Yet more “Flooding Drought”.
This is very near my old home town. It is the Seasonal Flood as in my childhood. This area is “protected” by Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River, so this flood is from water in that catchment, plus local rains. This IS NOT related to the Oroville dam problems.
Yet it is flooded.
The horrible thing this means is that releases from Lake Shasta are too high for present rain conditions, which implies the operators are very worried about something. Perhaps a too full lake with too much snow above it and a warmish atmospheric river starting?
The pictures of Williams I-5 as a watercovered road are also not good. That roadbed is raised relative to the land on each side, and has good drainage (normally).
This is what is downslope from Central Valley reservoirs that are full.
This (toward Colusa and Williams) is where Oroville residents head to leave town (though 30 miles from Oroville). The main road west goes directly to this flood zone. The southern road is along the banks of the Feather River, so the prime flood direction. The northern road to Chico took 3 hours to go a 25 minute drive.
.
.
And we have 3 more days of steady rain ahead.
From this posting:
https://www.iceagenow.info/residents-flee-northern-california-town-video/
Musings from the Chiefio 
Thanks for these pictures. The forces that control nature are obviously not very well described by government funded models of reality.
Inhabitants and officials simply have no historical insights.
Much more severe floods have happened in the past. Tony Heller has put up a few historic floods on his real climate science blog.
The entire valley can turn into a flood plain with high water levels that last for months drowning all the live stock.
Thanks for the infor, for some reason, maybe this is “fake news” the msm is not covering this very important story.
Just looked up the snow depth at Cedar Pass this morning 47 inches! and 98 inches at Dismal Swamp. This is the head waters of the Pit River that drains the Inter Mountain Area of North East California 3,000 to 10,000 feet elevations. twice normal amounts of snow in this area.
The Pit in full flood can fill Shasta lake by it’s self in 2 weeks! It appears that they are in a desperate push to drain down Lake Shasta before the Pit drainage melts down and floods. Last time this happened after a prolonged drought it took 10 days to overtop the Shasta dam spillways, starting from very low water levels. This time that lake is nearly full.
Good news is it is cold in that basin and will get much colder after tomorrow…pg
Tony is a highly productive poster so his flood articles were already snowed under.
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/02/massive-flood-in-california-after-two-decades-of-drought/
Oh yes, and It looks like we are going to be blessed with a little more rain over the next 24 hours!…pg
And this posting:
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/02/california-sanctuary-state-for-morons/
Mmmm, as soon as I post a link I end up in the bin…
And quakes: https://youtu.be/8-RASxMZGy0
@R.de Haan:
A 4.x quake is rather irrelevant. Even 5s are barely worth notice…
I don’t know the whole process used by WordPress to toss things into spam and moderation, but they clearly have a stochastic component…
@Margaret:
Note that the video is from a local TV station, so it is being covered, but only as local low importance news.
@R.de Haan:
Oh, and remember that Tule Lake was once a very large lake and is now farmland… that can rapidly become a lake again…
@P.G.:
It is the snow that worries me the most. Over 40 feet at Kirkwood…
If one thinks of CBS TV as a local channel, then the MSM may not pick it up. Here in WA State we have small floods frequently and it simply happens (a) because folks build things in the flood plain, and (b) other folks build things in the lands up slope. Water comes off faster and higher and then drops more quickly. This isn’t of much interest to people in NYC.
” … releases from Lake Shasta are too high for present rain conditions, which implies the operators are very worried about something.”
And this does make it interesting. Good call.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Evacuation plans are, more or less, fantasy tales.
At Oroville, they said — Get out. Go north.
How did that work out? Clogged roads. Gasoline not at hand. Fights.
Happened in Houston when folks tried to flee Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They needed to bring in a tanker and parcel out gasoline to get people on their way.
Every family needs to keep a car full of gas and have a “Go Now” bag. Even better, call it a “Go Early” bag, and plan on going in a direction and to a place with food and shelter not on everyone else’s list.
The basin of the Pit River is HUGE. Silver Lake and Kirkwood Meadows get a lot of snow, but they only cover a small area. Normally the High Mountain Desert discharges a small flow from it’s 15 inches of annual precipitation but in wet years a vast flood. There is 7,350 square miles in it’s watershed and discharges 80% of the water flowing into Shasta Lake…pg
One of the major problems we had when doing evacuation plans, was you have folks running out of gas at about 1/2 a tank full distance from the starting point, until you get to 1 tankful distance.
(About 150 – 300 miles today)
Just about everyone in the evacuation stream will run out of gas (or need to top the tank) from 100 -250 miles travel distance. Most will try to top off sooner as they are leaving town and realize it will be a while before they get back and start to notice folks are filing up the gas stations along the route as they get out of town.
It is worse if roads are clogged and folks spend a lot of time sitting idling the engine.
This site is again excellent on the subject:
COLUSA COUNTY — The town of Maxwell is being evacuated due to flooding in the area.
Residents are being relocated to Williams.
https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-spillway-failure.t8381/page-25#post-201316
They have filled up the disturbing hole:
https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/bedrock-emergspillway_1-jpg.25016/
Proper job.
It struck me that in all the pictures of the broken Oroville spillway, I could not see any rebar in broken concrete.
Has anyone seen any ?
And then there are these stories:
Oroville Dam’s flood-control manual hasn’t been updated for half a century
Oroville Dam running on temporary licenses; mandatory evacuations still in place
@LG:
It has rebar. Really high res photos show it, but the low res in computer images that fit a screen (I.e. not zoomed in) don’t show it as it falls under one pixel width.
The spillway is a mile long and wide enough to play football. A 3/8 or exen 1/2 inch rebar wouldn’t even look like a hair. But in close up photos of the break, in hi res, if you zoom in, little bits can be seen.
Per the old ops manuals for the dams:
The complaint is that they are not infested with”climate change”, I’m good with that. Then they denigrate sliderules and hand draw charts. We got to the moon with sliderules and hand drawings. Engineering is best when well thought out, and those tools made you think. IMHO, students ought to be required to learn the sliderule and drafting today. It would improve their understanding and attention to detail.
Nothing like needing to toss out 6 hours of careful work, because you just inked something wrong, to “focus the mind”. Much more motivating than hitting “print” again …
Besides, just how much does a pile of dirt change in a few decades…
@John Silver:
That image is particularly nice as it shows the depth where the gray bedrock starts showing up. That is not very deep.
That gives confidence that the Emergency spillway will not wash out with use, but just erode a few feet, as designed, and be done. The original design docs said it would suffer moderate damage if used, and IMHO, that is what it meant. Which means it is operating as the original engineering expected, not as some surprise failure mode.
R. de Haan’s links to Tony Heller are probably the most telling. history does repeat itself for morons, and it seems Moonbeam is there each time. for sane people that would be enough to sour them from idiots. But then it does not appear most Californians are sane.
I believe the E.S. to be about 1700 feet long. Current inflow is 61000 CFS, outflow is just below 60,000 CFS.
Re:
John Silver says:
21 February 2017 at 9:34 am
They have filled up the disturbing hole:
https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/bedrock-emergspillway_1-jpg.25016/
Proper job.
I just looked at that photo. It sure gives “cement pond” a new meaning, doesn’t it?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cement%20pond
On facebook one of my friends has posted a video of Don Pedro Spillway flowing over Bonds Flat Road. Looks like similar issues will be occurring throughout California for a while.
I found these video segments on youtube
cutting action on Bonds Flat road below dam as gates opened
news clip on the water release at Don Pedro and the Tuolumne river
Snowing heavily in the high country..going to be a big melt year!
https://truckeetahoeairport.com/webcam
They have had a levee breach on the San Joaquin River which forced evacuation of about 500 residents.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/02/21/flooding-evacuations-rock-drenched-northern-california/98188168/
@Larry From your last link… “One wind gust reached 199 mph.” Guessing that was a typo…
Since it has hit Fox News so nationwide:
Yes, there is flooding in San Jose and it is ‘sort of’ near me about 5 to 10 miles away.
I’m a tiny bit ‘up hill’ from it. The nearest creek to me is not flooding, and not likely to flood.
Basically, the flood zones are all along the East side of the valley where the inland hills scrape the water from the clouds, or in creeks that drain them.
On some news blurb was something about breaking a 100 year rain record, but as you might guess, I’m a bit busy right now so can’t look it up…
I don’t think it is a typo we are getting very high winds here in Colorado from the leading edge of that storm system. We have had 70 mp gusts near Boulder that blew down some very large trees.
I would not be surprised that areas in the Sierras and their foothills, got some impressive wind gusts in the passes and such from this storm complex.
Looks like it was most likely near squaw valley and nearby areas.
http://www.readingeagle.com/ap/article/storm-brings-record-rainfall-gusts-up-to-199-mph-and-flooding-to-northern-california
@E.M Smith,
I know quakes of this magnitude don’t make a dent in pack of butter but it is the prediction that was made plus the whole theory behind it that triggered my attention.
I suspect their wind gauge tops out at 199 and they just never figured it would need faster than that (or that the spinning bits would survive faster…)
@R.de Haan:
OK, I’ll go back and read it (he said sheepishly…)
@All:
Per levees:
In the San Joaquin they make “islands”. They did this by building dikes in the delta and then pumping out the water. Many of them are one dike height below sea level… Needless to say, this is not a very good idea when there is a lot of rain…
Most rainy years, some dike somewhere gives out and an “island” returns to its natural state as bay/delta bottom… This, then, makes the news… Go figure.
When these were all farms, nobody really cared much. The smarter farmers had homes on stilts, or had a built up area to levee height where they parked the equipment. About 15? years ago, some enterprising folks started building “suburbs” in those “islands”… a very very bad idea.
While much of the central valley is “near” sea level and insanely flat, so gets a foot or three of flood in the occasional torrential rains, there are places near where rivers conjoin, or on artificial “islands”, that get more like 3 to 5 meters of water… especially when the levee breaks… or just the pumps stop… The brighter places make these “parks” where you can run dune buggies and motorbikes in summer, or go fishing. The more dim places make them neighborhoods… FWIW, our capital in Sacramento is built near the confluence of a couple of rivers… Just sayin’… In the 1862 flood aftermath, they trucked in dirt and fill and raised it 14 feet. Our government has been a bit daft about water that long… (I lived about 10 blocks from there, slightly up slope, in the ’70s… and watched the water rise more than once).
A lot of people show a shocking lack of curiosity and extremely poor imagination regarding flooding and where water will go when you have a cloud burst or historic proportions.
Saw the same sort of flood mitigation actions here in Colorado by farmers and ranchers. Along the white river in Moffat county the flood plane is very flat (which is why the Indians liked to race horses along the mountain valleys during the summer.
In the mid 1980’s we had a very wet year with mud slides etc, and I noticed driving up highway 40 an old farm house completely surrounded by water but on a very small plateau just a foot or so above the water level (as was the driveway out to the road). The rancher knew of the periodic flooding along the river and built accordingly.
In about that 1862 flood, my old home town was flooded. They rebuilt, but first raised all the lots to about a foot above flood level (so downtown has about 2 foot curbs and house lots slope up about 2 feet from the street to the house foundation, itself about 2 feet high).
During subsequent floods, the roads became 2 foot deep rivers and folks parked off street…
After WWII one subdivision was added at natural grade with slab foundations. My Dad, who sold realestate, explained to me why to never buy one…. I was about 8, but remembered…
@R.de Haan:
Well, he cheerfully slides around by “a point” that is really a factor of 10 or so of energy and frequency… then expects to impress by predicting a 4 ish quake in a band from the offshore San Andreas to the volcanic field up near Tahoe? That’s like predicting water in San Francisco bay…
The reason we pay no attention to anything below a 5 is that they are always happening somewhere in this rats nest of faults. His zone includes no less than 4 major active faults and a half dozen more minor ones. Hayward, Calaveras, san Andreas, Rogers, …
That a 4 happened in The Geysers is about as surprising as sunrise… then he claims it somehow is important to Oroville? When I was 12, and the lake had just filled, we had a 5.5 (miles from it, my bedroom shook…) when something 10 times as strong at the dam does nothing, then 1/10 that 200 miles away is utterly irrelevant and of no importance.
Does a nice “show” with constantly moving the globe around and gratuitously adding and removing quake prints from it, kind of like the shell and the pea… but with little explanation of why or what it means.
Yeah, I’m not impressed. Frankly, just the “only one point less” dodge is enough to light up my radar. It is like predicting you will sell 10 cars, then when you only sell one claiming an accurate prediction. Then he makes his prediction zone the vague middle 1/2 of the State with about 20 miles between faults and more of them than I can count?
OK…
So, yeah, a novel bit with trying to tie Oklahoma to California, and having a global view of stress transmission patterns is interesting. But to be believed, he needs a 10x tighter metric on his predictive skill. Anyone can predict a 4 to 5.x range quake in “Central California to Tahoe” and be right much of the time. IIRC, The Geysers area gets one like that about weekly (most in that near 4 range). As long as you can open your lower bound by a factor of 10 in frequency and power, and are already starting from a low power high frequency range, it really is just a statistical game.
Predict magnetude 6+ quakes within a fault system, or a 100 mile square, within one week, then you have something. But no dropping it to 5s or 4s after the fact or opening up your 100 miles to 500 on a side…
When I lived in CA (late 60s) loved the Geysers. Especially after midnight.
Re:
<>
I agree. Talks way too long and moves things around way too much for anyone to really glean useful information from his presentations.
I wish I could go to Ben Davidson’s conference. I would like to hear more about the earthquake triggers he has been tracking. I think there is a significant amount of overlap with the triggers I have been tracking.
Well phooey. It removed the text I was quoting…
Here it is again:
Does a nice “show” with constantly moving the globe around and gratuitously adding and removing quake prints from it, kind of like the shell and the pea… but with little explanation of why or what it means.
@ E.M.Smith.
Funny that you should ask :D
Actually, “There’s An App For That !!!” (available both from the appstore and googleplay ).
AND, they claim to meet your criteria !!!
Ben Davidson of suspiciousobservers.org has been conducting some interesting trials, forecasting 6+ quakes with a claimed accuracy of 80% + (it even notifies via twitter of areas of interest.)
Listed below are links and resources documenting their methodology ( if there’s an interesting in exploring their approach).
http://quakewatch.net/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zRUPkFrofDO7HF41pqvg6SXTJugNGtsszqaweF43HP0/edit
https://twitter.com/TheRealS0s/with_replies
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/disaster-prediction-app/id1177806007
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.disasterprediction.ios
Hmmm…
That picture of the spillway looks like they could cast a large block between the two broken bits and be back in business. It also looks like the two sides are on bedrock and that span that fell in was bridging over fill, that washed out.
Knowing how paranoid government works, they will undoubtedly fear reuse of the existing slabs and make more money for crony contractors removing all the old one and building an entirely new one next to it…
@Power Grab:
WordPress steals ANYTHING between two angle brackets and tries to turn it into HTML that it can understand. IF it can’t understand that HTML, or it isn’t HTML, it just throws it away… Welcome to wordpress… So NEVER use angle brackets for anything other than bog simple HTML…
@L.G.:
Well, then the question is “How well does it really work”…
Looking at that close up picture of the spillway failure blown up slightly, I see no sign of either rebar, or 4″ x 4″ concrete re-wire screen. It looks a lot like it was just poured on grade with no reinforcement as mentioned above.
Hmmm I wonder if some contractor cut a corner on the spillway specs, even residential driveways in the 1960’s (at least where I live) had at least the reinforcement screen cast in the panels.
It would be interesting to see a detail of the engineering drawings for that spillway as designed.
If they cut some corners might be able to put a big construction company on the hook for paying for the repair (or as EM mentioned complete rebuild if it does not meet current construction standards for main spillways.
@Larry:
The problem with trying to see rebar is that there are not enough pixels. The spillway is 3050 feet long:
http://www.water.ca.gov/orovillerelicensing/docs/app_ferc_license_2005/Vol_I_Exhibit%20A.pdf
The crest of the spillway area is 1730 feet long (that’s both spillways) and the gates in the regular spillway (all 8 of them) are 33 feet tall each.
Figure out just how many pixels will be occupied by a 1/2 inch rebar in that picture. Yeah, less than one…
Assume you have a 1000 foot section of the thing, that’s 24,000 half inches. Now square it… 576,000,000 pixels.
Think that image was taken with a 576 Megapixel camera?…
I’ve seen one close up of the break that DID show rebar, so it is in there. But you MUST get a closeup, not an expanded image from far far away of something a half mile wide…
Open this image and expand it. Then look carefully at the broken block sitting on the lower segment near the middle. Notice the very tiny thin wires? Those are rebar. Now look back to the broken edges. Notice the tiny hairs of bent rebar?
https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/upload_2017-2-18_11-21-37-png.24934/
This thing is huge…
Okay that is close enough to show rebar, I knew it was pushing it but even in an image too course to actually resolve a thin feature you can see a subtle darkening where the object is.
I recall one of the video clips you could see large pieces of concrete getting tossed in the air by the turbulent water flow, so there was a question if there was adequate reinforcement to resist the pounding of violent turbulence like that.
That kind of structure is so large it is hard to figure out scale from small isolated shots. I do recall now that you mention it one picture of several trucks parked on the spillway while they examined the damage so it is as wide as a multi lane super highway.
I wouldn’t feel bad about asking the question (or rather, I don’t feel bad that I too asked it…) since it does look like none is there and only after a lot of searching did I find close-up photos good enough to see any. THEN I back figured the “why” of not seeing it in the other pictures… after a certain amount of OMG that thing is huge… even having seen it in person in use (though in my own defense, that was about 50 years ago and I was just a kid impressed by everything new…)
DWR published an overview of the repairs so far.
One Page PDF doc.
Click to access Lake%20Oroville%20Spillway%20Repairs%20general%20overview_022117.pdf
Northrn Sierra 8-station Precipitation Index 2017.
John F. Hultquist says….
We ALWAYS keep the tanks of our trucks filled. Water condensation in a partially filled tank does the vehicle no good.
In a situation like this I would have the 100 gal tank on the dually filled and the truck already packed with camping gear and food ready to leave when needed.
On the other hand I made sure to check out the property I planned to buy during a hurricane and saw it flood to the ‘100 yr flood level’ so I know where that is and I am 100 feet above that. People stupid enough to build in a flood are get a chance at a Darwin Award.
@Gail:
And I would NOT have the truck gassed and food packed… I’d be in a Best Western 100 miles away looking over the dinner menu at the Marie Callender’s restaurant!
8-‘)
Then again, I tend to think too far ahead….
I can be in Phoenix in 12 drive hours if needed. Like the pool and hot tub at the hotel there….
OTOH, I can be Up Slope a few hundred feet in about 20 minutes…
OTOotherH: I checked out the USGS maps before I bought so I don’t really need to do anything beyond cooking dinner….
EM, Thanks for the tip about angle brackets. I always pat myself on the back when I learn something new every day. :-) That keeps me from feeling overly dumb for not already knowing it!
EM, I have ~ 50 sheep and goats (they keep multiplying…) and 20 equines so I do not go anywhere for more than a day without a lot of planning.
@Gail:
Why I exited the bunny herding operation… I could be gone a few days since they would self tend for as long as the feed and water held out… but with increasing risk. Usually had to leave a family member at home or arrange a “bunny sitter”.
So now my bug out plans can center on a pocket full of cash and a hotel guide 8-)
Next time I have animals, it will be on upslope acreage… so likely won’t happen as there isn’t much of that in Florida…
Try Georgia or Alabama instead of Florida…
I sort of wish we had settled in South Carolina instead of North but I can not take the wet heat.
I do like being on the top of a ridge so no fear of flooding, just tornadoes and that is very occasionally.
I have a fondness for mid slope not quite at the summit of the ridge (less wind)
Depending on geography you can tailor the slope to the local conditions, south facing slopes have longer growing seasons, tend to be dryer so desirable in the northern latitudes, north and east facing slopes are cooler in the southern areas where growing seasons are not an issue etc.
Far enough above the local drainage that flooding (other than down slope flow during a cloud burst) is generally impossible, not steep enough to be a bother but having a clear drainage slope so you know where waters is going to go without doing a survey or checking a topo map.
Here in Colorado there is a band about 20-30 miles wide just east of the front range that has some nice advantages. Gets warm down slope winds in the winter (good snow melt and can be 10-30 degrees warmer than just a few miles east in the depths of winter). Up slope flow on the other hand makes it a bit wetter than the near desert arid high plains, so is not so critically affected by drought. In cold weather it is often above the cold weather temperature inversion in the Platte river drainage and also tends to be a little warmer during Siberian cold outbreaks from Canada (Alberta clipper).
Of course the fact that I have lived in that area all my life might have something to do with it.
Larry, Just below the top of the ridge also helps protect you from tornadoes. They have a tendency to ‘hop’ over you. Learned that from my ex-in-laws who lived in tornado alley.
Here in NC have the wind is really really nice. No mosquitoes! And it is cooler. Unfortunately it also means you can’t spray paint outside most days and if tossing hay you had better pick the correct time of day.
Follow up, secondary consequence of the Oroville dam incident is higher public awareness of dam safety and the need for ongoing inspections and remedial action as required. Many dams are very old and easily taken for granted, and presumed safe. That is not always the case.
The latest atmospheric river is hittin San Diego non stop since the early morning. So far 3 to 4 inches all over, with Palomar Mountain at about 9 inches of rain today.
San Diego river above flood stage and expected to peak at close to 9000 C.F.S.
Wonder if their drought is over yet? Maybe they need a little more rain!…pg
Looks like San Diego is forecast for a couple of dry days now, but is still under an “Active Warning: Flood Watch” or some such. My guess would be the hills are still draining into the flat for the next day or two. The Drought Monitor http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ shows them as still in a drought (surprise…) though an L stage one. So yet another flooding drought…
@David A
We just flew back from Imperial Valley Monday. Fortunately the rain held off until we left. But we flew through Palm Springs this time (actually a much nicer place to fly through than San Diego). If you have never seen the Palm Springs Airport, you are missing a one in a million! The “Concourse” is merely an awning covered walk way between buildings (housing the restaurants and such). When going from the main terminal building to the “Concourse”, you pass through an open court yard. Given the normal weather there, very beautiful and practical.
But not when it rains! I guess that airport is not so nice the past few days.
BTW: To get to the airport, you have to travel over Bob Hope Avenue, past Gene Autry Trail, and then take Kirk Douglas Way. And the concourse is the “Sonny Bono” Concourse.
Report: Oroville dam’s main spillway must be repaired by November
I smell “dialing for dollars” in that report per Oroville.
There’s always some leakage under / around concrete structures. They can grout any gaps / leaks in the existing, then just ensure the base drains ground water properly.
Per the emergency spillway: IMHO it is designed to ablate about 10 to 20 feet to bedrock then hold. So yeah, a ‘redesign’ is what they would want, with attendant $$$$.
What I would do is build a new primary spillway where the present “emergency” one sits, then declare the old one the “emergency spillway” since clearly it worked as one in this emergency… Probably grout it and repave the bottom half, though…
@E.M.Smith:
ICYMI, the DWR youtube channel with recent videos of work around the Dam.
https://www.youtube.com/user/calwater/videos
The main spillway can release water at far lower levels and likely has a great deal of bedrock below much of it. As E.M. says, likely fishing for dollars, the state fishing for federal dollars is a reasonable guess.
@David A:
I watched the main spillway be built. They dug down into the bedrock to create the lower (50 foot?) drain height, then put a concrete box in it with gates, outside of that, the spillway chute drops away to the river to carry what comes out.
As that area started out about the same as the “emergency” area, they can do the very same thing there. Dig a 40 or 50 foot deep channel, line it, and have a chute below it. Lots of fast digging and concrete work needed but not much else. Then come back the next year for a ‘redo’ of the existing spillway (that is well situated on bedrock footing at the top 1/3 to 1/2 so likely only the bottom needs a bunch of concrete work to make it visually appealing…)