Some amazing preliminary observations of the flood records

[Daryk Campbell Sr]

1 hour ago, moguy1973 said:

I just read an article about how poorly the dam at Lake Fort Peck up on the Missouri River in Montana could be the mother of all floods here in Missouri.  It's the largest earthen dam in the world and it's construction is made from hydraulic fill which is prone to liquification and catastrophic failure that would wipe out every other dam, bridge, and town along the Missouri River.  Levees wouldn't even stand a chance if that lets loose.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/guest-commentary-the-looming-missouri-dam-flood/article_2b1eeca2-e701-51dd-83c2-f7bcc81845a4.html

This story is from 2011.  I am no engineer,  butI believe that unless there was a valley directly sending the water spoken about, it would not be anywhere near the doomsday the journalist wrote about.  I wonder who paid for the story. 

[msamatt]

Guys,  I haven't spent too much time looking at this data yet; however, the National Weather Service collections all sorts of Climate data including (no suprise here) data about rainfall.  If you go to the Climatology and Weather Records page at the NWS St. Louis' website:  http://www.weather.gov/lsx/cli_archive you'll find all sorts of data including Monthly Rainfall and Seasonal Totals which starts with data from 1836/37.   The NWS Springfield website also provides some good data sets:  http://www.weather.gov/sgf/climate_records_normals  

There's a very succinct summary of this past weekend here:  http://www.weather.gov/sgf/28-30AprilHistoricFloodingEvent

If you look at the "rainfall" tab you'll see the storm total rainfall reports covering Friday through Sunday.  Pretty darn incredible amounts of rainfall in a short amount of time!! 

 

 

[MOPanfisher]

2 hours ago, Daryk Campbell Sr said:

This story is from 2011.  I am no engineer,  butI believe that unless there was a valley directly sending the water spoken about, it would not be anywhere near the doomsday the journalist wrote about.  I wonder who paid for the story. 

Most Doomsday Articles Are More Doom Than fact.  Fort Peck has so far taken the worst nature has thrown at it and performed exactly as designed.  Could an earthquake fail it, sure, a big enough earthquake could fail any if them.  If there us one thing the COE is "anal" about it is dam safety.

[Al Agnew]

The Corps is NOW anal about dam safety, but during the time that a lot of these dams were being built, they had a lot of hubris.  They and the Bureau of Reclamation out west were convinced of their own rightness and expertise, and made quite a few mistakes that they later had to correct.  An example from this area is Clearwater Dam, which required a huge "apron" to be constructed a couple decades ago on the upstream face of the dam.  Wappapello, one of their earliest dams, also had design flaws that have required a lot of maintenance ever since.  The power generation aspect of Stockton didn't take into account the tremendous amount of erosion that regular releases 10 times the natural river's normal flows would cause on the river banks downstream.

And, of course, there was the Teton Dam collapse in Idaho, which in part spelled the death knell to the original Meramec Dam.  It was a huge series of mistakes and design flaws perpetrated by BuRec, which caused the dam to fail before it even finished filling, wiping out two Idaho towns downstream.

Some of the design flaws may not be fixable, and the hydraulic fill of Fort Peck dam may be one of them.  Yep, the dam has lasted this long, but it's kinda like my grandpa said when my dad broke one of his canoe paddles.  "Dang it, that's been a good paddle for 25 years!"  There is such a thing as cumulative damage.

 

[Greasy B]

There is a book called Colossus, it's the story of the Hoover Dam. There were I lot of short sighted design flaws built into the original design. I highly recommend it. 

Fontenelle dam is Wyoming is another one that should scare the bejesus out of the folks downstream.

  

[MickinMO]

24 minutes ago, Al Agnew said:

 The power generation aspect of Stockton didn't take into account the tremendous amount of erosion that regular releases 10 times the natural river's normal flows would cause on the river banks downstream

At Stockton, wasn't there a problem with the turbine and generator basically being a mismatch? And they didn't fix it until it finally failed a few years ago? Stockton, Truman, and Pomme all there to protect precious LOTO anyways. Plus, Stockton releases are eroding one of the oldest and artifact rich Native Ameican sites in the midwest (big eddy)

[vonreed]

57 minutes ago, MickinMO said:

At Stockton, wasn't there a problem with the turbine and generator basically being a mismatch? And they didn't fix it until it finally failed a few years ago? Stockton, Truman, and Pomme all there to protect precious LOTO anyways. Plus, Stockton releases are eroding one of the oldest and artifact rich Native Ameican sites in the midwest (big eddy)

How far below the Stockon Dam is the Big Eddy Site?

[MOPanfisher]

Dam design and operation are two different things.  Every major dam has some sort of design or construction issue, the COE is known for safe operation, sometimes to annoying degrees but I don't believe the COE has ever had a dam failure thus far.

[moturkey]

I'm a natural skeptic of "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever the hell its being called now. No doubt this past weekend was an outlier for precipitation, but I put far more stock in the theory (whose? I dunno... maybe just mine) that urban sprawl, development, and man-made changes to topography are far more likely culprits of the increased frequency and intensity of flooding seen in recent history. More impervious pavement/structures, less water-soaking florae, and unnatural levees that compound up-stream river levels are the true reason we are witnessing the recent historical events. I'd be curious to see a comparison of data that shows historical rainfall in the same watersheds during the periods Al highlighted. My hunch is that big downpours like we just saw would have had a far less significant impact 50 years ago. I'm not trying to spark a political debate, but am curious what others think. 

[MOPanfisher]

The only constant about climates is change.  I have no doubt that many factors combine to make rain events more calamitous, many of which you already mentioned.