Hey Eastern Washingtonians! Wanapum Dam Drawdown?

Francesca Knowles wrote:
I read yesterday that doing so brought the edges of the crack back together, and that the pillar itself "moved" almost two inches back upstream!Really stupendous forces involved, eh?

I guess so. Water is heavy stuff! Moving water even worse.

WOW!

Talk about sharp eyes...guess how they discovered/suspected there was a problem down under the water? Some PUD employee noticed the "wow" in the conduit that you can see up near the top of this picture. That's why they sent the divers down.

Give that eagle-eyed person a raise!



Source of image

2oldman wrote:

Francesca Knowles wrote:
The water that would have been stored behind Wanapum just goes downstream, eventually to the ocean.

So they didn't back up water at an upstream dam, they are opening the spillways on Wanapum?

You've got it. I doubt that there was any extra capacity upstream, but if so they can still fill it.

They had to relieve the pressure.... I read yesterday that doing so brought the edges of the crack back together, and that the pillar itself "moved" almost two inches back upstream!

Really stupendous forces involved, eh?

What water that would normally be "stored" at Wanapum is gone. The other dams are operating at normal levels for this time of year.
I do not believe everybody understands how our Bonneville power Adminstration works. All power, hydro electric, windmills, geothermic, coal and gas fired production here in the Northwest goes into a big pool. A lot of Northwest power is sold to outsiders. A lot of power goes to CA and the northwest doesn't get much back from it.

Francesca Knowles wrote:
The water that would have been stored behind Wanapum just goes downstream, eventually to the ocean.

So they didn't back up water at an upstream dam, they are opening the spillways on Wanapum?

Yes, failure could or would be devastating to life and limb and costly just like have a natural disaster like a volcanic explosion, a hurricane, or an earthquake, etc. Sound familiar? Dams are MAN made and have a usable lifespan after which is the repeated ongoing cycle of repair or replacement which is guaranteed. Some areas do need reasonable flood controls while most of the other dams are to create man made lakes or reservoirs of water for recreation or humans uses or irrigation and some are producing lots of usable hydro power (they are the minority).

These dammed reservoirs come with lots of extreme costs and dangers also and so many were never needed to begin with and now will require extreme expense to repair the un-needed. Why should good money vastly inflated and be thrown wildly after bad money should be the norm? Aren't we smarter than that? Remove them once and the long term problem is solved forever.

Only mother nature is self sustaining and really doesn't need repairing ever! We, the humans have created the need for man made structures and allowed the building of cities, homes, businesses, etc next to these dammed up rivers and un-natural backwaters and now we have what we have and the issues that come with having done such. Hello, is anyone home?

In most of the USA, very little hydro power is generated today due to many reasons and you must have adequate water going into the reservoir first or there will be little or no power produced. Most hydo power production is virtually seasonal dependent anyway. Just like solar is sun dependent and wind turbines are wind dependent. Very expensive to build and maintain and a very short service life before needing very expensive major repairs, revisions, or replacement. There's no FREE lunch!

We've kind of gone crazy in our expectations and even lots of fraud of finding that FREE lunch and it's wasted so many hundreds of billions of dollars already with nearly fruitless gains. More money wasted than all the costs that would have been incurred with perfecting our usage and acquisition of and from our vast known natural resources and newlt discoverd resources and ways to extract usable energy from them. As an engineer, YES, we should "explore" new energy ways but be sure they have proven long term viability on a small scale before throwing out the baby with the bathwater like we have. We the people are the losers!

2oldman wrote:
Hmm.. where will the river be 20' higher?

Nowhere, unless some downstream dam is running low at the moment. Unlikely this time of year.

The water that would have been stored behind Wanapum just goes downstream, eventually to the ocean....and with it goes all the power generating potential it contained. Big loss for the Grant County PUD!

travelnutz wrote:
Dog Folks,

Many of the 84,000 dams in this country are not needed and should go or have been removed already. That alone would lower the needed "repair" costs significantly.

They have taken out several dams in Northern Michigan over the last couple years alone and now they a going to put the free flowing "rapids" on the big wide 287 mile long Grand River back in downtown Grand Rapids as those several local area dams are going to be removed finally. It flooded bad again last spring in downtown behind the 10' to 15' dams as the water held back was almost 20 feet deeper than it would have been without the dams. Michigan already has over 11,000 natural larger than 3 acre lakes and over 3200 miles of Great Lakes shoreline so dam formed lakes are so un-needed here. Years ago, people in our state seemed to be "dam nuts" and are finally coming to their senses. The biggest thing the dams did was fill behind them with settling mud runoff and screw up the natural fish habitats. DUH!

Out west etc, the dams may do a much better job of controlling rivers but not in our state. Mother nature is so much smarter and doesn't need repairing or suffer from aging!

I agree with you in principal, except for hydro power generation.

Also, removal of said dams will not be cheap either and could very possibly be much more costly than repair.

Failure of any of these dams will be very costly in terms of life and money.

Chelan county has two major dams on the Columbia plus Lake Chelan Dam.
They use the sub for inspecting the dams and boater protection systems.
They "share" the sub with other agencies including BLM and Corp of Engineers.

They do a pretty good job of flood control.