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0 pointsrebootthesystem9y ago0 comments

It did in the sense that you could undertake projects that would be impossible had the lake been full. In other words, you had certainty of not needing the spillway for months/years.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

maxerickson9y ago· 3 in thread

It's pretty impossible to predict that the spillway won't be needed in a given wet season.

They share the data about the level of the reservoir:

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/histPlot/DataPlotter.jsp?staid=ORO&...

The wet season last year basically filled the reservoir up from its lowest levels. So a project started in the middle of 2014 would need to leave the system operable by December, and they have that same ~6 month period in pretty much every year.

rebootthesystemOP9y ago

The point is they had 6 to 10 years (however long the drought lasted) to get ready for this moment in time, even if a little bit at a time.

Nobody ever seems to do this. We always wait for disasters before fixing or maintaining anything. This, despite the fact that we pay taxes, plenty of taxes, to fully staff, train and employ departments with thousands of people who are supposed to actively be looking after these things.

It's the infrastructure equivalent of a sysadmin who never looks after security and then, when all hell breaks loose, proclaims we need to do something about security.

maxerickson9y ago

Sure, but my point is that they have the same opportunity to do inspection whether there is a drought or not. So they've had the lifetime of the dam to do inspections and maintenance, not just a few years.

There's lots of possibilities. Maybe they didn't do inspections last year. Maybe they did inspections and noted damage that did not yet warrant repair. Maybe they did inspections and missed damage. Maybe they were unable to secure funds to repair the damage. Maybe the damage was noted too late to do repairs last fall. Etc.

The thing to do is wait and see if they come forward with a reasonable explanation of what went wrong and then feed that information into the maintenance plans at this dam and others.

chrishacken9y ago

It's easy to say this after the fact, but infrastructure like that has a minimal budget for that sort of stuff. If we did this on every dam in the US, it would potentially amount to a billion dollars or more. At a time when the government is trying to claw back budgets, that sort of thing is never going to be approved.

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