originally posted by 4x5:
I don't think I'm cutout to live under a dam. I would always feel like a sword hanging over my head.

Years ago I went camping with a buddy of mine below the Jordanelle Reservoir. I felt much the same way as you are saying.

quote:

Originally posted by 4x5:
I don't think I'm cutout to live under a dam. I would always feel like a sword hanging over my head.

Me either. I think we should start a petition to rename the Oroville Dam to "Ocles".

quote:

Originally posted by 4x5:
I don't think I'm cutout to live under a dam. I would always feel like a sword hanging over my head.

Would be interesting to know how many houses in that photo are covered for flood insurance.
My guess would be that most families living there are expecting those families not living there to pony up money for them in-case of flood.

I could be wrong and would love for someone to correct my assumption.
Maybe they are required to have flood insurance.

quote:

Originally posted by kimber1911:

Maybe they are required to have flood insurance.

Their mortgage insurer may require it. They have a thing called a 100 and 500 year flood plain around here. As I understand it, everyone within the 100 year plain must have it to obtain an insured mortgage. I have no idea how they bend the lines under a dam.

The 100 year flood plain is a curious thing, something about a 1% chance of flooding in any given year over 100 years. It's not exactly without chance.

One of the things washed away from my mom's home in the 1998 flood on the Guadalupe River downstream from Canyon Dam was a letter from the city notifying her that the property was not in the 100 year flood plain. The property flooded again a few years later.

I love all the posts on Facebook that say Gov Brown spends 25 billion a year on illegals. .and he was told 12 years ago this Dam needed fixed. He sent a 100 billion request to Trump and will throw a stompy feet fit if he does not get his share. But the kicker in that 100 billion in infrastructure improvements he needs, He never mentions this Dam.

Oroville Dam’s flood-control manual hasn’t been updated for half a century

quote:

The critical document that determines how much space should be left in Lake Oroville for flood control during the rainy season hasn’t been updated since 1970, and it uses climatological data and runoff projections so old they don’t account for two of the biggest floods ever to strike the region.

Independent experts familiar with the flood-control manual at Oroville Dam said Wednesday there’s no indication the 47-year-old document contributed to the ongoing crisis involving the dam’s ailing spillways. The current troubles stem from structural failures, not how the lake’s flood-storage space was being managed.

But the experts say Oroville’s manual does point to larger operational issues that affect most of California’s primary flood-control dams. Like the dams, most of the manuals were designed decades ago by engineers using slide rules instead of computers. Many of the documents and licenses that govern dam operations don’t account for advances in hydrology, meteorology and engineering, or for a changing climate.

....
Army Corps officials say the manuals have done their jobs, despite their age.

“Just because a water-control manual is old doesn’t mean it’s obsolete,” said Joe Forbis, chief of water management at the Corps’ Sacramento office. “It still allows the reservoir to be operated appropriately.”

He acknowledged his agency would prefer to have updated manuals. But, he said, it’s difficult because the updates require complex engineering and environmental studies. Funding would have to be approved by Congress.

Most recently, the issue of outdated dam manuals came up in the context of California’s five-year drought. At Folsom Dam near Sacramento, local water agencies complained that federal dam operators were releasing too much water from the reservoir during a lengthy dry spell when no major storms were forecast and the state was trying to conserve water. Federal operators said they had no choice, because Folsom’s manual dictated that it create flood-control space based on the time of year.
.....

quote:

Originally posted by Zecpull:
I love all the posts on Facebook that say Gov Brown spends 25 billion a year on illegals. .and he was told 12 years ago this Dam needed fixed. He sent a 100 billion request to Trump and will throw a stompy feet fit if he does not get his share. But the kicker in that 100 billion in infrastructure improvements he needs, He never mentions this Dam.

What!? $100 billion? He asked for one hundred billion!?

What happened to the 150,000 people who evacuated?

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
What happened to the 150,000 people who evacuated?

I saw a report last night that said the evacuation order had been lifted "for now" and people were allowed back into town. Fat fucking chance I would stick around too long! Grab a few things and see if there is family/friends that can put me and mine up until something is done, otherwise I think they are taking a very serious risk.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by Zecpull:
I love all the posts on Facebook that say Gov Brown spends 25 billion a year on illegals. .and he was told 12 years ago this Dam needed fixed. He sent a 100 billion request to Trump and will throw a stompy feet fit if he does not get his share. But the kicker in that 100 billion in infrastructure improvements he needs, He never mentions this Dam.

What!? $100 billion? He asked for one hundred billion!?

Typical "progressive" (God, I hate that Orwellian term) politics: If Trump refuses, Brown will use it to further inflame his base. If Trump capitulates, Brown will simply ignore mentioning it.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
The 100 year flood plain is a curious thing, something about a 1% chance of flooding in any given year over 100 years. It's not exactly without chance.

Assuming that such probabilities are subject to normal statistical rules, another way of looking at them is that there’s a 99% chance that such a flood won’t happen in any particular year. That makes for a 98% chance it won’t happen in any two years. But if we look at 10 years the chance it won’t happen drops to 90%; in any one of 22 years (which is how long I’ve lived in my house), the probability is 80% it won’t happen, or a 20%—one in five—chance it will happen. If I’d lived here all my adult life, or 53 years, the chance that it will happen rises to 41%. No rational person would play Russian roulette if there was a four out of 10 chance they’d pick a live round from a mixed box of live and dummy cartridges.

The two common problems are that very few people understand how such probabilities work, and they also fail to account for the fact that things like weather conditions are subject to changing over time. If someone said, “It’s possible the climate will get warmer and because we may experience more rain in the future, you must pay more money for insurance and for infrastructure upgrades,” most people would have a three-cornered fit.

The manual thing is just another example of finding an easy target to attack without having to demonstrate any validity to the criticism: “OMG! It’s 50 years old; we’re all gonna die!” There may be good reasons why something like that should be updated, but as was noted, old doesn’t automatically mean invalid. If anything, it demonstrates that they were drafted well enough to ensure good dam operation for half a century without tweaking. It’s like saying that the AK and AR pattern rifles are obsolete because they were designed so long ago.

VDH's take on the Oroville Dam:

A year ago, politicians and experts were predicting a near-permanent statewide drought, a “new normal” desert climate. The most vivid example of how wrong they were is that California’s majestic Oroville Dam is currently in danger of spillway failure in a season of record snow and rainfall. That could spell catastrophe for thousands who live below it and for the state of California at large that depends on its stored water.

The poor condition of the dam is almost too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole; its possible failure is a reflection of California’s civic decline.

Oroville Dam, along with Shasta Dam, is the crown jewel of California’s state and federal system of water transfers. Finished nearly 50 years ago, the earthen Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States. The resulting Lake Oroville stores 3.5 million acre feet of snow and rain runoff, and is central to transferring water, eventually via the California Aqueduct, from the wet north to the dry southern half of the state.

The dam was part of the larger work of a brilliant earlier generation of California planners and lawmakers. Given that two-thirds of the state wished to live where one third of the rain and snow fell, they foresaw a vast system of water storage and transference that would remake the face of a growing California by putting people, industry and farms where water was not.

State lawmakers spend their time obsessing over minutia: a prohibition against free grocery bags and rules against disturbing bobcats.

The 19th and 20th century dams have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars of property from perennial spring flooding. The dam at Oroville helps to control the flows of the Feather, Yuba, and, ultimately, the Sacramento rivers, allowing millions of Californians in these former flood basins to live without fear of deluges. Many Californians have come of age taking dams like Oroville for granted, assuming that flooding was something of ancient family lore — and that the manmade storage reservoirs surrounding their growing cities were “natural” lakes.

The water projects created cheap and clean hydroelectric power. (At one point, California enjoyed one of the least expensive electric delivery systems in the United States.) In addition, dams like Oroville ensured that empty desert acreage on California’s dry west side of the Central Valley could be irrigated. The result was the rise of the richest farming belt in the world. Complex transfers of water also helped fuel spectacular growth in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles Basin. Their present populations often do not fully appreciate that their dry hillsides and Mediterranean climates could never have supported such urban growth without the can-do vision of a prior generation of hydrological engineers.

Finally, besides, flood control, hydroelectric power and irrigation, California dams created over 1,300 reservoirs that presently provide the state with unmatched mountain recreational and sporting opportunities — often for the poor and middle classes who cannot afford to visit expensive coastal tourist retreats.

Yet the California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project have been comatose for a half-century — despite the recent drought. Environmental lawsuits and redirection of critical state funding stalled final-phase construction, scheduled expansion and maintenance. Necessary improvements to Oroville Dam, like reinforced concrete spillways, were never finished. Nor were planned auxiliary dams on nearby rivers built to relieve the pressure on Oroville.

A new generation of Californians — without much memory of floods or what unirrigated California was like before its aqueducts — had the luxury to envision the state’s existing water projects in a radically new light: as environmental errors. To partially correct these mistakes some proposed diverting storage water for fish restoration and re-creating of wild rivers to flow uninterrupted into San Francisco Bay.

Indeed, pressures mounted to tear down rather than build dams. The state — whose basket of income, sales and gas taxes is among the highest in the country — gradually shifted its priorities from the building and expansion of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, bridges and highways to redistributionist social welfare programs, state employee pensions and an enormous penal archipelago.

California currently hosts a third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over one in five Californians lives below the poverty line. One in four Californians was not born in the United States. These social transformations pose enormous political challenges and demand that infrastructure and schools grow commensurately to meet soaring populations.

Instead, California is eating its seed corn.

State lawmakers spend their time obsessing over minutia: a prohibition against free grocery bags and rules against disturbing bobcats. When they do turn their attention to development, they tend to pick projects that serve urban rather than rural populations — for example, that boondoggle of a bullet train whose costs keep climbing even as the project falls years behind schedule.

The crisis at Oroville is a third act in the state’s history: One majestic generation built great dams, a second enjoyed them while they aged, and a third fiddles as they now erode.

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
VDH's take on the Oroville Dam:

Do you have a link?

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

Assuming that such probabilities are subject to normal statistical rules, another way of looking at them is that there’s a 99% chance that such a flood won’t happen in any particular year. That makes for a 98% chance it won’t happen in any two years. But if we look at 10 years the chance it won’t happen drops to 90%; in any one of 22 years (which is how long I’ve lived in my house), the probability is 80% it won’t happen, or a 20%—one in five—chance it will happen. If I’d lived here all my adult life, or 53 years, the chance that it will happen rises to 41%. No rational person would play Russian roulette if there was a four out of 10 chance they’d pick a live round from a mixed box of live and dummy cartridges.

The two common problems are that very few people understand how such probabilities work.......

If the statistics were as you've suggested, it's once in a hundred, not once every hundred. The risk is not greater in year 85 than in year 1.

However the 100-year flood term is a measure of likely recurrence interval anyway, not a statistical probability measure, as I understand it. So yes, the likelihood increases with time if it's accurate, though not to the level of near certainty you've suggested. But is still just a guess.....

Not that I'm interested in living in the shadow of that, BTW.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
The 100 year flood plain is a curious thing, something about a 1% chance of flooding in any given year over 100 years. It's not exactly without chance.

Assuming that such probabilities are subject to normal statistical rules, another way of looking at them is that there’s a 99% chance that such a flood won’t happen in any particular year. That makes for a 98% chance it won’t happen in any two years. But if we look at 10 years the chance it won’t happen drops to 90%; in any one of 22 years (which is how long I’ve lived in my house), the probability is 80% it won’t happen, or a 20%—one in five—chance it will happen. If I’d lived here all my adult life, or 53 years, the chance that it will happen rises to 41%. No rational person would play Russian roulette if there was a four out of 10 chance they’d pick a live round from a mixed box of live and dummy cartridges.

The two common problems are that very few people understand how such probabilities work, and they also fail to account for the fact that things like weather conditions are subject to changing over time. If someone said, “It’s possible the climate will get warmer and because we may experience more rain in the future, you must pay more money for insurance and for infrastructure upgrades,” most people would have a three-cornered fit.

The manual thing is just another example of finding an easy target to attack without having to demonstrate any validity to the criticism: “OMG! It’s 50 years old; we’re all gonna die!” There may be good reasons why something like that should be updated, but as was noted, old doesn’t automatically mean invalid. If anything, it demonstrates that they were drafted well enough to ensure good dam operation for half a century without tweaking. It’s like saying that the AK and AR pattern rifles are obsolete because they were designed so long ago.

No rational person plays Russian roulette if there is ANY chance of a live round in the box, or in the pistol, or in rhe room.

Anyway, 63.7% of statistics are misleading and the rest flat wrong, merely serving to make otherwise intelligent well-meaning people look like complacent fools.

About twenty years ago, we were treated to the spectacle of one of the biggest collapses, and fastest, in the history of investing (Speculation, really) when a dozen or so extremely bright, experienced and incredibly successful traders, including 3 Nobel Laureates in Economics, blew through quite a few billion dollars executing a trading plan that had been generating double digit returns when suddenly they went broke, an event that had been calculated to occur once in 7 lives of the universe. Read all about it: Long Term Capital Management.

quote:

Originally posted by Georgeair:
If the statistics were as you've suggested, it's once in a hundred, not once every hundred. The risk is not greater in year 85 than in year 1.

I’m not sure I understand your point, but I was careful to include “Assuming that such probabilities are subject to normal statistical rules,” in my statement for a reason. If we believe that an event will happen (on average) once in 100 years, then on average there is a 1 percent chance of its happening in any particular year. That’s what I based my calculations on.

In examining the probability of weather events, though, it’s not like throwing a die. I can throw a dozen sixes in a row, and the probability of the next throw also being a six is unchanged: It’s still one in six. That’s not necessarily true of a weather event; events like that are not random like the throw of a die and the things that cause them may persist and influence events from year to year. What’s more, some climactic forces occur in cycles, and that can indeed make it more likely that something will happen at the top of the cycle than at the bottom.

But my point is that even if we assume that a 1-in-100 event means there’s a fully-random 1% chance of its happening in any particular year, the more years we look at, the more likely it is to occur. There may be a 99% chance that it won’t happen this year, but there’s only a 90% chance it won’t happen this decade.

Who's or what is VDH

VA Dept of Health?
Vermont Department of Housing?
Verband für das Deutsche Hundewesen (VDH)?

OK Victor David Hansen


Victor Davis Hanson is a fifth-generation rural Californian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.



ist der Vink ya?