If I Were To Say 'The Oroville'

You Might Well Think I Was Rabbiting On About -

Seth MacFarlane's sci-fi parody, which I admit/confess/boast <delete where applicable> that I haven't seen, and which successfully spoof the 'Starry Trex' franchise whilst not being mean or nasty about it.  You might say partly an homage as much as a satire.  Art!

Unseen but still on your screen

     But no.  There is that extra 'O' to take into account.  If you had let me continue, I would have ended with 'Dam', because in this Intro we're going to be discussing another item from 'Be Amazed's 'Expensive Mistakes That Ruined Companies' vlog, the same one I used as the backbone of our Intro on BEARRS.  In this one we are confronting the forces of nature instead of untrammelled human greed.  Art!

     I remember covering this w hen it happened, all of ten years ago, and it was an horrifying drama where the end was unknown.  BA now has 10 years of hindsight to work with, whereas I was somewhat constrained at the time by having to take things one day at a time.

     As you can clearly see, one of the striking things about Oroville was the enormously long spillway, which is where problems began.

     But I get ahead of myself.

     Oroville is the tallest dam in South Canada, standing at 770 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET high, and was built between 1961 and 1968, costing $123 million in total.  Art!

Oroville under construction, with puny humans for scale

     

     The dam was built in order to prevent flooding further downstream, which had occurred in 1955 and 1956, where the Feather river and others flooded and caused $200 million in damage and losses, killing 112 people along the way.

     Things ran smoothly for 49 years as the dam nonchalantly handled all the hydrographic events nature could throw at, until February of 2017, when it couldn't.  There had been extremely heavy and sustained rain and snow for four days, from the 6th of February to the 10th, depositing 12.8 inches of water into the reservoir's drainage basin.  Operators released water down the 930 metre long spillway to drop the lake level.  Art!

     Then the surfacing of the slipway began to crack and collapse, exacerbated by the water flow's speed and mass.  Once a hole like this appears, rapid erosion takes place and - Art!

Looks pricey if you ask me

     There's nothing to scale this, but believe me, you could put a house in that pit.  It widened into a crevasse 250 feet wide, breaching the side of the spillway and thus allowing water to flow freely over the hillside.  Art!

During and after.  Looks even pricier

     You will be delighted to know that there was a backup system, an emergency spillway to the starboard of the main dam, if you were sitting in Lake Oroville.  It was pretty basic: a concrete weir that allowed water to top it and wash down to the Feather River, and it had never been used - that being the 'emergency' part of it's description.

     The main spillway was shut down - allowing sight of how much damage had been caused - and water began to top the emergency spillway.  Only problem was, it eroded the hillside ridiculously quickly, threatening to undercut the weir and collapse it.  So the emergency spillway was shut down and the main one opened again.  Oooops.  Art!

Spillsbury D'oh

     I can tell what you're thinking - yes, this is going to be an expensive resolution.  For one thing, the county had evacuated 188,000 residents downstream of the dam, just to be sure.  Art!

     Conrad remembers being verrry impressed with the speed and scale with which the South Canadians responded, in their best 'Git 'r done' fashion.  What you see above is them rebuilding the spillway from scratch.  Was it cheap?  NO IT WAS NOT!  Art?

Hopefully those diggers give you a sense of scale

     That's the net total.  Since nobody died, you could, perhaps, ask the 188,000 non-unalived people to chip in $59,000 each and that would cover it.

     Only joking!  Well, we've had 10 years of faultless operation of the new Oroville Dam spillway, so I guess we just have to wait another 39 years to see if it's up to scratch.

     O I just did a bit of digging about insurance - the dam, as is typical of South Canadian mega-structures, is not insured through a commercial agency.  The costs were met by Californian state funds and FEMA - Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Nor would the evacuees be compensated, unless they had specific insurance terms covering 'loss of use'.  ALWAYS READ THE FINE PRINT!

     Thank heavens I live at the top of a hill.

     

'Leviathan Wakes' By James A. Corey

Ah, me, I remember being accosted by Tom, when I had just begun at HR in Sainsbo's at Arndale House, when I had this tome in hand and was reading it whilst waiting for other staff to arrive in the Training Room.  Hard to credit that was at least 8 years ago.  Art!

     Cover art by Daniel Dociu, a Romanian artist.

     Enough time has gone by that I only vaguely remember the plot, which is good as knowing what happens before I turn the page is a bit of a downer.

     If you want a plot precis: Hom. Sap. has taken all the ills of Earth and exported them to every corner of the Solar System.  Then an incredibly destabilising bit of alien technology turns up -

No thunderstorms so far.  Somewhat disappointed.  Let us continue.

LOGISTICS!

Which, amazingly enough, we have not defined as per the 'Collins Concise English Dictionary'.  So!  'The science of the movement, supplying and maintenance of military forces in the field.'

     There you have it.  I now want to supply an excellent diagram of Teuton tanks in all their variegated glory.  Art!

Courtesy 'Clint Warren-Davey' on Twitter.  Art!

     I count 44 different tanks there.  Clint wisely points out that this lot were a quartermaster's nightmare, with different hulls, suspension, engines, guns, radios, tracks, optics, etcetera, etcetera.  You, as a QM, had to carry all the spare parts to be able to repair one of these beasts.  Which is quite apart from having the engineers and kit to actually carry out replacements.

     Conrad sneers at the Sinisters for their profligacy with human life, yet they had wit enough to streamline their military production lines to produce the maximum number of minimum types, and they didn't bother to finish them to a high standard, either.  

Have Your Hurl Bucket At The Ready!

Conrad is deeply sad that he has to announce Donold Judas Trump is still alive - if only barely.  He's back in hospital again, to see if they can extract the excess Stupid and reduce bloating.  I don't hold out much hope.

     What I am leading up to is another ghastly picture of Pumpkinhead.  Art!

     Not sure what to call this one.  The return of Weregravy?  Melania is braver and more deserving of pity than you think.

Still More Logistics!

This topic has emerged from nowhere.  There is a Twitter clip of a Ruffian truck driver on the M-14 highway north of the occupied Black Sea shoreline, noticing numerous destroyed Ruffian trucks and commenting 'These weren't there last week.'

     Indeed they were not.  The Kozaky have managed to get their Firepoint drones, the large ones containing a kitchen-bin of HE, across the front lines and into the Ruffian rear.  Art!

     This is the Prof explaining about how the 'land bridge' into Crimea is now under threat from Ukrainian long-range drones, which have the range to get there and interdict the motorway.  Art!

     Courtesy the very excellent 'Clement Molin', a Twitter legend well worth following.  You may not be able to see the font here, so just allow me to explicate that Clement lists 45 hits on Ruffian trucks - in ONE DAY.

     Over on Telegram the Ruffian milbloggers are collectively voiding their bowels and shrieking, as this kind of logistical blockade has dire effects verrrry quickly.

The Curse Of Being Analytical

Is That One Cannot Leave Well Alone

Whereas another person might come across an item, shrug and move on, Your Humble Scribe's mind works a bit differently, since he will focus on said topic, and come back to it until he is satisfied he's squeezed all the lemon juice out of it.  Pretty much the ethos of BOOJUM! in fact.  

     So!  Allow me to begin with a dramatic illo from the nation state of Slovenia, the northernmost of the regions that used to constitute Yugoslavia.  This came from a Google question about which castle is the most unique in Europe, and i have to confess I took the bait and Googled.  Behold the utilisation of natural features, which we will come back to.  Art!

     This is, as you may have guessed, a castle; Predjama Castle, unique in that it was constructed in the mouth of a cave system.  This allowed the owner, one Erazem of Predjema, to sneak out and raid the local lands via secret tunnels inside the mountain.  More particularly, when the Hapsburgs laid siege to the castle, said vertical tunnels allowed the castle to bring in food and water from outside, mitigating said siege.  Which meant, instead of being over in a couple of weeks, it took over a year.  There is a local legend that Erazem was killed on the toilet when a treacherous minion explained about his routine, allowing the Hapsburgs to commit toilet-targetting and totalling him.

     Which, in turn, implies that the Hapsburgs were not carrying out military operations elsewhere thanks to having to focus on a long, debilitating siege.  There's a thesis to be written on what else the Hapsburgs might have been doing to their advantage in 1484 were they not tied up in said siege.  Art!

     ANYWAY I want to bring up a picture used as a standby on my work laptop.  Art!

     Wherever this is, it's most certainly not in This Sceptred Isle as our waters tend to a muddy, opaque grey-green grottiness.

     Conrad was intrigued.  What are we being shown here?  Well, nothing definitive showed on screen, until, after several iterations, the legend 'Porto Flavia' came up at top starboard.  Art!

     What are we looking at here?  Art!

     This is manifestly architecture carved into a cliff face.  To what end?  Unlike Prejdama, it does not seem to have any defensive utility.  Is it a domestic residence?  Because if so it must have been tunnelled into from behind in the cliff face.  Then again, why have a sea-front property with no harbour, port, dock, pier or jetty?  The only way from sea-level to that balcony is up a barely-there vertical path that ends in a blank wall.  You might as well not bother.

     Very mysterious!  Art?

     

     Conrad began digging.

     Firstly, what we're looking at here is an Italian geology site from a century ago: Porto Flavia, based on the island of Sardinia.  A century ago the Italians had decided that they were going to exploit the mineral resources of this island, and they appointed a most adept engineer to design their means unto: Cesare Vecilli.  Art!

     The first schematic above shows how the internal site was constructed; chambers, galleries ad shafts all excavated by hand, from the seaward side rather then inland, creating huge vertical shutes that dropped raw mineral into the tunnel to carry ore outwards, with various powered small-gauge trains doing the haulage.  You can then see that the gantry to load ships was retractable, which is why it doesn't show in the original Flavia picture I posted, and which threw me out.  No need for jetties or piers if your load comes in overhead whilst you sit in the channel.  Why it was a retractable arm instead of a permanent one I have no  idea, as the former seems more complex to construct.  Art!

     What you've got here is the internal railway that moved stuff, and the dimensions of the tunnels involved, unfortunately without puny Hom. Sap. for scale.  Vecilli named the mine after his daughter, showing what a whimsical old git he was.  The ability to drop directly mined minerals onto the transportation level and thence to ships waiting to load cut production time by 70% and I'd like to think Cesare got both recognition and recompense but by the time his system was in operation Mussolini was in power and it may not have happened.

A Little Ungentle Shoeing

Word has it that Pumpkinhead has been sent to Walter Reed Memorial Hospital for the third time in a year, because - he's so incredibly healthy?  They worry he's going to drop dead in front of the press conference cameras?  Fall asleep?  Go on about his Missile Control Centre Strategic Disco Defence Ballroom?

     Allow me to base you with another awful, awful photo of him.  Art!

     He looks as if a Donold Trump mask has been stapled to a hog's head, and the hog is being pursued with a cattle-prod.  Which is an Olympic sport in some countries.  

     Don't forget, pilgrims, reading this blog will automatically disqualify you from entering South Canada if ICE review your past 5 years of social media!  Heck, 1 year of reading BOOJUM! would do it, or even a couple of months since we started featuring awful pictures of Fat Caligula.

     More seriously about the last item, I confidentially predict that there will be numerous EU members refused entry to South Canada thanks to their descriptions of King Piggy on social media.  Lawsuits ahoy!  Art?

     From when he looked healthy.  Well - healthier.  Okay, okay. at least not dead.  Art!

Delver Your Milk, Lady?

One of the things that has come out of recent Ruffian bombardment of Ukrainian civilian settlements is that the Ukrainians ,bless them, are willing to carry on continuously with their everyday life.  Art!

     These are Ukrainians queueing up for coffee at a shop that has been blammed by a Ruffian missile, despite the windows being put in and there being plaster across the floor.  Art!!

Indomitable milkman

     From 86 years ago and not on the Continent but with the same DEFY ENEMY fault vibes.  I seem to remember that the dictator responsible for the above did not come to a happy end.

     Just to be clear, this is from the days when milk in bottles was delivered daily to one's doorstep.

     O and about Putin's favourite cudgel, the 'Oreshnik' missile that the vatniks salivate about.  In reality it's a cobbled-together Frankenstein monster that Mordorvia can only produce in ridiculously limited quantities, something like three per year.  The older models cost $30 million apiece, the current ones $150 million, and they have a 50% failure rate.  Art!

     This one destroyed 3 garages.  You can do the mathematics yourself; $10 million to destroy a garage is a pretty poor return on investment.

     In reality it's even more embarrassing, as the second Oreshmik the orcs launched ended up hitting their own occupied area, meaning it's now forbidden to ever mention it was launched in the first place.  Remember, 50% failure rate.

Back To 'Charley's War'

This is the first trade-paperback volume of the collected works from Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, which I bought at BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM in September last year.  Eight months ago and I still have finished Volume 1 <hangs head in shame> BUT I have been putting in more reading of late and am now near the end of Vol. 1, hoorah!

     So I thouoght I'd share some of the artwork.  Art!

     Charley is struggling out  of a partially collapsed dugout, carrying a Lewis gun and intent on inflicting misfortune on the Teutons.  Allow me to draw your attention to an item near his forearm.  Art!

     A well-observed detail.  What Pat and Joe depict here is a tin of 'Whistler's Jam', which was so ubiquitous there was even a doggerel poem about it.  Art!

The original article

     The artwork of Joe is beyond reproach, but Pat buys into too many stereotypes to be without criticism.  We will absolutely be covering this in later blogs!  I bet you can hardly wait. 

Finally -

Another bit of QI Banter.

"Statistics are like bikinis.  What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."  Aaron Levenstein.

 

Aqua Scutum!

No I Don't Mean The Clothing Brand

If I did it would have been a single word.  No, what I refer to today is things being proofed against water, as 'Aqua' is Latin <hack spit> for 'Water' and 'Scutum' is Latin <spit hack> for 'Shield'.  Art!

     Enjoy this depiction of aqua scutum, it being a nuclear-powered atomic umbrella.

     SO, in days of old, when knights were bold, and monkeys chewed tobacco, nobody had heard of the spaceship 'Sulaco'.  They were quite adept at rendering clothing waterproof, on the other hand, because The Allotment Of Eden is gifted with frequent downpours throughout the year.  Anyone who had to work outside, or sailors, required waterproofs, which were fabrics such as linen or wool, treated with melted beeswax or lanolin oil.  Art!

     ART!

     That's better.  

     What else needs occasional waterproofing?

     Exactly!  Tanks!  How clever of you to guess right away.  Yes indeedy.  I am going to poach a picture I created a couple of weeks ago, because I can.  Art!

     These are still from a film clip.  The vehicle you see here is the Tiger I, a barely mobile metal mastodon that weighed 57 tons and was thus far too heavy to cross most European bridges.  The solution?  Issue the first 495 with a waterproofing 'wading' kit that, when applied, allowed it to cross rivers up to 13 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET deep.  Sounds groovy, right?

     Not so fast!  All the hatches, vision ports and engine louvres needed to be sealed, with a large inflatable rubber tube proofing the turret ring, as well as the erection of an 8 foot snorkel tube over the commander's cupola to allow for the ingress of air.  Art!

     Such a process took 30 minutes to manage, and used lots of rubber, of which the Teutons were desperately short, so they did away with the kit in mid-1943, after which they could only ford bodies of water up to 6 1/2 feet.  My guess is that Naughty Hans* was sent to walk across the river bed and if it didn't go over his head, they followed him with the tank.  Art!

     I've put up this illo as the one to port incorrectly shows what might be a Comet, not a Churchill, and the starboard illo is of a Churchill, but the wrong kind as it's an AVRE model - Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers.  Art!

     A Mk VII, the type that Foley commanded a troop of.  Actually, looking closer, this one has a flame-gun in the hull, instead of the usual machine gun.  ANYWAY AGAIN from this picture you can appreciate all the hatches there were on such a vehicle.  Foley's crew had to waterproof the tank prior to D-Day, which they did by laying explosive 'det cord' underneath the waterproof sealant around the turret and hatches.  The cord was wired to an ignition switch in the hull front.  

     Enter Young Matey, a replacement crew member, who was being shown the interior of the tank a couple of days later.

     "What does this switch do?" he asked, idly flipping it.

     BANG!

     All the waterproofing was blasted away.  The crew had very harsh things to say to and about Young Matey.  Art!

     I simply cannot find any photos of waterproofed Mk VIIs, so here's a side shot showing even more hatches.

     When the crew returned to their tank in the morning, they found a dirty and exhausted Young Matey, who had stayed up all night re-applying the waterproofing.  Bless the lad.  Art!

     Back to Ol' Angelo, and one of the more obscure factors that prevented extensive training was - you may be ahead of me here - waterproofing.  The 21st Army Group planners were a bunch of nitwits about this, insisting that all vehicles landing up to D+42 - six weeks after D-Day - be waterproofed, in the fond illusion that they'd be wading through surf to reach the beach.  Art!

     That's one of the 'Mulberry' harbours in operation after one week.  

     Why was this an issue?  O I thought you'd never ask!  Because the process for 4th Canuckistanian Armoured Division began at the start of May 1944, to get every vehicle done in time for their deployment soon after the invasion.  Art!

A waterproofed Sherman

     A waterproofed vehicle had severe restrictions on how far it could move once the waterproofing began, and it wasn't allowed to move at all once the process was complete.  Consequently, as May wore on, less and less vehicles were available for training.  In reality the arrival of 4th Armoured in France was delayed for weeks, meaning the waterproofing had started to dry out, so it was reapplied when it ought to have been completely ignored.  When the division did arrive in France it went in 'dry', meaning all the effort put into waterproofing was i) completely wasted and ii) prevented training from the start of May.

     There you go, something to chew on.

The Haul

One of the reasons I sorted out my cupboard space yesteryon was to try and locate any remaining packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling, hereafter LOLD.  Art!

Before

     I did discover a couple of things a bit out of date.  Art!

     Three years out of date is practically in date, right?  Art!

     Note the absence of any LOLD.  I did, mind, rediscover where I'd put my Margaret's Hope First Flush Darjeeling, the horribly expensive stuff I got me as a Christmas present. 

     So, first thing today was a trip into Babylon Lite and Sainsbos, for all the LOLD they had.  Art!

     Yes, eight packets of it for a total of £17.60.  There was a ninth packet on the shelf but it was right up against the rear wall and I couldn't reach it.  One wonders what the staff responsible for restocking shelves think when they see someone has emptied out all the LOLD packets.  'O that bloke who looks like John Bolton has been in again.'

     Supplies of LOLD secured for several months to come!

The Algorithm Has Gone All Donold Judas Trump

This one keeps coming up on my Youtube channel and I've no idea why.  Art!

     What on earth?  Is the algorithm confusing me with a farmer?  Have I ever posted or boasted about owning chickens?  I like scrambled egg but not enough to resort to owning chickens in order to guarantee egg supplies.  Dear Youtube algorithm, I do not own a single chicken, never mind a whole flock that would necessitate purposed accommodation for them.

     Bah!

Just At Random

Have a nuclear-powered atomic sausage.  Art!

     Probably unwise to eat it.

Jake Abroed

NO!  That is not a spelling mistake, it's an hilarious pun I tell you.  Laugh or it's the Remote Nuclear Detonator, no mucking around with the Remote Nuclear Tormentor.

     If you've been reading BOOJUM! for any length of time then you'll be familiar with the name 'Jake Broe', whom is a Youtube vlogger and who's been covering the war in Ukraine since day one.  He has gradually acquired a very large audience, thanks to his consistently excellent analysis and coverage.  Normally he puts out a vlog every other day.

     But not this week.  For why?  Because he's taking his first holiday in 7 years, and is going to South Korea.  He taught English there for 6 years, before joining the South Canadian Air Force.  He posted a short vlog with no commentary.  Art!

This really is letting the pictures tell the story

Book porn

    Not sure how you'd reach the upper shelves.  Library book-carrying drone?

      In the meantime I shall make do by watching more 'Professor Gerdes Explains", whom is another Youtube vlogger who posts at least once daily, in lengths of 15 minutes at most.  In the case of both himself and Jake it's highly amusing to see them trying to pronounce the names of Ukrainian towns and villages.


Finally -

Going out with more QI Banter - 

"A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty" - Rudyard Kipling

*  Caught swigging the mess brandy without a chit