After heavy winter storms, the water level stands just two feet below the new spillway gates – will it work?
When the #CampFire occurred, one of the very best tools out there on the web for tracking progress of the fire came from Peter Hansen, at Chico State University. Now he has a new interactive tool he has shared with me for use in monitoring the level of Lake Oroville as it fills and approaches the top.
You can click the image above to open the interactive tool in a new browser tab.
California’s Department of Water resources provides tabular data, but no comparative visualizations. This interactive tool shows the the five most important variables that most people are interested in monitoring:
With a “full at the top” elevation of 900 feet, the interactive graph also displays the two most important benchmarks:
Right now, as of noon PST today, the lake level is at 810.84 feet, just 2.7 feet from the spillway gates, and rising 2-3 feet daily. At that rate, it will only be less than a day before the new billion-dollar spillway can be used/tested. DWR says there is an 813.6 foot threshold for use, and that is indicated by the orange line in the graph above.
It will be another couple of weeks before the water level makes its way all the way to the top, where the emergency spillway will be used if that happens. Of course, DWR may increase releases, so that may not happen.
Back in early February, DWR said they don’t plan to use the spillway soon, but then later changed their story to say they were making preparations to do so if the water level exceeded 780 feet elevation. That’s already happened.
All eyes are on DWR. Will they, or won’t they?
Already, there are concerns:
I’ve been monitoring US lake levels for years. http://oroville.lakesonline.com/level.asp – it works for most lake names.
“Forget about the rain, it’s the snow pack we need to worry about.”
Actually, it’s a hard rain on a big snow pack that is the most dangerous thing to any mega flooding as history shows us everywhere at higher elevations and northerly locations in the late winter or spring. Hopefully, it isn’t a late warm rain on an unmelted snow pack, which is real mess because not only is it the local rain content, but also much of the accumulated snow content that melts all at once by the rain and is an instant flood. That is what caused the devastating floods in Alberta/Calgary back in mid to late June/2013 when warm spring rains fell on the higher elevation Rocky Mountains that were still all covered in deep snow from a real cold spring. Same as the 1948 May/June flooding across much of the Pacific North West and a lot of the western NA continent.
Earthling 2 has it exactly right. The same amount of rain can be safe or dangerous depending on its temperature and the air temperature at the point where it is falling. A warm late rain on an unmelted snowpack is the most dangerous because the warm rain melts the snowpack, which releases the combined water amount of both the rain AND the underlying snowpack at the same time. That kind of water pulse can overwhelm a reservoir.
So a large rainfall in really cold air temperatures produces a large snowfall, and snowfall on the Oroville Reservoir watershed isn’t dangerous at the time it falls, or when it melts gradually during the summer.
“The floor panels on Oroville Dam’s spillway appear shoddily jointed, & gutter-jointed at that. See how rainwater runs sideways into the joints? Not a smooth surface. When 100,000 cubic feet of water per second hits that floor, = cavitation?”
“Cavitation” is a problem with hard materials e.g. steel. Under high pressure.
The problem for concrete walls would be flushing, washing out.
But that would be easily recognizable from the outside.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=I21-XJ-6CoqNlwTf_JXgCQ&q=cavitation+fluid+mechanics&oq=cavitation+fluid+mechanics&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
Mission “Oroville Spillway reconstruction” accomplished in 2018.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=XG5-XIqdFoOYacXQrrAJ&q=Lake+Oroville+spillway++recovery+&oq=Lake+Oroville+spillway++recovery+&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
D.Trump makes America great again.
The expected rainfall in California will be calm. It is not an atmospheric river.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=epac×pan=24hrs&anim=html5
The level rose 3 feet on the 4th March.
It was inly 1.5 feet from the spillway.
We are now halfway through the 5th, so I am guessing the water has reached the spillway.
Sadly the linked pages to the monitor have not updated, can anyone say if the water is now flowing down the spillway? Is it automatic or does it get released down the spill way? The water will rise by around 3 feet per day, so what next?
Thanks,
RS
According to the revised operating plan, water will get to elevation 838 or above,\ before the gates are opened. They will then try to make outflow match inflow limited to a flow of 100,000 cfs.
Yes If they matched outflow to inflow now they’d have an extra ~30,000 cfs in the Feather river, better to delay outflow increase until the natural river flow goes down then gradually bring it up. After all that’s what the dam is for, flood control.
I note having just Bing mapped the reservoir that the image on Bing is still of the wreckage of the spillway. That was one seriously scary incident.
If anything the whole re-do was way over engineered.
As it should be I suppose.
I followed all of the work and was impressed with the extreme measures taken to rebuild it all.
Any suggestions of shoddy engineering or work or are absurd.
In the mountains of Northern California it will now snowing.
Thanks for posting this. I looked on the website, and found this link to tutorials on how to produce your own charts: https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/resources — I am no very artistically inclined, but I’m thinking about signing up for an account (it says registration is free), and see what I can create. The website also says something about a workbook being a available. The only negative is that the introductory tutorial shows how to create a chart of carbon-dioxide “pollution” by country. In the example it shows that Qatar is the biggest polluter, but their CO2 output is decreasing, while Trinidad and Tobago is increasing CO2 output. Well, who cares — those islands will be well below sea level in a few more years .
Who needs sturdy construction when you have “official” pronouncements of permanent drought for the long term? Rename it the Jerry Brown Spillway.
It appears that the spillway sill level only represents about 2/3 of the nominal capacity of the reservoir. That is, the current water level is recorded as 66% of capacity and 94% of average for this day of the year.
The article makes it clear that the spillway is below the emergency spillway but implies it will get there in a few weeks. That seems very ‘optimistic’ as the capacity percentage has been rising slowly even with recent rains.
When the original emergency spillway was in use and chewing itself up, the the capacity percentage was recorded above 100% at as much as 104%, IIRC.
The URL below retrieves a pdf that is updated daily, usually before 2PM as of the midnight previous.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=rescond.pdf
You can see the ‘devastating’ drought that California is suffering in the depletion of its largest reservoirs.(sarc).
The percentage of capacity available at what level is irrelevant. What is relevant is the volume needed to retain the design flood. The operating plan reserved that volume as empty below the emergency spillway when the water is at elev 838.
You seem fixated on height which is irrelevant to the comment I made. If you want to talk about something else, go ahead.
Capacity determines when overflow and the necessity of using the emergency spillway occurs. One third of the total volume or 50% of the current volume of water must be retained to reach the emergency spillway based on today’s volume.
Have I misstated something?
@John Brisbin You’re correct. There is plenty of capacity available, particularly considering the hyatt power plant is only consuming a relatively small amount of the inflow at this time, 5000 cfs. At full flow, the plant consumes 16,950 cfs. I believe one of the 6 turbines is under repair, reducing the maximum by 2800-2850 cfs.
The modelling for the current operating strategy determined that 920 million acre feet of storage is needed to contain the design event under the planned discharge limits. If you have 1,840 million acre feet of storage available that is 50 per cent. If you have 2,760 million acre feet of storage available that is 33 percent. Per cent of reservoir volume that is available is a meaningless number, 920 million acre feet is what matters.
I “fixate” on the elevation of 838 feet because at that elevation there is sufficient volume available (920 million acre feet) to ameliorate the design flood before the emergency spillway is over topped. It does not matter if there are 920 million acre feet below that, or 1,840 million acre feet. The volume that matters is 920 million acre feet available to deal with what is to come. Whether that is 33 percent of the volume or 50 percent of the volume of the reservoir is not relevant. 920 million acre feet available is the critical volume. It just so happens that the required volume to retain the design flood is available when the elevation of the water in the reservoir reaches 838 feet in the wettest conditions considered by the revised operations plan.
I would have preferred that they would have reconsidered the design flood in light of the additional 60 years experience, but the design floods as determined in the original design are the ones that have been used in the analysis and are the best available at the moment. With the current stream flow routing models and discharge protocols it is determined that 920 million acre feet of storage is needed to ameliorate the design conditions. Whether that is 30, 50, or 90 percent of the volume of the reservoir does not matter. It happens that at or about a water surface elevation of 838 feet that 920 million acre feet of additional storage remains: it is that volume remaining that matters.
I can see that you have a problem with responding to what was said and instead would prefer to work your prepared talking points. I can see that you are well informed about enough ‘trees’ that an observation about the ‘forest’ is incomprehensible.
Fine. I am not playing any more.
Perhaps you would like to explain what this means?
“The article makes it clear that the spillway is below the emergency spillway but implies it will get there in a few weeks.”
Beautiful low over California.
Still harsh winter in North America.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/sat/satlooper.php?region=us&product=ir
Lake Oroville dam live feed webcams. Note that some may be offline and ever since Kiewit took the night worklights down, it is best viewed during daylight. The best one, that looked up the main spillway from across the river is no longer active, nor is the one that looked at the emergency spillway:
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=29480
Lake Oroville SRA Spillway Top
http://www.parks.ca.gov/live/lakeorovillesra_spillwaytop
Lake Oroville SRA Visitor Center
http://www.parks.ca.gov/live/lakeorovillesra
Lake Oroville SRA North Forebay
http://www.parks.ca.gov/live/lakeorovillesra_n_forebay
There is also California DWR youtube that has lots of videos during construction:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTTvFfFatgWr6jv1jVgei1w
I watched DWR and Blancolirio construction updates on an almost daily basis and it was fascinating. Kiewit did a first class job and I don’t believe the Army Corps was involved (unless in a minor way). It was all DWR and Kiewit.
What does $1.1 billion get?
The concrete on the original spillway chute had an average thickness of 2 feet 8 inches.
The new spillway chute is about three times as thick, an average of 7 feet 6 inches.
The rebar on the original spillway was 4 million pounds.
The rebar on the new spillway is three times heavier, at more than 12 million pounds.
The main spillway has more than half a million cubic yards of concrete.
Combined, the main and emergency spillways have more than 1.2 million cubic yards of concrete.
Not to mention that the old one had to be removed and then dug down to sound bedrock (something that was apparently not done when the first one was constructed. 600 workers on double shifts for a year or so not cheap either. Agree about Juan’s work on the Blancolirio channel!
Oroville UPDATE Feb ’19 – When will the new Spillway be Used? Update in the Mighty Luscombe after heavy rains and snow in Feb. 2019.
blancolirio Published on Mar 3, 2019
It will depend greatly on how the spring temps and storms unfold. The winter of 1996/97 showed what will happen when continuous warm rains impact the snow pack. In that fall/winter temps dropped early on. There were early snows in the Sierras which built up a decent snowpack by December. Then at the end of November a warmer storm system moved in, and it began to rain all day every day for the next 30+ days, maybe about 34 days in a row without let up.
Towards the end of all that lakes were forming in the Sacramento Valley. The flood gates to the west of Sacramento had to be opened to let waters surge south out of the river and into the valley. It was around that time when the spillways at the Oroville dam had to be used for the first time. I think that the initial damage to the spillway occurred at that time.
I was living in Marin County at the time. Every little rivulet of water had become a raging torrent. A tiny 6 inch deep stream in a drainage ditch close to the house I rented rose some 15 feet to overflow the drainage. That started cutting off access to nearby houses. The non stop rain at that point was becoming semi biblical. Millions of people were now affected by the rain.
Then the strange happened. The last night of rain I was watching tv, and had gotten up to smoke a cigarette on the back porch as I had promised the landlord to not smoke in her house. The rain was light. As I stood there facing to the north I said a quiet prayer “Lord you are going to flood all of us, if the rains do not stop”. Just like that the rains came to an end. The clouds opened up in a large crack to the north of me, and there was comet Hale Bopp falling in the north northwest sky right in the middle of that crack in the clouds. I stood there in amazement wondering at the sequence of events. At the time I felt like an old time prophet.
MOD: So what happened to my previous post (that needed moderation for some reason)?
I see that it is still snowing in the Sierras which when it melts, a lot of it feeds into this reservoir..
It looks to me that there is more snow than when it happened two years ago.
I sure hope that what they have done will prevent what happened before…just hope that the snow melts slowly…I think that the level should be lower now…it’s still winter in the mountains.
It’s slightly ahead of where it was in 2016, which peaked on May 1st.
http://oroville.lakesonline.com/Level/
All eyes are on DWR. Will they, or won’t they?
Already, there are concerns:
From a self styled ‘Amateur cryptodamologis’ with a fixation on Oroville’s ‘green spot’ not a credible source.
I see that the water level is now almost 10 feet above the spillway sill level…
Yeah, it’s now at 823′, the outflow has now been increased to 8,000 cfs. Inflow has been slowly dropping today.
So they might have rain until Tuesday, I am hoping that nothing happens like in Feb. 2017. I am just keeping track of what is happening… maybe lower the lake level gradually so what occurred in 2017 doesn’t happen again.
During the spring melt.
Where are the live webcams and news reports? I guess that no news is good news.
Anthony… you might want to update the graph at the top, or at least mention that the water is 11 feet above the sill at 10 pm pacific time – In some kind of an update.
at 3/07/2019
Looks like DWR are maintaining a river release of ~7,000 cfs and as the inflow is dropping fairly steadily they seem to have a good handle on things. They could significantly increase flow through the Hyatt powerplant but that would mean increasing the river flow, they’re still below the target capacity so unless there’s a huge storm forecast they might as well stay on the current plan.
River release has dropped and outflow is close to inflow now, converging on 848′ level, looks like it’s being well managed just by the Hyatt plant alone.
RES ELE FEET STORAGEAF OUTFLOW CFS INFLOW CFS RIV REL CFS
836.82 2,635,392 7,829 10,901 5,119
Sorry the formatting got screwed up.