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

Jo Schaper <joschapern4ospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:11q4ehrb6fhk614@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> 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.

That natural tendency is what engineering such a project is all
about. When a facility is properly designed and operated it should
be able to provide tremendously long service with failures limited
to active mechanical and electrical components.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the explanation of this failure
smells of a bunch of coverup to me. First, the lower reservoir
should never be designed to hold more water than is safe in the
upper reservoir. That's elementary safety which belongs in all
design. Next, either the walls are supposed to contain water to
the brim, or spillways are supposed to be present maintaining
contained water at a safe level based on the original design.

These are passive safety considerations which are supposed to
exist in the original design. If they were present then there
is no possible way to overfill a reservoir to the point that
it fails and I retract my earlier comments about employee
performance being causal.

The more I hear about this systems failure the more I dislike
the stories I am hearing. The corporation will probably settle
because they have a sense they can negotiate a better settlement
than it is likely to cost them when a jury makes the awards
should they force the claims through legal proceedings. And the
way utility companies deal with this sort of loss is to pass the
costs on to customers. The CEO can claim a victory (when they're
calculating his bonus) by pointing out how much he saved the
shareholders through his clever bargaining skills.

Defendants usually go to lawsuit because they believe that
they can avoid payment through legal trickery even when they
are actually culpable. Part of the civil lawsuit is called
"summary judgment." If the court rules in favor of the plaintiff
that's when most settlements are made because the court has
determined that there is sufficient merit to the plaintiff's
claims to present them to a jury.


.

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