Was hoping to hear more about other dams, the article focuses on Oroville. Lake Berryessa for instance is a concrete dam, much more like hoover than Oroville. It was built before they realized there was a nearby active fault, the Green Valley Fault.
Lake Oroville (in the NYT article) is the 14th largest lake in California, Berryessa is #11. Lake Oroville does hold twice as much water when full though
The big concern is that Winters was flattened by an earthquake in 1892 and the same size quake at a fault near lake Berryessa, which is only 7 miles from the winters, would breach the dam. I've heard it discussed several times in geology circles, there's even a simulation of the result. It goes poorly for winters (7,000 people or so) and Davis (65,000 people). Here's the simulation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEJEHnKrueo
If you look at a terrain map [1] it looks like things flatten out a lot not far below the dam. As you say, bad for Winters and Davis, but not "terrifying wall of water" bad for much else downstream.
As someone who drives around that area a lot, I can confirm that things do flatten out a lot. Everything West and East of I-5 is orchards, as well as North and South of I-80.
Quite a bit of that area is already water (the Delta), and we've seen during the heavy rains during 2017 (the period the article refers to) how the land around it can take a lot of flooding.
I've driven down the road from the dam to Winters, and the chutes I think would act like a giant water cannon. I wouldn't have high hopes for Winters. Driving down that road, I kept thinking "why would anyone buy real estate here?" - yet people do.
I recently read "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner which I highly recommend if you're interested in the history of water issues in the west and California in particular.
A great portion of the book is devoted to dams. The gist of it is that many dams of questionable utility were constructed throughout the 20th century due to pork barrel politics and the unstoppable bureaucratic engines of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corp of Engineers. Like much infrastructure built in the US, not much concern was given to ongoing maintenance and so the book predicts that this will be a larger concern as time goes on.
Hopefully close calls like Oroville will bring more attention to this issue before a larger disaster happens.
The spillway reconstruction was expensive and time-consuming, but at least it didn't fail that time. The issue was a lack of investment in remediation repairs and improvements, and a lack of planning for extreme event flows.
In the long term, California is unprepared and fucked in terms of dwindling water supply and damaging storms and forest fires from climate change. That's why I left.
California is probably the most prepared state in the US, by far, for the climate issues coming.
The problem is it’s also the most currently affected. Mostly due to historic forestry mismanagement (which they’ve corrected but it takes time to make an impact) and the maliciously incompetent behavior of PG&E.
Most of the East Coast is going to be a mess. Same with states near the Gulf. Texas can’t even function now in climate fluctuations without having its grid collapse.
California has its issues, but they’re largely caused over water rights being improperly managed due to unrestrained agricultural usage. Fix that and they have much a ton fewer issues.
I wish I were as optimistic as you on the fire prognosis. I think a lot of people like the forestry management angle because it's a simple, single root cause, and therefore should be easily fixed.
But the reality is much more complex. When Europeans arrived on the West coast, we fundamentally altered the environment. We clearcut the foothills, dried out vast wetlands in the valley, decimated native animal populations, dammed up the rivers, and are now depleting the groundwater. Not to mention climate change.
Is forest management a piece of the puzzle? Sure. But how do we even know what the proper approach is? The current situation is not the same as it was 300 years ago, and the same methods aren't necessarily feasible or effective. Forest thinning and well managed control burns are a good start, but I don't believe they're going to solve the wildfire issue on their own, even over a period of several decades.
> forestry mismanagement (which they’ve corrected but it takes time to make an impact)
no, this is trivializing badly. A more accurate statement is work, and there are varying opinions. The progress might be that some selection of smart, concerned and able public members now know about this topic, and discuss it at all without falling into fundemental disagreements.
At this time, one estimate shows fifteen percent of a total of thirteen million+ homes, are in extreme fire danger in 2023. But wait, that means that eighty five percent of homes are not.. and California is geographically diverse. So there are lots of real places with homes where this dire language does not apply. You cannot plaster over the reality of that with a parenthetic one-liner, however.
I don’t know what you think you’re saying but you don’t appear to be responding to anything I said & it reads like a bad copy & paste of a ChatGPT response.
But to your point: Millions of homes being in danger is a big problem but hardly the only one. Huge forest fires—homes in their path or not—are an ecological disaster. They are more likely with the bad forestry management I mentioned that it will likely take a decade to undo.
There's only going to be more and more climate refugees like you. Where'd you move from that you believe is more insulated from the same problems though? We're all on the same planet.
The question isn't if but when. If you look at California's geologic record, it has suffered massive flooding every several hundred years AKA Ark storms. The majority of the Central Valley turns into an inland sea in these situations and the locations of many current cities would be underwater.
USGS sediment research in the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara Basin, Sacramento Valley, and the Klamath Mountain region found that "megastorms" have occurred in the years: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, 1750, 1810, and, most recently, 1861–62. Based on the intervals of these known occurrences, ranging from 51 to 426 years, for a historic recurrence of, on average, every 100-200 years
I'm not sure but if you look at maps of both floods it seems that weather pattern in 1964 was a lot further north than the 1862 flood. Also, the wiki article for 1862 says that that was an El Nino year.
Calling out the atmospheric river implies a cause of purely precipitation, whereas the other floods are likely caused by some unfortunate combination of snowmelt runoff and high-precipitation events.
Can’t help it if something like 5 trillion dollars of our economy is built on a fault line and they’re forcing people back to said fault line for in person work
You find a way to get them all to relocate and I’ll book the first ticket
Fun fact: In some statistics on the safety of different forms of electricity generation, the largest dam failure [1] is left out, which brings hydropower down to same level of safety as nuclear, wind and solar. Our World in Data is an honest source, and reports both values [2].
If you see hydro reported as safe as nuclear, solar and wind (for example in [3]), then they excluded the largest accident. If hydro is 2 orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear, wind and solar, then they included everything.
solar 0.02 deaths/TWh
nuclear 0.03
wind 0.04
hydro 0.02 without, 1.5 with
The failure is of the Banqiao Dam in China, in 1975.
It was an extreme outlier amongst even major dam failures, and most of the contributing factors are at best distantly related to the technology itself, whilst common to any large and high-risk technical endeavour.
Repeating what I've written before:
[T]he failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficiency, lack of relevant domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial, see especially Vajont, also St. Francis), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, limited resurces or capabilities (especially in developing countries), communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate response in light of imminent or present threat.
None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects.
The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, and not technical: poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforeseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away.
In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate inundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical. These are all basic mitigations and are common to a wide range of foreseeable incidents.
China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, institutionally corrupt and inept, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits.
The risks from Banqiao were short-term (acute), though profound. They could have been mitigated by planning, preparation, warnings, evacuation, and response. China at the time lacked the safety and civil defence maturity and mindsets, the political will, the engineering culture, and simply the capacity to respond appropriately given the magnitude of the disaster. The deaths were avoidable, and similar threats, say the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure. The engineering failure resulted in costs, but no loss of life, nor any significant damage to property other than the dam itself.
The U.S. still does see occasional dam failures, as with the Edenville and Sanford Dam failures of 19 May 2020. Here again poor engineering, construction, and operation created the risk, though again, preparedness and response prevented deaths, though in this case there was significant property damage.
Today, Chernobyl and Fukushima are exclusion zones, and they will be for centuries at a minimum. The reactor cores themselves, for tens of thousands of years. This is far longer than the companies, countries, cultures, and even languages extant at the time of the disasters --- our capacity to address risks and management at this scale is utterly nonexistent. Banqiao today is home to 17 million people who face no ongoing concerns from the incident.
Nuclear power also becomes a threat-multiplier: Chernobyl (and the neighbouring ZaporizhzhiaNuclear Power Station, which had been operating normally prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine) have both proved militarily-significant points of leverage in the conflict, with potential impacts extending well beyond the immediate region and time. Yes, dams have also played that role, but the ultimate impacts there are localised in both space and time, as well as highly tangible in ways that radiation threats are not.
Dam failures are short-lasting disasters, occurring over hours, days, or perhaps weeks. Relative to total installations --- tens if not hundreds of thousands worldwide --- major incidents are relatively rare.
Nuclear failures are long-lasting disasters, occurring over decades, centuries, and perhaps millennia. With fewer than 400 nuclear power plants worldwide, we've seen numerous catastrophic failures as well as far more close calls.
Daniel Swain, who is quoted in the article, is a fantastic follow if you live in CA - he tweets at @weather_west and is a phenomenal resource for understanding what’s actually driving the weather patterns in California.
I'm sure you have the relevant qualifications in associated fields of study to make the claim that Daniel Swain, Ph.D, is somehow not a credible source of information on this subject?
Our family is bunch of armchair hydrologists. Every random few months we trek from Bay area to Oroville to count the bathtub rings and study the drought situation.
Recently we trekked to see the newly formed Tulare Lake. FWIW, Tulare lake ain't evaporating for another 2 years. Imagine the same size storm repeats for 10+ years.
And they will continue increasing as the atmosphere continues to heat up.
Just yesterday (literally) they were mentioning on a Swiss radio I was listening to, that the quantity of water falling in the Alps above 2500m was going to double in the comings years, due to high intensity storms created by climate change.
Such contingency plans are quite common, are they not? The water has to go somewhere, so better redirect it to the place where it causes the least amount of damage.
watch any video of rescue efforts in modern built areas. Some multi-story buildings with the right structure are fine, people with two story houses sit on their roofs, meanwhile, most cars go for a ride in the direction of the flow.. etc.
During energy discussions here on HN, a common topic is accident insurance. The general principle is that a power plant should have insurance that cover any and all forms of accidents, covering any costs that such accidents may have on people who live around (or in this case downstream) of the plant. Not much mentioning of this in the article so I assume the costs is paid either by the state or by the individual.
The issue is that for some accidents the liability is virtually limitless, so insuring it is impossible. Chernobyl is up to $850B already and it hasn't even been cleaned up yet! That's why governments often act as the "insurer of last resort": there is literally no other way to pay for it.
> Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
For those who do not recognize it, that’s a quote from The Devil’s Dictionary, written by Ambrose Bierce between 1881 and 1906, published in full in 1911. And yes, that is the full definition given for the word “Corporation”:
to describe that from another angle -- history is full of great violence, great chemical harm, great swindles and great despots "which worked remarkably well and makes us richer" .. Puritans and swamp-hunters have been pushed aside by New York attorneys and their masters of the day. And we allow all of that "because it works remarkably well and makes us richer" .. and I able to type this too.
Could one make a damn self repairing by using coolant lines and woodfibers aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete? I imagine it similar to the bodies repair facilities, using the electricity from the damn to uphold cooling?
Even if this was technologically feasible, maybe the cost would be prohibitive. It would be much cheaper to not build the dam in the first place or close it, or just build alternative energy sources (solar, wind, etc.)
A damn is a battery. In solar threads, when they write about more batteries, they don't give a damn, but they mean it.
This discussion was about failing damns or spillways and how to repair them. Solar can fall to strong wether events too and damns provide base grid power.
Its could also be added after construction. A set of pipes of coolant lines and warmed woodslushie that become a temporary solution to a catastrophic development.
Its basically installing a industrial sized ac and a wood slushie sprinkler system.
- With zero major dams available (to fail), the 1862 flood destroyed ~1/4 of all taxable property in California, and killed ~1% of the human population of California. (Today, 1% of that population would be ~400,000 people killed.)
- The 1862 flood is obvious in ocean sediment records, as a thick gray layer. Similar thick layers occur every ~120 years, and one of those is ~10X as thick as the 1862 sediment layer. The NYTimes is very annoyingly short of details here, but I found at least a paywalled version of the sediment research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00253...
I live in Sacramento, there is some context the author may not have been aware of.
First off, hydrology and specifically excess water management in the valley is often geared toward irrigation and replenishing ground water. We have areas that are suppose to become flooded to keep the pressure off of the earthen levees along the river and delta (created by the confluence of the Sacramento to and San Joaquin rivers) as the water drains into the San Francisco Bay. This gives us a way to slow the discharge of water give it time to soak in join the water table. There are improvements here like widening the river channels we’ve carved out to expose more surface area for it to soak into, but there are no plans for this afaik.
Second, we have a network of creeks, canals, and drainage ditches that move excess water to less harmful places, Dry
Creek (which is dry most of the year) was carrying water as it should in march. These provide essential, perennial habitats that were once naturally occurring, and are filled and let dry by design.
Like most new media coverage, with this article being no exception, there is a tendency to focus on the main dams, but in the case of the American River, there are 5 dams in all managing water flow, with a dozen or so more impounding various tributaries. Combined this is known as the Upper American River Project, which acts a extra power capacity that SMUD (Sacramento’s community-owned power company) can turn on quickly. This network holds back nearly 430,000 acre/ft of water. A cascading failure in these dams can cause a significant portion of this (with the total capacity being released as almost 1/2 of Folsom’s capacity) could cause a spillway event and a wall of water careening downstream and potentially rupturing levees that were not rated for this volume. Because of the nature of the river’s bend and the narrowing of distance between the banks, the most obvious spot a break would occur is near Sacramento State University and would fill up the River Park neighborhood instantly given that exists between two levees when a new one was built to restrict the flow of the river so they can build more homes. The floodwaters would make it to downtown, destroying the affluent area of East Sacramento, Midtown, and running south through land park, elmhurst, and oak park. This is just one disaster scenarios that could lead to post-Katrina New Orleans type of flooding, with only hours of warning to execute a poorly planned evacuation.
The upper American River project series of damns is fairly well maintained, but for every Sierra Nevada snowmelt River that drain into then Sacramento or San Joaquin, there is a similar network of dams at varying levels of repair, waiting for a large cascading failure event to give the poor unsuspecting towns in the valley an unfortunate surprise.
