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.
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