The devil dam thee black.

I do love a dam.  When I was a child, we used to dam the stream that split Duncannon strand, once to triumph effect.  If I'd known even one engineer when I was growing up, I might have something concrete to show for 40 years in the work-place. It wasn't really until I started teaching environmental chemistry a couple of years ago, that I started to appreciate of just how devastating dams can be.  Holding back the water on a river in some wilderness can have a huge effect on the dissolved oxygen, on the accumulation of sediment, and on the number and sorts of species that inhabit the valley.  Dams are created to generate hydro-electric power, to allow the abstraction of water for irrigation and/or to 'tame' the river, so that its flow can be controlled and wild fluctuations in flow-rate damped.  If you're not careful, artificially raising the water-level can create a greater catastrophe than any imaginable natural fluctuations. And if the dam fails you can kill people and destroy millions of €€ worth of property: the Baldwin Hills Dam failed on this day 14th December 1963. On a vastly greater scale, work damming the Yangtze River in China started exactly 20 years ago today but some are asking Is the Three Gorges Dam a Ticking Time Bomb?

Today it's dam movie time in the Pacific North West!

Over the last 200 years, dammers have been active along hundreds of rivers across the USA. There are as many as 75,000 dams in the country - about one for every day since 4th July 1776. A lot of these structures were built before the concept of environmental impact had been articulated, and the older structures are either coming to the end of their insurable life-span or have been superseded by other structures or more efficient modern methodologies. The last 10 years have seen a number of dam-removal projects that have been not without interest to environmental scientists . . . like myself.  Richard Lovett, a freelancer from Oregon, has written a nicely explanatory and discursive piece in Nature, Rivers on the Run, about the issues and practicalities of returning rivers in his neighbourhood to their wild selves.  The problem is that, while the construction of the dam had an enormous effect on the local ecology (drowning millions of trees and their attendant flora and fauna is only the most obvious part of this), the deconstruction is also bound to change things utterly and probably not to the status quo ante because extinction is forever and ecosystems move on.

Lovett contrasts three undammings to illustrate how differences in size scale up, but differences in sediment quality turn out to be a more significant variable.  In all cases, Salmonid fish, like steelhead trout Oncorhynchus mykiss, of the rivers were endangered by decades of inhibited access to upstream spawning grounds. Installing a fish-ladder to by-pass the dams was very much a hit and miss affair, with the fish preferring to nose up the spillways rather than taking a detour in the wrong direction up the artificial ladders.  They looked good on paper and satisfied the lads from the Environmental Protection Agency, but just had the wrong smell.

First down was the 18m high Marmot Dam on Oregon's Sandy River in 2007. Its chief purpose of early rural electrification which could be replaced by a helluva lot of wind-turbines and so the dam was seen as superfluous. They blew a hole in the bottom of the dam and the river ran through it leaving much of the sediment behind.  That sand and grit eroded gradually over the next 8 months and steelhead was soon seen nosing directly upstream past the dam site. The film of the changes is kind of hokey and complacent, and it grated to hear the whole project being monetised in a profit and loss way: each adult steelhead is worth $500 to the local economy; no dam means that some guy's kayaking business can expand.  If Oregon tree-huggers are like Irish tree-huggers, you may be sure that wind-turbines don't get a 10/10 score in the local community.

In 2009, the Forest Service targetted the elderly 8m tall Hemlock Dam on the Trout River. Here it was deemed expedient to build a huge sluice pipe to drain the lake and then cart away 42,000 cu.m for sediment in 20 ton loads and then dismantle the dam.  The film claims that 2000 truck-loads were required and that they loaded every six minutes for 40 consecutive days which suggests that it was a 5 hour working day.  A lot of aerobic bacteria presumably got trucked away; and nobody says where the stuff [which would cover a soccer pitch to a depth of 4m] was dumped.  This all cost somewhere North of $1million, and didn't seem to be manifestly a better solution ecologically when compared to the blow-and-go that had been implemented on the Sandy River two years earlier.

Soooo, in 2011 on the White Salmon River in neighbouring Washington state, the Forest Service went back to the Marmot Protocol. The Condit Dam on that river was 38m tall and had pro-rata accumulated about 1.5 million cu.m of sediment - about 40x more than Hemlock.  Crucially the quality of the sediment was very different from that that behind the Marmot Dam: instead of it being half-n-half sand and gravel, Condit was bunkering about a third mud, and half sand and a mere leaven of gravel.  When the klaxon went and a hole was blown in the bottom of the Condit Dam, an explosive black cloud of aerosolled sludge burst out and travelled downsteam in an emulsion with up to 28% particulate matter. You can see the waterlogged mud slump down in 1000 ton gouts as the sedimented lake drains away through the plug-hole.  It was all over in 3 hours!  I'm not in a position to say which of these three protocols is 'better' for the environment but clearly blow-and-go is cheaper for the tax-payer. 

If you don't spend the next half hour surfing youtube for further "dam removal" videos, then I don't think you are a normal boy - try Elwha or Glines for different protocols again.

Footnotes: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!" is part of a great endgame rant from Macbeth.

Saddam dam

I'm given to understand that you can't sue the county council if you trip-and-fall while walking along the grassy margin of the road; but if they undertake to make your life easier by making a footpath and you trip on some irregularity in the paving THEN you can make a claim for mental anguish or a grazed knee.  It seems a bit unfair on the council until you reflect that we should take responsibility for the consequences of our actions.  The long-dead Dutch engineers who build the barrage that created Situ [Lake] Gintung in 1933 might have ground their teeth in frustration when their handiwork failed on the night of 26/27th March 2009.  The earthen dam had been created to service local paddy fields near Cirendeu in Indonesia. At 16m high and 250m long, with water backed up along two river valleys, the dam held a reservoir of about 2 million cu.m = tonnes of water.  It was, therefore about the same size as the lake above Dolgarrog in N Wales that failed catastrophically in 1925. As with Dalgarrog, the Situ Gintung failure was preceded by a sustained deluge of rain. The dam failed at the worst possible time in the middle of the night and 100 people died when a wall of water destroyed their homes. One of the ironies was that the paddy fields had long since been converted into housing lots because the district is only 10km S of Jakarta's Special Capital Region. A number of officials were cited for negligence but you can bet that they never received sufficient funds to carry out the necessary maintenance.  The dam has since been restored and is visible on Google Maps.  So far so small: 16 poor Welsh people and 100 Javanese don't weigh much in the scales of catastrophe. And heck, they're dead, there's not much we can do about it except build the new Gintung dam stronger and with better spillways.

Some dams are big! They make an obvious impact on the landscape and a case can be made that they are useful: for regulating water supply for rice paddies or tapping the moving water to drive turbines to make electricity.  The Shannon Scheme and the dam at Ardnacrusha was as much a political statement about Independence from the Brits, and take her place among the nations of the earth, as it was about servicing the nascent state of Ireland with electricity.  The idea for damming the River Tigris North of Mosul had been on the cards since at least 1953. With each change in regime, successive international consultants were called in at international consultant prices as the Tigris Dam got political traction: 1953 Alexander Gibbs; 1956 Kolijan American; 1960 Harza; 1962 Soviet Technoprom; 1965 Amitranvoima; 1972 Geotehnika; 1974 Soletanch; 1978 Swiss Consultants Consortium.  If Iraq is anything like Ireland, the fees for the consultants could have built the dam twice.

Actual works didn't start until the 1980s as part of Saddam Hussein's Arabification of the predominantly Kurdish North of the country.  Hochtief Aktiengesellschaft, a German/Italian consortium got the go ahead to  break ground in 1981.  As the bed 'rock' was gypsum which is only harder than talc on the Mohs scale of hardness, and is also water-soluble, the first step was to grout the base of the projected dam. The engineers recommendation was dismissed as too expensive and time consuming and after a slip-slop blanket grouting, construction proper began.  The dam was completed by 1984 and is massive: 113m high in the centre and 3500m wide, it is holding 10 billion tonnes of water - that's a reservoir 5000x bigger than Situ Gintung.  The dam, however, is more or less of the same earth-core construction. In Indonesia or Wales, you have to be primarily concerned with excessive rainfall over a short period of time; in Northern Iraq the main concern is seasonal snow melt in the mountains of Turkey which is where the Tigris and its tributaries rise.

Going round the news at the moment is a story that the intrinsically under-engineered Mosul Dam is under imminent threat of failure.  The US Army Corps of Engineers say it is at "significantly higher risk" of failing than previously thought as more and more untreated voids are becoming apparent in the fabric of the dam or its 'foundations'.  Because the job wasn't done properly (or abandoned as futile) at the start, the operators are committed to pour concrete into voids until the end of time or the dam fails.  Oh, and there's a war on!  ISIL captured the dam in 2014 and the routine relentless maintenance was put on hold so that everyone could engage in compulsory Salah five times a day. If the dam fails 10 billion tons of water will travel downstream as a wall, reaching Mosul 4 hours later and Baghdad after a couple of days. The water will still be 4m deep in Baghdad. As with Egypt and the Nile, pretty much the whole population of Iraq lives in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Pessimists say that a sudden collapse would kill 1 million people, optimists claim only half that. !?

A river re-runs through it

A little over two years ago I reported on some small but highly dramatic progress in dismantling the dam infrastructure of the United States. The Army Corps of Engineers, The Tennessee Valley Authority,The Department of Forestry, local electricity entrepreneurs and many others had thrown rock and concrete across the wilder rivers of the country often without adhering to existing laws and regulations to protect wild-life. A pulse-stopping 75,000 such projects have been carried out.  On the Blob we've had a few examples of where man's hubris and/or chicanery in material quality have bought a disastrous bargain  for people who were sleeping down-river of these engineering projects: Lynn Eigiau - Vajont - not to mention inconveniencing my Portuguese perambulations. At he end of that Dec 2014 piece, I urged you to check out the videos on "Elwha"; but I doubt if anyone obeyed orders so I'll give you a summary here because the river has spilled into Metafilter in the last tuthree days.

The Olympic Pensinsula is a squarish chunk of land about 100km x 100km across Puget Sound from Seattle, WA.  It is a sparsely populated wilderness region that was once covered in temperate forest with a light sprinkling of Native North Americans. A little over 100 years ago in 1913, one of several salmon-spawning rivers called the Elwha was damned to provide hydro-electricity for a small town called Port Angeles, paper-pulp mills and a Navy Yard. The competing interests of the fish were 'sorted' by a promise to create a hatchery upriver, so that entrepreneurs didn't have to incorporate a fish-ladder into the dam design.  By the time the hatchery conclusively failed to produce any fish, the dam was built and that battle was lost. The demand for electricity is insatiable once the stuff is available and tupenny-ha'penny hydro-plants rapidly get to look small and quaint and wholly inadequate to meet requirements.  In 1978, after 65 years of diminishing effective returns, the aging Elwha dam failed a safety inspection. Failing a safety inspection implies the possibility of a catastrophic failure at some thoroughly inconvenient time - Teton Dam - Lynn Eigiau - Vajont anyone?. So something had to be done.   Local interests wrestled with the problem all through the 1980s but in 1992 it was decided that the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam on the same river should be removed. It took 20 further years to actually start the process ! and a further couple to complete it.

The transition is the most worrying time. The rocks and soil across the river catchment had endured 100 years of rainfall - it rains a lot in the Pacific North-West - frost-heave, glacier-grind, snow-melt and the occasional earthquake.  The displaced matter used to wash out to sea, building coastal sand-bars and shoals which supported a particular set of marine wildlife - algae, plants, molluscs, worms and fish. With the fall of the river curtailed, this material had built up into 20 million cu.m. of sediment locked up behind the two dams. The nature of that sediment - % rocks, gravel, sand, mud % organic/inorganic - dictates the method and timescale for the removal of the artificial obstruction. Time-lapse of Glines Canyon piecemeal removal by back-hoe working from topside on a pontoon floating over the abyss <don't look down!>. A rather different more elaborate back-and-forth was deemed to be necessary for the Elwha Dam.

The Elwha restoration project cost a staggering $325million but now it's done and ecologists and fisheries people are  documenting the change: counting spawning fish in the head-waters and the build up of beaches at the mouth are only the biggest and most obvious data. I hope humbler scientists are checking on the aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, the nitrogen fixers and the phosphate solublisers: the foundation on which the whole living ecosystem teeters upwards.  There's a very nice colour supplement view of the current state of the river by Lynda V Mapes of the Seattle Times. One elegant bit of leverage was to shift the logs that had washed up along the reservoir shores and were now high and drying. Judiciously moving these into the middle of the old lake bed helped to re-create a diverse braided river ecosystem: limiting erosion, sheltering willows and other pioneer plants, shading the fish in the shallows.  Tilting the conditions means that you never have to plant anything: create the habitat and the seeds will sprout.  For me, it reads like a story of redemption, and I feel a little less ashamed to be a gallumphing human tromping through the world in enormous toxic wellington boots

Oroville 2017

About ten months ago, I was worrying about the Mosul Dam across the Tigris River in far off Iraq. It was constructed on Saddam Hussein's watch but also on a really dodgy foundation. At the moment 10 billion tonnes of water are behind the dam and at least 1 million people are downstream hoping everything will be okay.

Right now in Northern California, they've been having a lot of rain after several years of drought [Lake Oroville just 3 years ago] - dang that climate change! The Oroville Dam is the US's tallest and is made of concrete-faced rubble. The lake behind is full to brimming and so water was let off down a concrete spillway. That GUSH of water - 35,000 cu.ft/sec = 1,000 tonnes/sec has eaten a huge hole in the spillway and the water has topped out the emergency spillway next door. The emergency spillway is just a concrete lip - never used in the 50 years since the dam was topped out 50 years ago - at the top of a rock-and-dirt hillside falling 230m to the Feather River below.  If the water flow undercuts the emergency spillway lip then water will start to lower the hill top possibly catastrophically: a 10m lowering of the lake is conceivable and the lake is 6,000 hectares in extent; that's a lot of acre-feet of water.  Water is coming into the reservoir at an estimated rate of 5,000 tonnes/sec. Weather is forecasting several more storms coming in this week.

160,000 folks downstream of the dam also know that the dam itself consists of an eminently erodable soft centre and they've been ordered to evacuate to higher ground to the north. RTE is still headlining with Maurice McCabe but does cover Oroville on Page 5. I've clipped a pic from RTE to show the was-concrete spillway and the emergency spillway to the left. The dam itself is massively off-camera to the right. Millions of salmon fry in the spawning gravels downstream - they're screwed (sorry). You can pick up enough links to satisfy your further curiosity at Metafilter.
Let's us hope that we don't have a Vajont 1963 , or even an Eigiau 1925 over there.

Infrastructural Communications.

I did get a PhD, I had to Go America and work really hard for it. I didn't get to have such sustained joy-of-work until I started The Blob working at The Institute 34 years later. But it was quite weird because although I rocked up to Boston University Biology Department at least five days a week for classes and seminars and number crunching my boss would come in about 5 days a year. Working from home? Everyone is doing that now. In the 1980s it was peculiar. The gaffer worked from home at least partly because it was difficult to channel his several interests into a M-F 9-5 regularity. He was into cats, genetics, cat genetics, population genetics, anthropology, history, numismatics and genealogy. Often one of my chores in BU was to throw his outgoing mail into the Departmental mail-box to save a few dollars on stamps. Ah thrift, my sorta guy.

I was happy-out in that milieu; my very expensive education had coursed over a lot of those areas. And it wouldn't be surprising for conversation to flit from conquistadors to cats to Cardiff to cysticercosis. The genealogy could be a bit of a sleeper for me, because at that age, I wasn't much interested in my own forebears let alone other people's. But I remember one story of a couple of New England families whose stories were intertwined with births and weddings and funerals for 200 years and then abruptly ceased, despite the fact that they hailed from neighboring Massachusetts towns. It was a puzzle until Neil was driving through the area and realised that the two townships were separated by a wide tidal estuary. The bridge joining the two communities was carried away in a winter storm; it was too much faff to go courting by skiff and so the families went on divergent paths until the Eisenhower Interstate system replaced the road bridge 100+ years later.

This was all brought from the roiling deeps of my "mind" when I saw this picture [it's here just north of Edenville MI]:

It's from drone footage from Edenville, MI where a domino of dam failures on the Tittabawassee River has been caused by a "500 Year Flood" in central Michigan. Here's the moment when the saturated earth of the Edenville dam finally bursts, slumps and allows water through. The mighty works of man look rather pathetic in the face of Mother Nature in a pet. For me the hubris is exactly captured by the concrete revetments, designed to keep the river-bank footings of the bridge from being washed away in a flood. ferro-concrete is strong: it has held together long enough for the concrete walls to be caught suspended uselessly from the road-bed rather than supporting it. You can see a) that the road surface and upstream [L] piers are loaded with snagged trees and debris b) because its usual path was blocked with crud, the river (now subsiding) went through the riverbank for a shortcut and caused 10m of road slab to drop into the torrent c) a clatter of hi-vizzed county engineers on the shore side of the chasm trying to make a plan for the immediate and longer term future.

Debbie and Randall, who live on opposite sides of the N Meridian Rd bridge and were dating will be doing a helluva lot of driving to keep in touch . . . even after covid19 blows away. The W Curtis Road bridge just downstream is still walkable but the approach road on the West has been erased; and replaced by a scour of mud. A lot of folks are now homeless downstream of the failed dams: like the former owners of this house which floated off to seek its best life in another, more salubrious, downstream, location. The dams have been placed across the river at considerable expense to win a list of benefits for the local people [the local wildlife not having much of a vote in the matter, although the Feds have tried to protect it]:

• flood control and mitigation;
• water supply to irrigate fields; 
• drinking water reservoirs; 
• hydro-power
• maybe fish farms?
• recreation: fishing, boating, swimming.

This is all grand until it isn't. A 500 year storm is a lot of water all reaching the river over a few hours and then heading off down the incline to Lake Huron. On Tuesday 19th May there was a dump of 60-70 mm of rain in 24 hours. That is a little less than 10% of the annual rainfall; and it all needs to go somewhere. A dam will catch this up-blip of down-pour and dissipate the flood over the next several days or weeks.

• IF
• by poor design, poor management, poor maintenance, the water overtops the dam rather than its spillways and emergency spillways 
• ANDIF 
• it is an earth-filled berm of a dam 
• THEN 
• the running water will rapidly and relentlessly erode the whole structure to buggery.

Q. And the water behind the dam, which will have been accumulating at least over the preceding winter; say a years worth of rainfall?
A. That will all come down at once, in a rush, making Tuesday's deluge look like a tinkle in a piss-pot.

I learned a lot about the consequences of dams, hydro-electric, corner-cutting on maintenance, cost-cutting on inspections from the Oroville Dam saga in Feb and March 2017 The best commentator for that saga was Juan Browne at Blancolirio. He's got something to show and tell about the mess on the Tittabawassee River.

If it was my home sailing off to the Great Lakes, I'd have some serious questions to put to Boyce Hydro Power, LLC who have been making money from power-stations installed in the failed dams. But the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) will have a case to answer because they recently required the retention of more water . . . to protect the pearl mussels. The Federal Energy Regulatory Authority has been requesting and requiring safety changes for years. [bickerfest reports]. I guess I'd leave my scrutiny of policy and procedures at Dow Chemical until all the fish die and/or the tumors have started to occlude my gut. Dow Chemical, which is headquartered in Midland, confirmed in a statement earlier in the day that flood waters were "commingling with on-site containment ponds.".

Only (some of) her rivers run free

Let nobody doubt that free-flowing rivers are highly politicised. Reflecting on the big ticket items . . .

• The Colorado River that carved the Grand Canyon now reduced to a dribble the fails to reach the Gulf of California
• The Aswan Dam that drowned the Abu Simbel temple complex
• All those Army Corps of Engineers levées on the Mississippi that have given back 500,000 hectares of Louisiana to the sea.

Or the Irish ecocrumps:

• The Ard na Crusha hydroelectric dam that blocked the Shannon Ireland's longest river
• and Bord na Mona stripping the adjacent bogs to allow millions of tonnes of sediment to clog the river
• and Athlone to establish the town's landfill on the callows below the town
• The Barrow Navigation that changed the river's natural tumble into a series of steps [Clashganny Lock R] to provide an additional energetic burden on spawning salmon
• there are now no eels on the Barrow

. . . you'd think that humanity had changed, changed utterly the running of fresh water across the entire planet. Running is the appropriate word because rivers run, yes, but we run businesses also; and we have looked on rivers as things to be used and exploited to suit human convenience and profit. Let the chips for the {alder | bacteroides | caddis flies | damselflies | eel | figwort | gudgeon | heron . . .} fall where they may.

Now a multinational group led by geographers from McGill U, Montreal have carried out a global inventory of "free-flowing rivers" and published their work in Nature. It's paywalled but the abstract and pixellated figures are available to all. It's not just the goddamm dams that inhibit free-flow:

1. dams, weirs and locks are just the longitudinal source-to-sea element. 
2. There are also the levées, and berms and quays which constrain lateral flow - natural rivers spill out over the banks to inundate callows, flood-plains and riparian fields and forests. 
3. Thirdly, there is a vital dynamic between groundwater, surface rivers and the atmosphere: oxygen maxes out at 14 ppm in cold water raise the temperature to 15°C downstream from a factory and there's a third less bio-available oxygen. 
4. Finally, rivers are dynamic through time: thee Aughnabriskey at the bottom of our fields was rocks and puddles during the last hot summer but can become a raging torrent 2m deep after a significant spill of rain. Callows flood in the winter, depositing silt [good] but compressing the soil [ungood] with the weight of water. And there we go again: making a value judgement on a natural process to decide that it is [good] or indeed [bad] for us.

The McGilliQuanties have spent some time defining terms and applying weightings to their base metrics so they are comparable across very different rivers from 10km streamlets to the mighty rivers that feature in Sporcle quizzes: including Ob, Lena, Parana. Someone has to decide if a navigational lock is more or less inhibitory of free-flow than a mile of levée or a tonne of sediment retention. They have reduced the multivariate multidimensional statistics of free-flow status to a single value the connectivity status index CSI and then applied that to every reach of every river longer than 10km. A reach is stretch of river between two confluences (where a significant lateral inflow occurs). I guess its a feature of the granularity of the analysis to find that short (10-100km) rivers are mostly [97%] free-flowing, while half the long (500-1000km) rivers are constrained [56% free-flow] and very long rivers (>1000km) are mostly not free-flow [only 37% still free]. It takes just one Hoover [L] or Aswan or Three Gorges or Oroville to destroy the free-flow status and the longer the river the more places humanity can tromp in with steel and concrete. Dam removal prev.

Sounds better to me than I expected from prior ignorance. Then again, a lot of the remaining free-flowing rivers debouch into the Arctic and they are only being left alone because nobody lives there. But watch out for the Congo, when they can stop killing each other in rolling civil wars in Central Africa, then the human population will grow and it's only a matter of demographic time before some bright spark proposes a prestige dam for power. What's upstream from the Aswan Dam? Ethiopia is upstream and Ethiopia  wants its own dam. Tomorrow: The Water Wars

Vajont October 1963

You know those Mensa IQ puzzles where they ask for the next couple of terms in a series: 1, 4, 9, 25, 49, __, __, or L, M, M, J, V, __, __, ?  Well what about Botox, Sarin, propylene, beer, __. ?

You will have noticed a tendency to track anniversaries on The Blob.  It's a way of limiting the choice of things to think/write about from the infinite to the dayinit. I'm interested in events at the intersection between the natural world and the folly, hubris or even malice of people. There were good reasons why Italians wanted to develop hydro-electric power in their Alps as their economy started to show green shoots after the debacle of WWII. There was pressure (political, economic, social) behind a plan to build one of the tallest dams in the world at the head of a modest valley carved by a tributary of the Fiume Piave.  The CEO of the local electricity monopoly had been Mussolini's Minister of Finance, so he was well-connected, and interested in money.

The dam was first considered in the 1920s, authorized in 1943, but construction didn't start until 1956.  They had, of course, done a geological survey to determine whether the walls of the valley were strong enough to hold this huge 260m high wall of concrete upright and some, more cursory, investigation had revealed some evidence of ancient land-slips further up the valley.  Construction was authorized and pouring concrete started.  Several outsiders sounded off about the instability of Monte Toc which loomed over the valley that was to be filled with water.  After the dam was built, the sluices were shut and the valley started to fill with water.  Some time later a farmer noticed that a 1700m long crevasse had opened up roughly parallel to the valley on a shoulder of Monte Toc.  The ever-increasing width of this crack suggested that a very large chunk of the local world was thinking about taking a plunge in the lake.  This was worrying but the company had invested a lot in the project and accordingly cast about for more data and solutions to probable future scenarios. With 20/20 hindsight, two significant scientific gaffes were committed.

The first error was to treat anecdote as data. They noted (N=1) that when the water level increased the crack had started to open. When they pulled the plug (N= -1?) and let out some water then the creep stopped. They therefore believed that the water level in the lake was driving any local land-slippage. The second error was to assume that one anomalous value was wrong rather than that it was the key to a new and much better paradigm of what was happening under-ground.  They had drilled four boreholes deep beneath the limestone surface to see if the solid rock went all-the-way-down or was resting on something far less stable.  Three of the holes' piezometers said "solid" and the fourth, which they put down to faulty instrumentation, said "wobbly".

Regardless of these data, the company was determined to filler 'er up and start to generate some return on their investment.  Any rock slide would just have to be managed: if and when it happened enough redundant safety features would have been installed, so that nobody would be hurt.  The company's engineers built a scale model of the valley with a mini-dam and dumped loads of gravel over the edge and measured what the resulting mini-wave got up to.  They concluded that biggest possible landslip would result in a tsunami 20m high.  So they drew a Plimsoll line 25m (25% extra to be sure to be sure) below the top the dam for the maximum safe height.  They then filled up the lake again and waited for what would happen.

The anomalous piezometer (20/20 hindsight here) showed that the whole huge slab of limestone and its attendant topsoil, trees and foxes was separated from the mountain by a layer of clay. When this failed it allowed a near frictionless slide downhill, so the mass traveled far faster and was far more massive than the simulations had considered possible.  Indeed there was more stuff (260 million cu.m) going downhill at 100km/h than there was water in the reservoir.  It was like dropping a walrus from a great height into a bath-tub. Instead of a wave 25m high, the mountainside slopped 50 million tons of water over the edge of the dam in a wall 250m high which wiped 4 villages and 2000 people off the face of the earth in a couple of minutes.  It's reminiscent of Lake Nyos.  The dam survived with only superficial damage and is still there to this day but they never filled the reservoir after the 9th of October.  It's all rather well covered in a National Geographic documentary.

One set of answers to the questions posed at the head of the post:
1,4, 9.25,49,121,169 (squares of primes)
Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi, Samedi, Dimanche (French weekdays)
150ng, 150mg, 150kg, 150t, water=25,000t (quantities that can kill a person)

Things that go whoosh in the night

Last year I was on about Aluminium: how we depend upon it to hold 7-Up and Indian take-aways and 500 people aloft in a wide-body aeroplane.  Aluminium the element is abundant in the lithosphere but aluminium the metal is extremely costly to produce.  The key process is electro-smelting of aluminium oxide Al₂O₃ which requires megawatts of electricity. That is why aluminium plants are usually situated near a source of hydro-electric power.  More than 100 years ago in 1907, the Aluminium Corporation of Dolgarrog started to output tons of aluminium sheets. This venture depended on damming a tributary of the Conwy River in North Wales and running a pipe [R with adjacent tramway] from the Coedty Reservoir formed behind the dam [290m elevation] to the turbines of the hydro-power plant below [50m elevation].
In the 1920s, the rapacious directors decided to dam Llyn Eigiau a further 100m higher up the valley.  That dam was poorly surveyed, poorly engineered and poorly built with sub-standard materials on superficial foundations. On the night of 2nd November 1925, after a week of torrential rain - 650mm in five days! - the Eigiau dam failed and released a 15m wall of water which over-topped and then destroyed the Coedty embankment below and carried on downhill to wipe out the lower part of the village of Dolgarrog.  The power of 1.5 million tons of water was able to shift 500 ton boulders, so the puny works of man didn't resist for long. The church and a couple of rows of houses were batted aside and at least 16 accounted people were killed. With a fair amount of turn-over in the works work-force nobody can be sure if there weren't itinerant labourers billeted in the village who disappeared without trace. Luckily, it was film night at the village hall, so much of the population was above the plume of destruction and survived.  It was quite similar to the Vajont dam burst 40 years later.  In that case I calculated that it took 25,000 tons of water to kill each of  2000 people.  The Dolgarrog disaster was much smaller both in absolute, but also in relative, terms: it took 100,000 tons each to kill the misfortunate Welsh people. Dams are one of the mightiest engineering feats of which man is capable (beavers Castor canadensis are pretty good too) but they have to be built right and in sensible positions or they are a ticking time-bomb that is difficult to defuse or deconstruct.

Monetising misfortune

What is a natural disaster?  Sometimes it is clear that nobody is to blame but the Wrath of God. The only thing we can blame for the Darwinday Storm of 12 Feb last year is the goddamn butterfly that flapped its wings several weeks earlier in Martinique.  That storm made a mess which cost me hours of time and a couple of thousand euros in clean-up costs.  But I just had to suck it up and play the hand the weather dealt me. It actually made me reflect that we are fortunate to live in Ireland where outrageous weather is so rare.  In the case of the Dolgarrog Dam Disaster, the massive and almost unprecedented dump of rainfall in the days before would have passed through and out to sea if the directors of the Aluminium company hadn't built a substandard dam.  Clearly there it was the interaction terms that 'caused' the disaster: if the directors hadn't wanted to increase capacity then that dam would never have been built; if the rainfall had been less, the dam would have held. If anybody thought to hold the company accountable for the death and destruction of 2nd Nov 1925, nobody a) went to jail or b) got paid compensation for their loss.

Fast forward 90 years: you can now find somebody to blame for almost every accident that happens and because of the rise and rise of the insurance "industry", that somebody can be induced to cough up €'000s for your present and future pain, costs and/or humiliation. I'm told that some people make a steady income from slipping on spills in supermarkets. It's often cheaper to pay up than start instructing your legal team. And your legal team may just advise you to pay up aNNyway - witness the Panti "homophobe" shakedown of RTE last year. The Irish Health Service Executive HSE has a default position that their employees can do no wrong, so you have to sue for redress when things go wrong: perinatal anoxia causing cerebral palsy for a multi-million € example. Suing for help to bring up your desperately handicapped child is a grossly inefficient way of readjusting the wealth of the country so that The Least have a certain minimal standard of care. The current process rather enhances the disparity of wealth: successful litigating barristers are the chaps with the mansions. The parents of the handicapped who have no reasonable or even unreasonable grounds for suing the midwife or the surgeon have to make do with their own resources or secure help from the Jack and Jill Foundation: no mansion for them, they're lucky to get a wheel-chair ramp.

On 15th August 1952, a Dolgarrog disaster overwhelmed the village of Lynmouth in North Devon.  The village grew up at the mouth of the River Lyn which rises as several streams up in Lorna Doone country on the wilds of Exmoor and spills prettily out into the sea through a gap in the cliffs. After a wet August had saturated the ground on perennially soggy Exmoor, a monsoon quantity of rain [230mm! the third highest 24hr amount recorded in the UK] fell in 24 hours.  This filled the rills and becks to brimming, eroding the banks and toppling trees and other debris into the water courses. These natural impediments to the water's flow proved but temporary and the 'natural' dam gave way catastrophically when sufficient water had built up behind it. 90 million tons of water came down in a hurry. In the town, the river had, over the course of years, been covered over to improve traffic flow and foot-fall for the businesses along the street.  These culverts were overwhelmed and the swollen river took the shortest path to sea carrying a maelstrom of tree-trunks, boulders and the wrecks of houses. All the boats in the picturesque harbour and several dead bodies were swept out to sea, never to be recovered.  34 people died and more than 400 were rendered homeless.  But nobody looked for a scapegoat to sue. In those days, the UK had a National Health Service and a certain socialist mentality, despite a Conservative government, so the people of Lynmouth weren't thrown entirely on their own resources to rebuild their town.  Looking for someone to blame who would give you a handsome payout was still foreign to our mentality.  It was still foreign 20 years later when negligence and poor engineering killed so many people in Flixborough; nobody thought to ask directly for monetary compensation for the loss of their husband even if he was the breadwinner for the family.

It was, as I say, a wet August, but the BBC's "North Devon experienced 250 times the normal August rainfall in 1952" is not only incredible - in implies that 2 meters of rain fell in the month - it is also wrong!  Each year since 1860, the UK Met Office has produced an annual compendium of weather statistics, which for 1952 is 220 pages of maps, tables and narrative.  That source reports that Exmoor endured 425mm of rain that month, including the 230mm on the 15th.  That's about 4x the long-term average for August.  Don't accept uncritically anything you read on the interweb . . . no not even the BBC.  If you're inclined to question the accuracy of the rest of the BBC's coverage of the disaster, I feel you'd be within your critical thinking rights.

49 years later, during a slow news time [the English Press refer to August as the Silly Season], the BBC came up with a story that had the ring of truthiness: the Lynmouth disaster had been caused by Operation Cumulus a cunning Cold War plan hatched by the Ministry of Defense for selective downpours to bog down the tanks of the Soviets as they swept into Western Europe. Apparently, they had been sending aircraft up above the clouds and seeding them with dry ice, silver iodide or common salt to form precipitation nuclei that would translate into rain. In the intervening years, the truth of Operation Salt-spray of September 1950 had come to light: the USAF threw [mildly] pathogenic bacteria out into the air above San Francisco to see where Red biowarfare agents might finish up. Needless to say, key Top Secret MoD files about Operation Cumulus were 'missing' but eye-witness testimony from a cloud-seeding pilot was dug up which was implied to have caused the downpour; despite the fact that the quotable pilot was operating in Bedfordshire 300km to the East. Meteorologically qualified people say this is nonsensiness.

My point being that if Lynmouth had happened in 2001, the Air Force would have been sued up the wazzoo and/or an endless tribunal of enquiry would have been called. Sometimes, folks, shit happens and you can't blame, let alone sue, anyone.

Oroville Update

In January this year, after 5 years without rain there was a dramatic drought-break in Northern California. Suddenly there was more water than anyone new adequately how to deal with. I mentioned the story again a couple of week later by way of saying that Mr Trump's 'promise' of $1 trillion$ was probably not going to be enough to fix all the bridges, culverts, dams and road-pavement that was beyond their sell-by date. The cost of just cleaning up the mess at Oroville up till now is in excess of $100 million. Here's good footage showing water moving before, during and after the over-flow crisis at Oroville.
When we left Oroville on 13th February, the rain had eased off, if you can call 13in = 330mm in 4 days an easing off. The emergency spillway was still in danger of being utterly destroyed through under-cutting by the flowing water and the reg'lar spillway had a hole [see above, the yellow Lego figures are about 2m tall] big enough to bury my 'umble 'ome and another half-dozen houses of similar size. But the California department of water resources DWR were left with Hobson's Choice and had to let water out of the brimful lake down the compromised spillway. Without Hans Brinker the hero of Haarlem to stem the flow, the rushing water ate at the edges of the hole and then ate at the edges of the hill and than started scouring out the very bedrock. In about 20 days, 1.5 million cu.yds = 1.1 million cu.m had been stripped out and dumped into the Feather River below. Every day of that meant another ?$5million? in damage and erosion that would eventually have to be repaired. This what a million cu.m of crumbled concrete and bedrock looks like - mainly grey in the brown river:
You can see the almost white strip of remaining spillway near the top right of the picture. This is after they had scrabbled a channel through the debris field (you can see it flowing along the left edge of the heap of grey rock). They did that so that the level of the river could be lowered below the out-fall ports of the Hyatt power-station at the base of the dam - off-camera to the right. On an engineering side note, you can't run water through the plant unless you are taking electricity off the turbines - if they aren't engaged with the magnets they spin so fast they melt the bearings and explode. They couldn't run the electricity because the cables and pylons tracked off through the flood disaster zone and had to be removed!  It was a fine old mess of a 'normal accident' or one dam thing after another. Here's a picture of before (normal spillway gush 2011), damage (7th Feb 2017) and after (27th Feb 2017):

New Oroville spills

How quickly they forget! Not many people in Ireland will be triggered by the word "Oroville" to be pitched six years back to Northern California when 180,000 citizens were told to leave their homes at very short notice because a dam[n] spillway had gotten all tore up and the emergency spillway looked likely to fail catastrophically and release a wall of water 100m tall to scour everything downstream. You, dear reader, may remember because I covered the story obsessively at the time but most folks have more pressing matter to occupy their minds - like the price of electricity here and now!

Dams and their reservoirs require active management to balance their complementary functions.

• Dams stop river flow allowing more controlled water supply downstream
• Water comes mostly in Winter but agricultural demand is mostly in Summer. Reservoirs keep the excess in reserve for demand six months later.
• Reservoirs also serve domestic water to wash behind ears, wash potatoes, wash cars and make coffee
  
• A big dam will have a big head of water behind it; so turbines can be en-coupled to generate hydroelectric power
• A big dam will create a large lake which has recreational / amenity value
  

Juan Browne at Blancolirio reports. The California DWR [Dept Water Resources] recently decided that Oroville Lake was filling up a little too fast for comfort given that a second atmospheric river was expected to dump A Lot of warm rain across the Oroville catchment. On Sat 11 Mar 2023, therefore, they opened the reg'lar spillway for the first time in 4 years to release 8,000 rising to 8,500 cfs [cubic feet per second = 225 cu.m /s]. See above: the white diagonal streak pluming out lower right is water cascading down that spillway. The white rectangle top left is the emergency spillway: reinforced, repaired, back-filled and backed up since the Big Ooops moment in Jan 2017. The terracing and roadways and landscaping are all new too. In all this single element of the power-generation + agricultural irrigation infrastructure has cost $1 billion to make it secure and functional with a judicious margin for the unexpected. 

225 cu.m /s is a lot of bathtubs but it's the drippiest of tiny drops in the context that Lake Oroville contains 4 billion cu.m. behind the dam spread over 6,250 hectares of surface. Then again there are a lot of seconds in a day and the atmospheric river wasn't due for 3 days. Putting all the numbers into a calculator says that DWR can lower the lake level by a meter in that half week. They don't want to lose their nerve and spill too much because excess will run off down to the ocean without growing a single almond and because the Feather River will erode banks and scour its bed if forced to carry too much flow. Then again, 2022/23 has been a snowy old Winter so far in N California: twice the average snowfall is waiting for Spring to fill the Lake with snowmelt.

One dam thing after another

A bunch of allll wet links

• I had a bit of a hysterical flap about wrote about the Oroville Dam crisis. It seems to have abated, and 200,000 people are returning home after some enforced camping on high ground, although the repair of the spillway is looking at a $100 million bill.
• Update 21Feb17 Oroville: clearing downstream debris so that the hydro-electric plant can kick in again and add 12,000cfs of useful outflow.
• The tin-foil hat chem-trail take on Oroville[in the interest of balance]
• an alternative spillway design
• This is how to build a dam in the woods, spillways, overflows and all.
• And this is the dam fail. Not surprisingly in these days of the pornography of destruction, the fail gets 10x the view of the constructive phase
• what is a 100 year flood?
• Utrecht's moat is restored to water after 50 years as the country's shortest motorway

Oroville-le-small

I've had an interest in dams since I was a nipper with a bucket and spade in Duncannon in the 1960s. In January 2017, I got over-excited about Oroville Dam, a massive earth-filled flood-abatement project across the Feather River in N. California. Nobody likes a flood, especially if the water comes through your front door and covers your chintz sofa in diluted sewage. In Ireland, it would just grand if the annual average rainfall of about 1,000mm was delivered with modest regularity: say 10mm every third day between 0100 and 0500 hrs. That would be enough for the crops, enough to top up the reservoirs for drinking water, with a modest excess to generate a bit of hydro-electric. Ain't gonna happen!, though. What actually happens is that rain falls with unpredictable irregularity giving us weeks of drought, as last Summer, or damaging torrents which flood Clonmel, or Enniscorthy or Grainaguemanagh with predictable irregularity. At least in the first two cases, the floods are made worse because of cunning plans for flood abatement which defers a minor problem [elsewhere] to a catastrophe if the weather doesn't play ball with the hubris of engineers and planners.

Farmers and citizens in the Sacramento Valley in California were fed up with Spring floods, when the snow melted in the High Sierras with a bit of warm February drizzle and the riverbed was unable to contain the excess water. Soooo, they built USA's largest earth-filled dam to contain the floods and eke out the water through the growing season of the apricots, almonds and apples of California's Garden of Eden. With great cunning they incorporated a hydro-electric power plant in the dam structure . . . and a trout farm in the warm water of the rail-race. The water of the Feather River was turned from a threat to an opportunity. Until . . . the weather stopped playing ball and delivered a huge amount of water (after years of none-at-all) and the reservoir topped out to beyond the manageable expectable predicable quantities for which the dam designers had allowed. In 2017, the concrete surface of the aged spillway developed a small hole as the torrents of water came down. Torrents of water will rapidly turn a small hole into a large one and soon enough the voracious maelstrom was sucking at bedrock and sweeping it all downhill in a heap. As the erosion worked back towards the footings of the emergency spillway, it looked like that might fail to loose a Wall of water 10m high into the valley below where 100,000 people had homes. The worst flood imaginable - a 10,000 year flood - from the natural pre-Columbian pre-concrete times would have been a trickle compared to that. Over the succeeding months, I followed the management of the disaster and the successful restoration, and augmentation, of the flood safety net. One of the positives was the rise and rise of Juan Browne a pilot from N California, who took it upon himself to comment on the unfolding saga on his wife's Blancolirio youtube channel.

You may believe that we are living through The End of Days as climate change extends the range of natural weather beyond what we have so far taken as normal. The hottest July ever in Central continental Europe, record rainfall in UK, last year's parching drought. The Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge has been in the news since last week when a big spill of rain filled the reservoir above the town and . . . the spillway failed just like Oroville. The reservoir has been hanging over the town since Whaley Bridge was joined to the English navigable in the 1830s. It is behind an earthen berm across a small stream and the front face of the spillway was faced with concrete:
This year the rushing water winkled destructive fingers through small-small irregularities in the concrete surface, eroded the supporting clay beneath and collapsed some of the concrete panels. The management had to stop using the spillway and try to fill the cavity.
They called in an RAF Chinook to deliver hundreds of 1 tonne bags of fill, four-at-a-time, to help stop or slow down the erosion of the raw earth beneath the once-upon-a-spillway. And they sourced and leased the biggest pumps available in Northern England to lower the level of water in the reservoir so that nothing will travel over the damaged spillway
They've lowered the level of the water by 1.5m but a storm is forecast to dump another 100mm of rain across Derbyshire this afternoon. Whaley Bridge is not out of danger yet. Best commentary on Whaley Bridge from Juan Browne. To put it in perspective, the Whaley Bridge reservoir is 1.5 million tonnes of water, Oroville was a problem about 4,000x bigger.

Pots Landing

Sometime in the 1970s Coillte, the semi-state forestry firm, acquired one of the old steadings in the hills above us and planted it all with Sitka spruce Picea sitchensisis. By the time we arrived ~20 years later the forest formed a forbidding dark green cliff to the East of the rough track which served as the main access to Mt Leinster and other local peaks. For reasons, Coillte had excluded the ruined farmhouse and yard from the deer-fence enclosure of the forest. Notwithstanding the cliff, that farmstead was, if not a destination, at least a way-station on a longer trek; perhaps especially for small people. Storyrock was another (off-piste) picnicplatz for Dau.I and her sister..

Sometime in the 00s, a hillwalking family suffered a tragic loss and their friends-and-relations planted a tree to commemorate one whose tiny legs would never again give out and demand rest at the ruin on the edge of the forest. Mountain ash = caorthann = rowan = Sorbus aucuparia was a pretty good choice, not least because in berry-season, it really brightened that corner of the dark forest. The tree grew straight and tall, fighting for light up against the spruce. But when Coillte clear-felled their forest during Covid, the memorial rowan was exposed to the blast of any easterlies and was badly shook. I restaked it [have rope, have hammer, have stakes, have time] at least once and I know the friends-and-relations looked out for it. But this last Winter, the weather laid low the tree well before its time [insert sad emoji].

One section of the hillwalkers used to yomp about the mountain by the light of head-torches: after dark, in Winter often on Thursdays. Last Thursday they called in to "borrow a shovel" as they walked up the lane with a baby rowan, stakes, spike, hammer, sheep-fencing and energy. They were going to have a Go at memorial_tree.02. I left them to their neighbourly task and went to bed. Woke up at 0300 hrs screaming "the water, the water". You're at nothing planting young trees without a solid plan to keep the roots damp - ask me how I know. At first light I dealt with my anxiety and reported:

. . . mountain ash looks well! It takes a village to raise a tree.
I lugged a 4lt flagon of K'roe Spring up there just now and left it for the next waterer because it's not needed now.  You know this, but the nearest running water is 100m SE just across the county line where the runnel gets closest to the ditch:

I could see myself making a wee dam there but not until I'm wearing wellies.
Ar aghaidh!

Although the OS map above is more than 130 years old, it does capture how the land East of the county line is bog marsh wetland. By Sunday morning I had wellies, shovel and bucket because I have form for building recreational dams. It was slight excuse to pretend that I was creating a lake, with added dry-shod landing for the convenience of otters others: utility topping my amusement. It only took about 20 minutes, with Jacinda Adhern chatting in the background describing her orderly departure from a six year term as NZ-PM.

I didn't need wellies as my micro-dam project happened after a long dry May. You can see Lake Blob reflecting the sky behind a minimal intervention obstruction to the water flow. I dug up some mud-and-sphagnum from the bottom of a pool in the rill and dumped it in a downstream heap. It was then just barely deep enough to easily obtain a bucketful of tea-coloured water. For added utility (for waterers in dancing pumps, like) I robbed three extra flat stones to make a landing / standing. 

It's been lashing down these last tuthree days, so the baby rowan is getting well puddled in, and nobody will need to bucket water about for a good while yet. Indeed, there was a Summer down-pour after dinner last night and it's entirely possible that my pathetic two-scoops dam has been carried away. I am also assiduously collecting water for the polytunnel and we are talking about acquiring another 1 tonne IBC against El Niño Madness later in the Summer.

STOP PRESS: Before 07:00 this morning, as the clouds lifted off the hills and blue sky appeared in the East, I walked up the hill. Up beyond the Mountain Gate, the hills are alive to the sound of water, the drains are full and somebobby should really go up and fix the spill-over sites. But the dam at Pots Landing is holding. I'll go up again later this week with a shovel and drop a tuthree cut sods on top.

Infrastructure

I was writing about Oroville Dam and the frightening few days that engulfed [metaphorically!] 200,000 downstream residents when it looked like an emergency spillway might collapse catastrophically. They were compelled to vacate their homes at short notice and spent hours in slow moving convoys heading for higher ground. That apocalyptic situation has been dialled back a notch, because there wasn't as much rain last week as had been forecast and because they had one remaining way to take the pressure off by lowering the reservoir.

It made a lot of people think about how the natural world is prone to floods, avalanches, mudslides, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes and how these can be mind-bogglingly capricious and destructive. In some cases you can do something prophylactic about the danger: early radio warnings that outstrip the tsunami; baffles to dissipate a wall of sliding snow; dams to tame a river. But once you start your interference in the laws of nature, you have to shoulder a lifetime commitment to maintenance. There is now a US-wide process for dismantling hundreds of obsolete dams before they fail [prev, prevlier] but it's costing ready money to achieve; contrariwise, it would cost a lot more in money, lives and anguish to do nothing. If the emergency spillway at Oroville fails it will release a wall of water 10m high which will be like Vajont 1963 all over again. But if Oroville Dam itself failed the water-wall would reach San Francisco: Oroville is just a pile of dirt between two cliffs but it's the highest such, water on one side & air on the other, pile in the USA. Here's a model piled up by the US geological Survey and then trickle-breached. With no Little Hans Brinker to put his arms in the dyke, the whole structure is <spoiler alert> eroded to buggery in short order.

Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways was authorised by the Federal Aid Highways Act of 1956 and more or less completed by 1990 a generation later. Look at the project name: it was born at the height of the Cold War on the realisation that the US could not efficiently ship its armed forces from one side of the country to the other to counteract the threat of a a foreign belligerent. It also benefitted the car and gasoline lobby, ensured the demise of the rail network and raised private motor vehicles to the status of chariots of the gods. Not only tanks and armoured personnel carriers use this road network. You can start off down the Massachusetts Turnpike I-90 in Boston and carry on and on and on driving to Seattle, WA 4,861 km further West. The network is truly amazing but the roads are built in, on and across the landscape. They must go up hill and down dale and cross hundreds of rills, streams, becks and rivers. Crossing rivers requires bridges and thousands upon thousands of bridges were built to service the Interstates, not to mention the bridges that have peppered the countryside since the days of horse&buggy.

According to a new graphic produced by WaPo there are 130,000 bridges in the USA which are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Let's look at Yuba County which includes the Oroville Dam complex. If there is another compulsory evacuation there are going to be a lot of cars travelling along the same crucial escape routes; you don't want any bridge to collapse under the unwonted weight. But only 68 of the 124 bridges in Yuba County are, according to the Federal register, classified 'good'.  In 1983 a bridge on I-95 in Connecticut collapsed at midnight  into the Mianus River followed by two semi-trailers and two automobiles. The post-mortem revealed that water seepage had rusted the steel pins that held up the section of the bridge and the weight of two trucks at once had broken the camel's back. There is a lot of steel embedded as rebar in concrete bridges all over the Interstate System; it is now invisble; it is in contact with water leaching through the concrete and it expands as it oxidises; it is a recipe for disaster. President Trump has promised €1,000,000,000,000 to upgrade, update and make safe the US Federal Highway System. Let's hope some of his cronies have stock in civil engineering, steel, cement, tar and/or gravel companies. It is a peculiarity of the US political mindset that Federal tax dollars can buy space-shuttles, tanks, levees and bridges but cannot provide medical treatment to the poor.

Dammed!

In 1989, fed up and plot-lost after six years working in an English University, I left academia and went for a long walk. I was tolerably fluent in Portuguese having taken lessons in order to push forward some field work in the Portuguese Atlantic Islands: Açores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. That decided where to walk (the mainland; not round and round a dot in the middle of the ocean; and Brazil was too far and too big) and my hopelessness with maps suggested that walking up the coast would take care of the navigation: if I veered left I would get wet feet. Accordingly, I took an overnight train London Newhaven Dieppe Paris and another to Lisboa via Hendaye.fr and Irún.es. While in the Portuguese capital, I went to the Instituto Geographico e Cadastral, the equivalent of our Ordnance Survey, and bought a set of 1:100,000 maps to cover the coast from Sagres in the bottom left-hand corner to where the Rio Minho marks the Spanish border 700km further North. The maps were 16 in number, weighed 750g, and when folded were the size of two fattish paperback books. That was about 10% of my pack-load, so must have seemed important. The next day I caught another train to Lagos in the Algarve, then a bus to Sagres and set off North on foot. Sometime in the middle of the morning on that first day, I realised that I had left my roll of maps on the train the evening before and debated briefly about whether I would plough on regardless on the left = wet-foot protocol.  But as I had already gotten lost twice in the chaparral trying to find the Atlantic coast, I stopped at the next village and caught the bus back to Lagos, retrieved my maps (phew!) from the station-master, and set off again.

It was lonely but it was lovely to have the world opening wide before me as I ploughed deeper into the dusty countryside. It didn't rain at all for the first week although it was late September, but on the seventh day the heavens opened and I slopped into Porto Covo de Bandeira with everything soaked except my precious maps. I had to decide that night whether to hug strictly to the coast and plod through the town of Sines - famous for its oil-refinery and the largest artificial container port in Portugal - or cut inland heading for Santiago do Cacém - which had a castle famous from the days of the Reconquista. It was a gorgeous morning next day and I headed inland trying to make out which of the maze of dotted lines on the map represented the upland track I was pacing along. Mid-morning, like a character in a folk-song, I met with a shepherd and asked if I was on the right road for Santiago and pointed at my map.  He said that I shouldn't try that road because that road had been flooded when they built the dam:

Albufeira da Baragem de Morgavel intended route = red dots

The most recent available map for this section of the route had been printed in 1970 and presumably surveyed at least 20 years ago. There had been a bit of development in the interim. The shepherd advised me to walk along the top of the dam rather than trying to negotiate the upper reaches of the albufeira (reservoir) to the East.  I took his advice and puttered across the dam and then through forests of cork oaks Quercus suber and past little farmsteads. I was completely lost, the map was on too small a scale to be useful, but I asked my way when I saw anyone and meandered along in a vaguely Northerly direction. Eventually I was spat out of a woodland onto the main road about 5km short of Santiago and after being buffeted by speeding container trucks for a while, stuck out my thumb and hitched into town. I spent three days in Santiago, nursing my blisters, and was more or less adopted by the patrão of Cafe Ribatejano who rented me a room for 700$^oo a night which was about £3 in old money.  I've been meaning to go back for the last 25 years, but I know I'll be disappointed.

Blood roses

I don't think I've given Irish Water  a particularly good press but at least I haven't hysterically claimed that water falls from the sky and so should be free to all. At The Institute on Friday afternoon I was prepared to be neutral while the ecological guy from Irish Water explained some of the regulatory tribulations that beset the company in its mandate to clean up the water supply. The other speaker was from Veolia [previously dumping a mountain of sewage sludge across my only access to the outside world] who gave a long technical talk about the latest techniques for cleaning foul water. That was fascinating and I wouldn't have missed the middle 10 minutes of his talk if I hadn't had so much free lunch. When I registered for the two-talk symposium I joked that I was only there for the canapés but the truth is that I'd rather take advantage of any 'extras' which are going down on campus. The alternative is to mark exam scripts and who wants to do that? I've left my notes on my desk at work but I have one story that I can remember enough to do a capella.

It concerns Vertigo geyeri and the plain people of the North-West. V. geyeri is a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc aka whorl-snail that is nowhere near as big shown [L] but more like this [Arial 10pt] g! I guess I'm here guilty of the same exaggeration for effect as the No campaign in their 2m tall foetal posters. These teeny creatures breathe air but live in wet-lands and don't fare well when their marshes get flooded . . . or dry out. It's a wee bit fussy and so acts as a sensitive indicator species; a bit like a miner's canary. The Environmental Protection Agency EPA have requested and required Irish Water to clean up the water supply for Glenties in Donegal. The water treatment plant is several decades old and cannot cope with either Cryptosporidium [prev] which flush the guts of the plain people of Donegal out goodo OR the mildly carcinogenic trihalomethanes [prev] which are an unintended consequence of chlorinating peaty water supplies.

But Irish Water cannot just fix the water treatment plant so that the identified environmemtal hazards are reduced or eliminated. No, they have to satisfy the County Council Planning Department that their solution to two problems doesn't launch another. Environmental legislation has largely originated in the EU where they have to leisure to care about the environment and the resources to carry out studies and then legislate to protect what they deem in need of protection . . . including Vertigo geyeri. Donegal CoCo doesn't even have discretion to give Irish Water a waiver on the necessary Environmental Impact Assessments. Likewise, the EPA's policies are driven forward by the EU Water Framework Directive / Wasserrahmenrichtlinie / Directive-cadre sur l'eau / Rámcové směrnice o vodě / Vesipuitedirektiivi. Irish Water are caught between the rock of planning and the hard-place of protection and has to pay at both ends. Indeed, all of the players are spending government money in the very Irish pass-time of lawyering up and trying to do the minimum in order to move on.

The plain people of Donegal are thus suffering years of paying for cruddy drinking water and occasionally losing a few citizens to a session of very loose bowels because of a mollusc so small that not even the French would eat it. The Utilitarians among us [meeeeee!] will want to suggest that someone does a risk-assessment and balances the QALYs of 2,000 person/puka-puka days and 20 cases of cancer in 20 years time vs the rights, privileges and utility of 20kg of Vertigo geyeri.

Before you get all shouty and certain about the obfuscation of bureaucracy and the nanny state, we might reflect on another watery disaster that just unfolded in Kenya at supper time of the 9th May 2018. One of several irrigation and water-storage dams on the farm of Mansukul Patel in the Rift Valley collapsed with a >!crump!< [see dam with its own rift valley R] and sent 70,000 tonnes of water downhill in a rush. Unfortunately a large number of Mr Patel's employees and the families lived downhill from the reservoir and 30+ of them are now dead. Well it seems that Kenya's Water Resources Management Authority WARMA had been concerned about the safety of the dams on the estate which had been subjected to a year long drought until torrential rains started to fill the reservoirs this March. Indeed that had recently ordered that the water be dispersed and the dam demolished or fixed The farm manager says that the dams are not illegal but he hadn't been in a hurry to sort out 'normal' seepage.

That's why we have rules and regs and the bureaucrats to enforce them. They are a total pain in the tits when they stop us doing something but without them we'd have more child-killing tragedies, as the pursuit of money outstripped someone's sense.  And what does Mt Patel irrigate with all that water? Roses . . . for the European market . . . a business which works because wages life is cheap out in Kenya and we love roses.

About one dam thing after another, I've had an absurd amount to say,

• 09 Oct 1963 Vajont 50 million tonnes
• 27 Mar 2009  Gintung 2 million tonnes
• 02 Niv 1925 Eigiau 1.5 million tonnes
• 04 Oct 2010 Ajka 1 million tonnes
• 09 May 2018 Patel Solai 70,000 tonnes

Context, streetscape, revisionism

Toppling statues, in Bristol and elsewhere, has been flavour-of-the-month for Black Lives Matter. It behooves us all to scrutinise the whole lives of the heroes of our streetscapes and adjust our appreciation accordingly. Take Andrew Carnegie, for example, he started from nothing, emigrated to America and became a multi-millionaire steel magnate, philanthropist and golfer. In 1901, at the age of 66, he sold all his steel holdings to JP Morgan for $303,450,000 or  for $480,000,000 and retired on his money [what's $180million between sources?].  There are only so many yachts and mansions that you can use and Carnegie spent the last 18 years of his life endowing public libraries in Scotland and elsewhere in the English speaking world including more than 60 in Ireland . . . and Carnegie Hall in NYC! What's not to like about that?

Well the back-story is that one of the first libraries built with Carnegie money was constructed in Johnstown, PA in 1889 after the original building was swept away in a disastrous flood which killed 2,000 people. Carnegie Catechism:

• What was the cause of the flood? 
• A failed dam on the South Fork of the Little Conemaugh River. 
• And who built the dam?
• South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club
• And who owned the SFFHC?
• Fifty local magnates including Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie was able to become, briefly, the richest man on the planet because he was the Jeff Bezos of his day. Reducing the cost of production to the lowest possible level by increasing mechanisation but also by shaving wages to the bone. That was instrumental in the polarization of labour relations as the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (the AA) moved in to get a better deal for the workers. Depending on your view-point this culminated in the Homestead Strike / Homestead Lock-out / Homestead Massacre of July 1893. Should we bulldoze those libraries, because they were built with blood-money?