why do they build these dams on top of hills? I don't get it

Videosift has it's own specific definition of what it considers inappropriate snuff. That definition may not be the dictionary or your personal definition, but it's the one that counts, and Lucky's interpretation is the final word when there's a question.

I thought this falls under the "incidental portion of an informative news report or documentary" exception since it showed in detail how the dam failed, but what I think doesn't really matter.....also I can't see the people at all on my tablet.

Jesus Christ! That's a dam break of text you let loose here! Sweet Mother of Mary!

Hover dam is slated to have a similar system installed I believe.

Sounds like someone didn't do their homework the first time.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/13/oroville-dam-see-before-and-after-video-of-construction-progress/

Also in January, an independent team of experts who reviewed the spillway failure concluded in a report that Department of Water Resources officials were “overconfident and complacent” and gave “inadequate priority for dam safety” for decades at Oroville.

They noted that main concrete spillway at the 770-foot tall dam north of Sacramento, in Butte County, was built in the late 1960s on poor quality rock. The spillway, only seven inches thick in some areas and not adequately anchored, cracked in multiple places in the following years, allowing water to flow underneath. On Feb. 7, 2017, water from powerful winter storms rushed under the massive spillway, which forced up its giant slabs and ripped a huge hole in the structure causing one of the most serious dam emergencies in California history.

I read here that they pour at night for slower curing as it's quite hot during the day. They had to remove one of the slabs they poured last year because it had set up to quickly in the heat and wind. https://www.chicoer.com/2018/07/14/oroville-dam-a-tour-of-two-spillways-phase-two/

To add to @eric3579's comment, the work was fairly carefully planned to occur over Summer, and after the water level had been reduced, to minimise the chances that they would get caught out like that. The hydro plant should be able to release more water than required for the duration of the second phase of works.

Their first phase was designed to leave the main spillway usable over winter, so this second phase could commence afterwards. The emergency spillway was designed never to be used, it was more like a fuse to allow evacuation if the dam fails. The revised design, taking into account the fact that the emergency spillway was required, appears to have strengthened it enough to be used as a backup instead.

The repairs would have been a heck of a lot cheaper if they had been conducted a decade ago, although I do wonder if all the flaws would have been obvious at the time.

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Bob, I must congratulate you. Your caricature of gullible republicans is spot on.

I guess Obama is going down for being an illegal immigrant from Kenya, right? Hillary for Benghazi, and all federal law enforcement for......having some agents who don't like or respect orange Kanye, just like every Republican senator and representative just months earlier. I guess you're just lucky that wasn't Obama's move, or they would have released all their damming info about Trump and not implicated Clinton last minute, but somehow now that they're investigating Trump they're all deep state democrats (that threw an election to elect Trump).
You cannot be that dumb, the fact you remember to breathe is proof you have too much intelligence to believe such flipflopping theories that require amnesia of yesterday to believe today's new utter bullshit story.

It's hilariously transparent that, according to Trump, the FBI, CIA, and NSA are suddenly republican enemies (so much for being the law and order party, huh?) and Putin is your friend. Reagan would be so proud.

To me, the really depressing thing is this was just one of dozens if not hundreds of similarly decrepit dams ready to fall apart. We got incredibly lucky with this one, I expect we probably won't stay lucky for long and one will fail in our next really wet rainy season....disastrously.
America sucks at upkeep.

I honestly don't know about Lucas.

He COULD be a Tolkien-esque visionary... or he could have taken a bunch of pre-existing elements (Kurosawa, Flash Gordon, the Dam Busters) and meshed them together and lucked out with an insanely talented group of people.

I don't want to write him off (I spent 20 years idolizing him from childhood to when I finally admitted how bad the prequels were).

But I also can't ignore the argument that much of what I love about Star Wars comes not from Lucas, but from Ralph McQuarrie's art, Ben Burtt's sound, John Williams' soundtrack (with a massive nod to Holst as well), Lawrence Kasdan's dialogue and the performances of Ford, Guinness and James Earl Jones.

Dam still breaks tho...

No Netflix for me, and no luck on a quick search of torrents, but I'll keep my eye out for that show/series.

Many metrics to compare. Ecologically, that system sounds great for static locations with enough of an elevation gradient and reservoir areas to make it work. On the other hand it seems like the ecological damage done by constructing batteries, factories, and disposing of them is likely quite small compared to many other alternatives, particularly fossil fuels (which also have long-term scarcity concerns on top of plenty of other issues).

A major advantage of battery tech over hydro storage would be mobility. If the thing consuming energy doesn't sit in one place, hydro storage won't work. Another somewhat less significant advantage is the ability to install anywhere -- a battery farm recharged by mains and/or a solar/wind farm could be installed in places where hydro storage couldn't. And for one more item in favor of batteries, I'd wager that the land area footprint required for batteries is much smaller per kWH stored, although that might be wrong for extremely large reservoirs (ie. a hydroelectric dam, pretty much). But by the time you're getting to that large scale, the location requirements and ecological disruption are also much more extreme.

Anyway, I don't mean to pooh-pooh the idea of hydro storage -- it really does seem like a very good and ingenious idea where it would be applicable. But there's certainly room for improved battery tech, too. I don't think that we're going to get fully or even significantly weaned off of fossil fuels quite as fast as the video would have us hope for, either. Fossil fuels were the primary tool in our toolbox for a LONG time. And as the saying goes, since all we've had is that "hammer", we've started to think of everything as a nail.