Re: Just in case you had a hydrologically uninteresting day...

Al Zenner wrote:

I have a cousin who was about a decade ahead of me in school who chose
underwater structural engineering as his career, following in his
father's footsteps. I was an undergrad when we had a discussion about
dams and water retention in general. It was considered, at that time,
a cardinal sin to fail to repair *any* leak in water retention systems.
A retention system showing any leakage at all is considered to be giving
warning that it is weaker then designed at that point, resulting in a
situation demanding thorough inspection of the entire structure. The
theory is that there are usually other places which are weak where it hasn't started to leak, but that structural integrity has been compromised
and it is unsafe.


Well, that leak in the reservoir started in 1963, and wasn't repaired until 2004...--forty years with no catastrophic failure, but a really cute trickle waterfall down the side...yep, I saw it, several times.
It would be interesting to know if the failure point were the same as the old leak...or not, but my memory isn't that photographic for me to answer.


I don't know about your part of the US but WEenergies (Wisconsin) is
severely proactive with green generation of power. Annually every
customer gets a phone call asking them to underwrite green power
by volunteering for a higher electric rate. I don't think the program is audited so my best guess is that it is a remarkable profit center.

If by green you mean ecofriendly, pumped hydro isn't that efficient.
At one time they envisioned lots of these things, but after they ran this one a while, they realized it wasn't the cash cow they expected, and built a nuclear reactor. (Which can also be operated remotely...a point my brother brought up yesterday, as he lives in the same county as the nuke plant.) 70% if AmerenUE's power base is coal-fired. I was on a train the other day, passing by a coal plant, with Callaway nuke in the background, and as far as smokestack emissions, they were the same color--a nice, billowy white.


I would think that given the demand for green the damaged facilities in your part of the country will be replaced, probably built even better. 
Aha. But this is what they tried to do a couple years ago.

The question is: what do they do to mitigate a repetition of yesterday, given the location of Johnson Shut-Ins State Park? They cannot move the park, since its raison d'entre is a rhyolite shut-ins and gorge, not some historic building or such. There will likely be deep, fast and furious negotiation between the company and the state over this. I just find it intriguing that the lower reservoir dam has long been thought to be the problem, and, once the discharge was made, the water reentered the river above that dam, and the dam held. That's the really ironic thing--the repaired upper reservoir (after the leak was fixed) was considered structurally sound.


Having that reservoir blow out was about the last thing in the world on
anyone's mind this morning.


I'll bet that when it comes to discovery during lawsuits management will
have been presented with lots of warnings about the leak from engineers both inside the company as well as from visiting engineers. The integrity of the entire installation comes into play in such warnings.

As I said, the leak had been successfully fixed some time ago. I'm not sure at this point that there will be lawsuits--especially if AmerenUE is as cooperative as they are claiming they will be, in meeting medical bills, restitution and so forth. They've already taken responsibility for the incident. Aren't lawsuits filed when a party tries to dodge responsibility? There didn't seem to be any malice involved, and they couldn't hardly blame it on the dog who ate the homework. But I'm sure some lawyers will show up for the party.



Actually, AmerenUE has been doing the preventive maintenance. What was apparently lacking here was a pair of remote/and or human eyes on the level of the reservoir.


Unless management is really stupid someone was assigned to look at the water level at least once a day. But then just how can you have two forms of level sensing and not only have both of them fail but no one noticed? Industrial control systems have a test mode, especially those that are only an "alarm" type (like the idiot lights in cars.)

Do you understand how this facility works? They pump the water up the hill at night, then let it fall (at varying rates) during the day to generate electric through turbines. Then, they pump the water back up the hill again. It was in this pump up the hill stage that the failure occurred. The difficulty lies in the fact that there was no time to notify anyone in the state park, which is roughly a mile and half away at a much lower elevation. If they rebuild, this is the issue which will have to be addressed somehow, because they will not be able to skirt the issue again.


It looks to me as though the failure by employees charged with operations were the proximate cause for the dam failure, with supervision responsible for not making certain their charges were actually doing the job for which they were being paid.


Hard to say at this early stage of the game if it was equipment or human failure. Or just the natural tendency of water to want to run downhill. Quickly.
.

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