🌊 Watch the previous video on Oroville Dam here: ruclips.net/video/jxNM4DGBRMU/видео.html 🕶 Try 5 pairs of glasses at home for free at www.warbyparker.com/practicalengineering
6:55 well thats ... unnerving because when i have someone fixing the multi billion dollar problem i know i want the guy whose over worked ,over tired and over stressed and may or may not be being divorced over "never being at home these days" because they are the people least prone to fatigue induced mistakes..... please tell me as least several non sleep deprived people checked the numbers ..please
10:37 please tell me these arent the same jokers who were in charge of monitoring and maintaining the damn dam before it fell apart? due to im just going to spin the wheel and ..... deferred maintenance...
As someone living directly below the dam, near downtown Oroville, Juan Brown's coverage was phenomenal and helped me to feel better about the project even as I could hear the clanging and clattering of the machinery during the night.
Juan passed more accurate and valuable information than any of the news stations, local or nationally. I know I wouldn't feel nearly as confident in the repair (basically new) spillway without his coverage. Also his 737 Max coverage help me keep my head on straight about flying on another one ever again.
Juan Brown is an aviation treasure, and a legend. And yes his coverage to this and many topics is above-par, commenting and upvoting for more traffic and eyes to his channel!
What a great story of engineering. It shows that despite never having the perfect solution to a problem, we can always build better, safer, and more efficiently, a structure that will outlast its predecessor
If this project had been procured through normal public procurement laws, it would have taken years just to get to construction. Pretty amazing what can happen when a public project is declared an emergency.
@@glennpearson9348 I'm honestly not that amazed. It's like when they rebuilt the Macarthur Maze, after it melted in that tanker explosion. Suddenly, it became practically the only project CalTrans put its resources toward, instead of the dozens of big things going on at once, which, of course, had to be put on hold, so the whole state felt it. I'm impressed more by all those experts putting their egos aside and collaborating so effectively. On the one hand, that's really encouraging, but I wish it happened more effectively on even larger scales, such as for the climate emergency.
@@Real28 It just goes to show that no matter how big you make the dam, no matter how impressive the emergency spillway is, Mother Nature can always come up with a bigger storm.
When talking about cleaning the bedrock of all loose dust and debris, you failed to mention that the bedrock is ultramafic rock that contains ASBESTOS! In the video look for the bluish rocks, that's the stuff. Those workers doing cleaning in the areas with the blue rocks were doing the work in hazmat suits and respirators in the summer. The surface temperatures where they were working were well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit! We owe each of those workers a debt of gratitude for doing such hard work in brutal conditions. They are real heros.
Man cleaning dust crumbs off rock made of asbestos in boiling temperatures is going into my top 5 worst jobs on earth. Not only miserable but boring to boot.
hero implies selfless. these workers are being compensated and acting in their own financial interest. saving property or the environment downstream is not their primary motivator. wake up man welcome to the real world.
@@majermike you make it seem like having financial stability and working with an environmental motivation are mutually exclusive. it doesn't have to be.
Proud to say I worked for this contractor through the duration of this project. Kiewit’s safety culture is unmatched and is always at the forefront of any project. As the motto goes “Safety Always” 👷🏻♂️
On time and no injuries. Damn well run project, especially given especially given the constraints they were under. And mad props to all the workers who made this possible and kept themselves and their brothers and sisters safe!
@@greensteve9307 you're implying there were unreported injuries based on absolutely jack. "Reported injuries" is just the phrase. Like "the alleged robber""
Thank you for your support. I spent an entire season working on that project - nearly 80 hours /week to reach our goals. I lost 20 lbs that season. One of the biggest projects I’ve ever been a part of.. I’m a proud union worker
@@lukedog7873 that's always the best kind of work imo, the kind that leaves you utterly exhausted but which you look back at and go "I did a damn good job"
Excellent recap Grady! This was a story that launched a whole new career for me here on RUclips. The Oroville story continues today as we hope for enough rain/snow to recharge the desperately low reservoir, re-start the Hyatt Powerplant, re-evaluate our water priorities in CA. and approve the new Sites Reservoir. Thanks Grady “See ya Here!” Juan Browne
Hey Juan, I discovered your channel independent of this project but am glad to find out you were involved, you're a great educator and I love what you do. Stay safe!
Juan, your coverage of this issue will forever be my counterpoint to anyone who claims that regular citizens shouldn't enjoy all the same rights and privileges under the 1st amendment as any credentialed journalist. Your coverage far exceeded the quality and accuracy of any news organization covering the topic. You're a shining example of the citizen-journalist and the power of new media platforms to democracize the creation and dissemination of valuable information.
Love your channel Juan, from your excellent wildfire coverage last summer, to your crash reports, and of course your Oroville and high Sierra fly-over precipitation reports! Awesome to see Grady shout you out.
An almost incomprehensible project. To think there were literally people vacuuming the massive hillside to prep it. It's like cutting grass with scissors. Just incredible.
Right? It boggles my mind the amount of different pieces of engineering and manpower involved in a project like this. There's no way any one person could understand the whole picture but this was a great summary video
"Just Incredible"? No, Just Construction. Sometimes that's what it takes to build/rebuild a project. Next time you're stuck waiting in a road construction zone, think about those guys on their hands and knees dragging a shopvac up that hill.
You might be surprised, a "clean and clear" foundation base is always specified. We don't anticipate clean rock most of the time, however, so we're typically thinking compact native soil with a compacted fill soils in to fill in local soft spots.
Juan Brown is the man. I remember watching his coverage of this as it was developing. He rented a dirt bike and a cabin and rode his ass to the site daily to document the damage as it was happening. Props to him for traveling far from his home to cover something that was of public interest to people he didn't even know.
@@stargazer7644 Didn't know that. In one of the videos he mentioned having just gotten back from Texas for some story he reported, so I just assumed he traveled for this one as well. So this cabin we're looking at in the videos is his home I presume?
@@randr10 He's not a reporter, he's an international long haul airline pilot flying 777s. He flies for a living, and as a hobby. He lives in a house in a residential subdivision in the woods. He enjoys outdoor recreation and has a camper, motorcycles, airplanes and a boat. He often posts videos from hotel rooms in foreign countries because his work takes him there.
The Oroville incident is where I first heard of Juan. I got tired of the pathetic reporting from the mainstream media. Constantly repeating the same bit of information as if it was new data. Mostly talking about the drama of the evacuation. Juan’s in-depth reporting , showing graphs of water inflows/outflow and his no nonsense style got me watching his RUclips channel regularly.
you cant appreciate the sheer size of the project until you see people stood next to the damaged spill way. watching those excavators clear the river, massive project and a small window of opertunity, really impressive seeing the progress
The excavators looked like tiny toys on a driveway. There was so much volume backfilled that even the numbers are meaningless to our scale of understanding.
If you're ever feeling like your job is overwhelming, at least your boss didn't hand you a shop-vac and ask you to go vacuum 500,000 square feet of hillside (11:48). That blew my mind!
I was an engineering student at Utah State University when they created the model of the spillway. It was really cool. We got to take a tour of the facility and see them test the model. It was really impressive to see it in action and only reinforced my decision to want to be a civil engineer.
See how Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP shore spillway made (it has 5 water-slow-down-reservoirs at 5 levels or five-stage drop consists of 5 disperse wells, 100 metres wide and with the length from 55 to 167 metres, divided by the dams). Water slows down from 30 metres per second to 4-5 metres per second at the exit to the river it becomes slower.
11:50 - that clip of the workers using shop-vacs to prepare the rock is absolutely hilarious but also a testament to how meticulous they were in their work. Absolutely awesome 👍
It genuinely warms my heart to see so many people come together to engineer, construct, and regulate such a massive project. These people are under appreciated heroes.
Grady: I know you receive thousands of comments and it seems unlikely you will ever be able to read them all, but I just want to thank you for the consistently skilled, insightful and engaging content we are blessed to enjoy because of your commitment to excellence. Not everyone knows how much work is involved in running a channel of this caliber; Those of us who do, do so in spades. Thank you.
Indeed, while this sort of stuff isn't usually what I watch, I came here because I had been waiting for the end of this story, having watched the earlier videos on this.
Juan's coverage of the failure and construction was significantly better than any of the media coverage during and after the crisis. Thank you for crediting him, and of course the mighty Luscombe, as both of them kept this downstream dweller informed and up to date. Stay safe and warm, and have a Merry Christmas!
I religiously watched Juan Brown as I was one of the unfortunate Oroville residents that had to evacuate. I lived just below the dam at the bend of the Feather River. His updates were FAR better than any news outlet and brought peace of mind as they were detailed and fact based. I still watch his channel to this day even though I moved out of state right after the Paradise fires. Wish all news channels were as good as Blancolirio!
i've watched every video juan put together from the very first one he made on the subject. he did an amazing job and everyone that followed him always knew exactly what has happening at oroville. he's an airline pilot that also breaks down a huge number of aviation accidents as they happen and as any new reports come out on accidents he's previously covered. very interesting stuff.
This is surely one of the most ambitious reconstruction projects ever attempted, in this country or anywhere else. The coordination of so many elements from design to pouring concrete is beyond comprehension. This is what makes America great: we are humbled by the efforts of so many to repair and restore this facility.
As the local representative of the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) it was a lot of fun to see our equipment in this video. I personally wasn’t a part of the project (I started working at UWRL in 2019), but everyone who was still talks about the Oroville Dam model with pride. Any time that tours come through, it’s brought up. In my fluids classes, it’s brought up. In pictures at UWRL buildings and on the USU engineering buildings, it’s a conversation starter. So thank you, from us at the UWRL, for your excellent video and for taking a good look at all the people involved. It’s been a lot of fun getting messages from nearby neighbors who also watch your videos calling us up and asking if that was us in your video.
Interesting that it generates less heat - I was wondering why the videos didn't show embedded cooling pipes like at the Hoover Dam that kept the concrete from splitting as it cured from internal heat buildup.
@@us89na That is interesting. The heat comes from the reaction between water and the cement, but my idea has been that the reason that less water makes for stronger concrete is that all the water is used up in the reaction whereas in normal concrete that flows easily there is water left over that weakens the concrete. Clearly there is something wrong with my theory.
@@davefoc A quick currying concrete can use less cement as well as less water with a lot of high range water reducing admixture. With less cement its not as strong, but it's only meant as a base, a roll typically filled by native soils, in this case, native rock and this Rolled Concrete (I've never heard of this before this video, but it makes sense). Normal concrete has 2% to 5% of air content depending on use; mixing it gives it a basic air content, admixtures can increase that for icy conditions. I bet this RC concrete is more like asphalt, in the 5% to 10% range.
I’ve worked on designing modifications for two spillways post Oroville and that event looms large over the industry. Luckily we have learned a lot, this time thankfully without loss of life.
This was incredible. The negligence which led to the original disaster was nigh unspeakable, but the ingenuity and dedication in the redesign and rebuild was astoundingly heartwarming. I couldn't help but think of how proud my father in law is to be a part of all the jobs he does (it's honestly adorable, he always takes pictures and has to show EVERYONE, it's like a little kid), but I think now I'm really proud of him too. This story was inspiring, I've never cried at a construction project before, but I think there's something really special about the people of the engineering and construction team that was able to pull this off. Bravo! Bravo!
Juan Brown asked intelligent questions at the press conferences as opposed to some of the nonsensical questions posed by many of the reporters that attended the press conferences. You could clearly see this as whoever was conducting the press conferences would call on Juan first, almost to the point of ignoring the other journalists. Juan and his RUclips channel becme famous for his reporting on this event.
The mere fact that a contractor finished a public project on time is an achievement that is quite remarkable all by itself. Think about it, this could have turned into a huge political / legal mess of finger-pointing stalling any reconstruction effort -- like the SF Millennium Tower which is going nowhere except sideways.
Well unlike the millennium tower, construction needs to be done before the rains come back and the spill way might need to be used. Can't milk a project that if you don't deliver on time you could end up making the dam fail and flood a town and kill a bunch of people.
The SF project has no functional consequences as to its completion, hence is qualified for graft, corruption, kickbacks, and cheating.. all of which enrichen useless commie politicians, enrichen the developers, and hurt the public it is supposed to serve.. Nothing in socialism benefits the 'people' ... it is the peon people that benefit the elite in control by being heavily taxed and controlled by heavy handed regulation.
I have watched that project from the very beginning because of one good man and his small airplane. Commercial pilot Juan Brown (Blancolirio chanel) took up his Mighty Luscombe to fly around the lake showing us what was happening. He also spoke with the construction teams and engineers during the whole project and then posted them on RUclips. You have added another level of understanding from what I learned from Juan. Well done my friend !
Hey Grady, would love to see a video on geotechicinal drilling. There's not a lot of good information out there besides what's passed down from driller to driler.. the only commonly available book I've found on the subject is "Basic Procedures of Soil Sampling & Core Drilling" by William Acker (I've actually had the opportunity to meet the man and him and his family have decades of knowledge). If you'd like me to reach out to you with any additional information from a drillers perspective just let me know. I'm a 3rd generation geotechicinal/diamond driller.
In my opinion and expirence it seems like drillers are like an unsung hero when it comes to engineering projects. Absolutely vital to a planning stage but often overlooked when the projects completed. Just to see a mention of the kind of work I do brought me joy
Jason DeJong had a decent video on his RUclips page. It’s about an hour going over the types of drilling and sampling for geotech. But Grady would make a cool video, and I love anything drilling
@@formu1fan most of the stuff I've seen on RUclips relates to environmental drilling. While it's very similar, of course it's not exactly the same. Most environment drilling doesn't include coring, mostly angering and soil sampling and installing monitoring wells. There's a couple videos from Australia and Canada on diamond drilling but that's on the other end of the spectrum per say, only concerned with coring and not with soil sampling (typically). I've been lucky to learn a lot from my family first hand and access to the few resources out there on drilling, but for the average Joe, in depth information is hard to find on the subject. And if you watch this channel you're probably like me and love to learn about anything.
Props to the people who captured all those images of the dam before, during and after repairs. Those are high quality and will inspire and inform people for decades.
I made my living as an Engineering Geologist (CEG) for over 30 years, and this presentation is EXCELLENT. My complements for clearly explaining a complex mitigation without “speaking in tongues”! PS: A CEG colleague worked at DWR when this happened, and was one of the first visitors to The Hole. He said the sheer size of it was humbling. The subsequent successful repair while ticking off days on the calendar was truly remarkable.
Thanks! - This project is both amazing and frustrating, they did some amazing work here. The engineering is impressive, the design and how quickly they got the job done. It really is incredible, yet its also frustrating because it shows what can be done. Yet too many civil engineering projects are delayed, existing structures decaying and in need of maintenance and some critical infrastructure is in a woeful state like the Hudson Rail Tunnels (possible video topic perhaps?). The success of this project shines a spotlight on all the issues surrounding all of the civil engineering and infrastructure problems.
"Shows what can be done" ... yeah, it shows what can be done when you've got a billion dollars to spend on it. It's impressive, to be sure, but I'm not sure what lessons there are for projects that don't have that kind of money lying around.
@@ps.2 exactly, the original dam construction cost was $13.7M in 1968, inflation adjusted that's $101M in 2018. The emergency repairs cost $1,100M nearly 11x and that was just for 2 spillways, not the dam itself or the power plant. Basically all it shows is what an amazing team of engineers and construction workers can do with an open checkbook.
@@andrewfidel2220 I'm too lazy to check your numbers but that doesn't quite pass the smell test. If $57 billion becomes $101 billion in 50 years, that's an inflation average of 1.15% per year. Including through the 1970s. So, I doubt that.
@@andrewfidel2220 Well, go figure, when I posted my reply, I said _billion_ twice in place of _million._ (I stand by the calculation though.) So...yeah. If the repairs cost 10× or 11× the (inflation-adjusted) original project cost, that does say something, doesn't it?
This is a time when the world - or at least the part of the world that is "me" - desperately needed a good news story. And this is even better than a simple "good news" story - it's a story of people actually fixing the problem. Thank you for posting this, and Happy Solstice!
@@JeffreyBue_imtxsmoke complainers are at most irritating, people that actively work against solving the problems (either by denying its existence or by actively prohibiting/defunding work on it) are the real problem
@@JeffreyBue_imtxsmoke In fairness, I think most problems get solved. Maybe not the really big ones like, say, homelessness, but most of them. The thing is, we never hear about those solutions - just that the problem happened. So that's why I'm grateful that this video got posted.
The story of Oroville reminds me of the near failure of Glen Canyon Dam back in 1983, it came extremely close to dam failure because the spillways started to fall apart and in the aftermath there was a rebuilding effort of the spillways alot like this one.
That’s beyond amazing. I can not even begin to imagine organizing a project like this. Coordinating all the workers operating the massive pieces of heavy equipment. Certainly an amazing feat.
I'll never forget seeing water pour down the eroded canyon next to the spillway as I installed inclinometers on the adjacent hillsides. This video was a great recap of the whole process I was able to experience onsite over the course of a few years.
That project was so massive, is actually difficult to really comprehend how big it is... Massive props to everybody involved in fixing this piece of infrastructure
Those views of workers standing on the spillway are just a breathtaking image of the scale of this project. They're absolutely dwarfed by the massive structure! It boggles my mind what kind or project management and organizational planning is required to pull something like this off. Thank you for posting this follow-up, I found it very enlightening and enjoyable to watch.
With seeing the winter runoffs after the 2022 winter...makes me very grateful for everyone who worked on the rebuilding of this, it's actually amazing and the timing is a great silver lining to the testament of good engineering.
Kudos to all involved in the project but I’ve gotta say it’s a legend of a project manager that can get a project like this across the line. On time. On budget. No incidents. Outstanding 🙂
We live 15 miles away from Oroville and watched the whole project. Juan's videos and interviews with the construction company's that were involved were front row seats of the progress. I can't say enough praise for the primary contractor of the job with the speed and safety of all involved. There wasn't a job related injury on the entire project.
11:47 I can't believe they're literally vacuuming and dusting the hillside. It's amazing to see what humans will do to ensure safety and predictability when they build things.
what a phenomenal achievement. the team of engineers and workers should be immensely proud of what they were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
It is almost impossible to imagine such coordination, efficiency and speed in my country. Amazing how the various engineering firms collaborated instead of all pulling in different directions. Awesome video.
Its mostly impossible in America too, lots of politics, conflicts of interest, and endless red tape. However, when a project has no choice but to get done, they can get done at unprecedented pace.
I watched Juan Brown's entire series on the Oroville dam as he released them. It was AMAZING information! He truly out did EVERYONE in all of the details that he dug up and especially in the way that he shared!
In these times when big civil engineering projects are seemingly always way over buget and delayed by decades: is there a lesson to be learned how this massive emergency project got managed and the "get it done!" attitude? Was it more expensive compared to a regular project? Were regulations skipped? How did they cut the red tape more quickly? Could this be used for regular non-emergency projects?
@@leakingamps2050 well, one could use multiple shifts, I think? It's just beautiful to see that this project seems to have been done efficiently and quickly, which sadly doesn't seem to be the norm at all anymore.
It's usually a case of "cheap, quick, and good, but you can only pick two" Most construction projects are cheap and good but not quick. This project was quick and good but not cheap.
Great job! We watched that rebuild blow-by-blow, and Kiewit and Juan Browne did awesome jobs. It's stunning how efficient the government and corporations can be when they absolutely need to be. That spillway was critical not only for California Central Valley but ultimately for the nation.
Juan did an awesome job in reporting and informing real information to the citizens of the area. Along with providing one of a kind coverage for those of us with a question of what happened and how are they going to keep it from happening again. His real world questions just showed how the main media had no idea how to report on this, and I think all of those involved with answering questions were relieved to get a real question from Juan. This event just shows how a single person can hopefully influence some young people to get 8nto the heavy construction and engineering industry. Great job, Juan!!
Journalism started to die during WW1, was walking dead during WW2, and finally thoroughly killed and pillaged in Vietnam. Instead of doing their best to report objective facts, the media realized it was much more profitable to make people as upset as possible, because that kept eyeballs on their channels and papers, and clicks on their websites.
This event in particular highlights just how devastating the power of water can be, specifically the hydraulic force of water. Water is used as a cutting agent in water jets because it can't be compressed, cutting through steel and rock. The spillway failures turned the dam's outputs into massive water jets.
@@jasonwood7340 It's human nature to ignore danger and just send it I guess. :D There's published facts on how much lift a foot of water can apply to a vehicle, people attempt to cross unsafe bodies of water anyway. I watched several people earlier this year during a record flood try to cross water over the highway that was about 6-7 feet deep. Fortunately for them it was not moving water.
I watched hundreds of hours of the reconstruction through the live feeds from the first day to the first real testing, as well as all of Jaun Brown's coverage, it was one hell of a project for sure. It was certainly food for thought for all the other old reservoir sites across the US, and we even had one of our dam spillways here in the UK (Whaley Bridge) let go in a much less spectacular fashion as the Oroville project closed down. Hopefully Oroville was a once in a lifetime event for it's sheer scale, but given how corners were clearly cut during it's original construction, you have to wonder how many others built around that time are really holding up.
This job was an incredible achievement of expertise, cooperation and project management. I think the choice of RCC was brilliant, it has so many advantages, but proper compaction is everything with this material. I also love that they re-used eroded materials from the site to make the RCC.
Fascinating project. The true marvel of engineering as opposed to pointless half empty pencil skyscrapers on Manhattan. This is what engineering should be about. Thank you for making this video.
I have a hard time believing that a project that large, on that timetable was only $1B. It's truly impressive that the contractor was able to pull such an impressive feat.
That should help you have a better concept of how much a billion dollars really is, and help us all understand how much our government wastes on many other projects.
@@melaniecotterell8263 you could pay 1000 people, 1000$ a day for a 1000 days... if you think about it like that the contractor probably pocketed more than 100 million
Incredibly interesting, absolutely fascinating. Every single person from engineers to workers on site are to be commended for something I can't imagine possible. Kudos to all.
This is just incredible how much work it takes for something that the average person may view as entirely unsubstantial and straightforward. Great work covering this!
I don't have any relations with the engineering field, nor live in the US, but I really enjoy watching your channel, Grady. Everything is well-explained and relatively easy to understand, even for a layman like me. Thank you for the knowledge.
I don't believe there was an actual evacuation as the roads became clogged and no one could move. It was covered extensively on the Blancolirio Channel. Your summation is good. The contractor from the state of Nebraska completed the work on schedule which I found amazing.
You're right - evacuation was a dream, not reality. Existing roads in the region can't handle emergencies of flood, or fire. My brother nearly died in the traffic jam of the mass-casualty event of the Paradise fire... If the 2nd spillway had failed - I would have potentially lost most of my extended family. Most of the population of 3 counties were told to leave at the same time. The bottlenecks are lack of river bridges, and lack of East/West highways. Easy lesson: Don't build dams, or cities in fire/flood country if you're not going to build evacuation routes also.
Yes the great flood.... I was able to get off work at about 10 finish my shift.... My parents and fam left around 8.. I was able to take back roads and get to my cuz house in about 25 min... My fam took the main roads and i didn't see them show up to my cousin house till about 2 hours later... The roads where super jamed i could see rows and rows lights bumper to bumper mean while i was on lone back roads.. i know the roads a bit better since i don't have a phone so i have to have these a all memerized so i know where I'm going... The following days where a mess since at the time i was in college they still expected us to do school stuff think i was at my cousin's house for about 5 days or so till we could go back.. wild times
This was all new to me. I really appreciate the way you explained it because I'm not an engineer and would have otherwise found the process of rebuilding the spillway difficult to understand.
Seeing how many people worked on this project, makes me kinda wish that the US had a preventative approach to infrastructure, and not only an emergency first response approach. Seems like we could put a whole bunch of people to work, literally at any moment.
@@kenbrown2808 Well duh. The tax money to fund that stuff is taking valuable cocaine out of the noses of our executive classes. Taking away that nose snow from the wealthy elite is communism.
Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. Maintaining and keeping things running smoothly doesn't impress the public because they don't even realize all that goes into it. Therefore, politicians, who only care about the next election, don't care. It doesn't have the same electoral impact to maintain infrastructure as it does cutting inaugural ribbons.
@@spencerjoplin2885 Rarely things work perfectly well until they catastrophically fail. With proper oversight, inspection and upkeep, the deficiencies would have come to light much earlier.
Juan's coverage of this event truly was excellent! I don't live in the area but I watched the videos with interest as he posted them, and have continued following him (his coverage of the 737 MAX issue from a former 737 and current 777 pilot's perspective was interesting as well).
I like you very much enjoyed Juan's coverage early on. For those who were interested and like you not in the area, his reports were the only newsto be had. Then I think he started smelling himself, at least about the dam projects.
The maddening part of this entire incident is this: prior to the failure, California experienced 5 (count them, FIVE) consecutive years of severe drought. This was more than ample time to have inspected the dam and discover flaws and initiate repairs! The damn dam owner, and not the ratepayers should bear the costs associated with this disaster!
The owner is The State of California. Logic is not allowed to be used in their decision-making processes. Personnel must include LGBTQ or you are fined. Identity outweighs all other qualifications. This disaster was preceded by another disaster that nobody knows about which led to this disaster. Story is so unbelievable that I cannot even repeat it. Turkey fryer incident. Unbelievable
@@melaniecotterell8263 even if that were true, why would being LGBT make someone a bad engineer? the problem here is there’s no incentive for decent maintence on any american infrastructure, that’s why all our bridges and everything else are in such dire condition. in other words, the problem is that the government and anyone else in charge of structures like this are lazy and negligent because it doesn’t suit their profit margins, and there’s nothing pushing them to act _before_ the structure fails. trust me, i understand the anger, just don’t direct it towards things that have nothing to do with the problem.
What a tribute to the fantastic achievements of the engineers, workers and planners that all came together to solve this gigantic headache, to demonstrate huge resolve in the face of adversity and to overcome gigantic obstacles to rebuild this flawed and demolished piece of critical public infrastructure. Congrats to all and a big "well done"!
@@GP-qi1ve I know what you mean - and your statement has nominal merit. But if you look at the unbelievable scale of the project, the sheer number of metric tons that had to be moved, the amount of raw material that had to be placed and / or poured, the short time frame and the looming, POTENTIAL next desaster if the deadlines were not met, I'd have had wobbly knees just SIGNING some of those delivery contracts. Add to that the re-engineering that had to be done concurrently, testing and approval procedures that had to be done while being forced to already order the materials just to meet the deadlines, the unproven drainig system, ... I still think this project was a 6 month road to hell, and those leaders that fearlessly took that road are to be commended, considering the wall of obstacles they were facing. I've built my fair share of "critical stuff" all across the globe and am not easily impressed, but THIS project strikes me as a whole different level of nasty. Perhaps you've had more experience than myself at this type of construction project, and have a better feel for this project than I have. And anyway, alternative views are obviously always just as valid.
@@christheswiss390 what I see is: a giant dam, which is ecologically very, very bad and the solution to a problem: put a shit ton of money and just build it bigger. There isn't a lot of smartness or skill in that, just a lot of money. Once the dam has failed, you can just abbandon it at all.
I love your channel. No BS.. but i used to consider being a civil engineer major, but life got in the way. Everytime i watch one of your videos i am again enamored by the idea of going out there and fixing something that benefits a community.
I live 10 miles from Oroville. When this was going on I was just happy the 6 year draught was over. Then it continued a year later and we are still in it. Least they had dry weather to rebuild it.
Dam buddy. You call this only a summary? That was a lot of learning in only 20 minutes! The US could use more educators/smart guys like you--very well done!
Great video! I confess I was hoping to see some video of you and Blancolirio flying over the dam. I hope your videos give people a better appreciation of civil engineering projects like this, and those projects that are “invisible” infrastructure.
It's probably for good adhesion with the rocks. Thank goodness they don't have to use those stupid sticky pads for removing dust before something goes in a paint booth, lmao
And you'd be walking away from (probably) the highest paying job you've ever had. Repairs didn't cost $1,000,000,000 because the labor was being paid minimum wage....
Very good explanation and documentation of this. The spillway is a engineering marvel built like it should have been built years ago. The amount that went into that project is insane escpailly given the contractor had less than 6 actual months to get everything done. Massive achievement.
I love showing your videos to my son. He is always wondering how he will use his math. I want him to see that he is working on the building blocks of really important work that makes our modern lives possible.
as always, super well done. We studied this a few years back at the annual FEMA Dam Safety conference in Maryland. Just amazing failure and even more amazing recovery.
My husband worked on the Oroville Dam Spillway beginning in 1966. If they could only have seen the future. He did not live to see the destruction of the spillway and I can't help be think that may be a good thing, Everyone was so proud of that dam and spillway,
We were living in Live Oak on 99 at the time of both catastrophes, the spillway and the Camp fire. We didn't evacuate because we had utilities, a home and food. That was a very sad couple of days watching bumper to bumper traffic headed south, 20ft from my recliner. And then the never ending convoys of trucks and equipment headed north. It was an experience that you don't forget.
@@Jehty_ Were you there? Do you have any clue where most of those 200k people ended living for weeks? The dam wasn't going anywhere. The emergency spillway may have given way to undercutting but we lived far enough away that had it get go, our place wouldn't have flooded. You take care of yours and I'll take care of mine. Merry Christmas.
@@tstahler5420 They were likely just confused at your sentence structure, as "utilities, home and food" have nothing to do whatsoever with the dangers of flooding or wildfire. I would bet everyone that evacuated also had utilities, a home and food. Just an odd, completely unrelated thing to bring up. You also seem a little defensive that they asked how those were related. Would have been much clearer to say "we didn't evacuate because we were far enough away to be out of harm's way." Far more straightforward.
It's incredible how many moving parts a project like this has. So impressive that they navigated it all. Really great story telling in this video to help us appreciated their great work too!
I believe that the world knows about Oroville due almost entirely to Juan's covering of the entire event. Without his tireless reporting, I think it might not have been a blip on the radar to most people. It was barely mentioned on the news here in northern Illinois. Great video, Grady!!!
This and the first half are fantastic videos - a great summary of the project! I was just at Oroville a few weeks ago - while much has been restored since the construction, the contractor (Keiwit) is still on site today, presumably still working on extended site recovery and reclamation projects.
Thanks for your crediting of "Blancolirio" in this video. I live in the SF Bay Area and he was the most reliable source of information throughout this entire ordeal ..... His complete coverage of this disaster is in a playlist on his channel ...... remember that this "reporting" is/was not his primary job - he is an airline pilot by trade and his channel covers many aviation topics as well ....... just sayin'
This is probably one of the only positives of the drought California has gone through over the past 4-5 years. Luckily the dam's spillway failed during the beginnings of the drought.. I can only imagine the devastation if the failure occurred during normal, or worse, el nino type rainy conditions, I'm sure the town of Oroville would have experienced a catastrophic flood as the dam completely failed, and/or heavier rainy seasons would have made the rebuilding process more difficult as the rains would have started sooner or significant summer showers (if el nino conditions).
Thank you for your straightforward explanations and reliance on real data. MOSTLY Thank you for not hyperbolizing and for not trying to be PC and mentioning the climate, ... 🙂
Worked in flood control years ago, and knew of a few folks involved in response/ repair of dam project. The calls/texts being sent those first few days were the “worst case scenario” stuff in EOC trainings! Yrs later I met the person who made the call to evacuate and got to shake his hand. Legendary incident and project! Keep up the great work. I work wastewater now and use your videos a lot to brush up and/or better explain engineering terms/process during facility tours! Thanks for making me look smarter lol ;) #nonengineer
I've been watching this channel on and off for years... and this one video feels like the pinnacle. This was immensely interesting and left me with a feeling of "wow I can't believe we, as humans, know what we know". The careful level of planning, execution and delivery on schedule were on point... and this channel did a great job of editing it all together and telling an informative story. I even stopped 3 minutes in to watch the first video detailing the collapse of the spillway in the first place. It was just all so interesting and I'm thankful for the hard work Practical Engineering put into covering this, subscribed.
🌊 Watch the previous video on Oroville Dam here: ruclips.net/video/jxNM4DGBRMU/видео.html
🕶 Try 5 pairs of glasses at home for free at www.warbyparker.com/practicalengineering
6:55 well thats ... unnerving because when i have someone fixing the multi billion dollar problem i know i want the guy whose over worked ,over tired and over stressed and may or may not be being divorced over "never being at home these days" because they are the people least prone to fatigue induced mistakes..... please tell me as least several non sleep deprived people checked the numbers ..please
7:58 oh god i really hoped some one double and triple checked their figures ...
10:00 rush... is not the word i want to hear in this context...
10:37 please tell me these arent the same jokers who were in charge of monitoring and maintaining the damn dam before it fell apart? due to im just going to spin the wheel and ..... deferred maintenance...
the reason it failed in the first place was because they didn't do up-keep on it
As someone living directly below the dam, near downtown Oroville, Juan Brown's coverage was phenomenal and helped me to feel better about the project even as I could hear the clanging and clattering of the machinery during the night.
Juan did an awesome job.
Juan passed more accurate and valuable information than any of the news stations, local or nationally. I know I wouldn't feel nearly as confident in the repair (basically new) spillway without his coverage. Also his 737 Max coverage help me keep my head on straight about flying on another one ever again.
Juan Brown is an aviation treasure, and a legend. And yes his coverage to this and many topics is above-par, commenting and upvoting for more traffic and eyes to his channel!
@blancolirio Juan always great reporting and always digs in and finds the correct info
Yeah. He really did explain it in point.
What a great story of engineering. It shows that despite never having the perfect solution to a problem, we can always build better, safer, and more efficiently, a structure that will outlast its predecessor
@J Hemphill Entropy is not a reason to give up working to make life better.
If this project had been procured through normal public procurement laws, it would have taken years just to get to construction. Pretty amazing what can happen when a public project is declared an emergency.
@@glennpearson9348 I'm honestly not that amazed. It's like when they rebuilt the Macarthur Maze, after it melted in that tanker explosion. Suddenly, it became practically the only project CalTrans put its resources toward, instead of the dozens of big things going on at once, which, of course, had to be put on hold, so the whole state felt it. I'm impressed more by all those experts putting their egos aside and collaborating so effectively. On the one hand, that's really encouraging, but I wish it happened more effectively on even larger scales, such as for the climate emergency.
Especially when you're dealing with controlling nature. Nature seemingly always has a way to thwart our best efforts.
@@Real28 It just goes to show that no matter how big you make the dam, no matter how impressive the emergency spillway is, Mother Nature can always come up with a bigger storm.
When talking about cleaning the bedrock of all loose dust and debris, you failed to mention that the bedrock is ultramafic rock that contains ASBESTOS! In the video look for the bluish rocks, that's the stuff. Those workers doing cleaning in the areas with the blue rocks were doing the work in hazmat suits and respirators in the summer. The surface temperatures where they were working were well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit! We owe each of those workers a debt of gratitude for doing such hard work in brutal conditions. They are real heros.
@@steveperreira5850 Yet another clueless loudmouth saying, "I ain't allergic to that assbesstoes stuff."
@@steveperreira5850 there is NO SAFE EXPOSURE LEVEL for asbestos fibres
Man cleaning dust crumbs off rock made of asbestos in boiling temperatures is going into my top 5 worst jobs on earth. Not only miserable but boring to boot.
hero implies selfless. these workers are being compensated and acting in their own financial interest. saving property or the environment downstream is not their primary motivator. wake up man welcome to the real world.
@@majermike you make it seem like having financial stability and working with an environmental motivation are mutually exclusive. it doesn't have to be.
Proud to say I worked for this contractor through the duration of this project. Kiewit’s safety culture is unmatched and is always at the forefront of any project. As the motto goes “Safety Always” 👷🏻♂️
Its good to hear about any company that takes its employees seriously. Also, thank you for all the important work you did (and do)!
On time and no injuries. Damn well run project, especially given especially given the constraints they were under. And mad props to all the workers who made this possible and kept themselves and their brothers and sisters safe!
No *reported* injuries.
@@greensteve9307 you're implying there were unreported injuries based on absolutely jack. "Reported injuries" is just the phrase. Like "the alleged robber""
Thank you for your support. I spent an entire season working on that project - nearly 80 hours /week to reach our goals. I lost 20 lbs that season. One of the biggest projects I’ve ever been a part of.. I’m a proud union worker
@@lukedog7873 Damn!! That's insane. Did a good service for the people in that area though! Solidarity brother! ✊
@@lukedog7873 that's always the best kind of work imo, the kind that leaves you utterly exhausted but which you look back at and go "I did a damn good job"
Excellent recap Grady!
This was a story that launched a whole new career for me here on RUclips.
The Oroville story continues today as we hope for enough rain/snow to recharge the desperately low reservoir, re-start the Hyatt Powerplant, re-evaluate our water priorities in CA. and approve the new Sites Reservoir.
Thanks Grady
“See ya Here!” Juan Browne
Hey Juan, I discovered your channel independent of this project but am glad to find out you were involved, you're a great educator and I love what you do. Stay safe!
Thanks for you're coverage of this event.
Top shelf!
Immediately thought of you when I saw the title of this video. :) Glad to see your contributions are recognized!
Juan, your coverage of this issue will forever be my counterpoint to anyone who claims that regular citizens shouldn't enjoy all the same rights and privileges under the 1st amendment as any credentialed journalist. Your coverage far exceeded the quality and accuracy of any news organization covering the topic. You're a shining example of the citizen-journalist and the power of new media platforms to democracize the creation and dissemination of valuable information.
Love your channel Juan, from your excellent wildfire coverage last summer, to your crash reports, and of course your Oroville and high Sierra fly-over precipitation reports! Awesome to see Grady shout you out.
An almost incomprehensible project. To think there were literally people vacuuming the massive hillside to prep it. It's like cutting grass with scissors.
Just incredible.
Yeah kiewit did the construction and knocked it out safely and very much on schedule. There civil projects are fantastic
Right? It boggles my mind the amount of different pieces of engineering and manpower involved in a project like this. There's no way any one person could understand the whole picture but this was a great summary video
I was stunned when i saw that :D
"Just Incredible"? No, Just Construction. Sometimes that's what it takes to build/rebuild a project. Next time you're stuck waiting in a road construction zone, think about those guys on their hands and knees dragging a shopvac up that hill.
You might be surprised, a "clean and clear" foundation base is always specified. We don't anticipate clean rock most of the time, however, so we're typically thinking compact native soil with a compacted fill soils in to fill in local soft spots.
The amount of quality drone footage is truly historic. Everything from the failure even is documented.
I was wondering where he got all of this amazing footage
Juan Brown is the man. I remember watching his coverage of this as it was developing. He rented a dirt bike and a cabin and rode his ass to the site daily to document the damage as it was happening. Props to him for traveling far from his home to cover something that was of public interest to people he didn't even know.
Far from his home? Juan lives in Nevada City CA, a whole 30 miles from Oroville. And he generally inspected the spillway progress from the air.
@@stargazer7644 Didn't know that. In one of the videos he mentioned having just gotten back from Texas for some story he reported, so I just assumed he traveled for this one as well. So this cabin we're looking at in the videos is his home I presume?
@@randr10 He's not a reporter, he's an international long haul airline pilot flying 777s. He flies for a living, and as a hobby. He lives in a house in a residential subdivision in the woods. He enjoys outdoor recreation and has a camper, motorcycles, airplanes and a boat. He often posts videos from hotel rooms in foreign countries because his work takes him there.
The Oroville incident is where I first heard of Juan. I got tired of the pathetic reporting from the mainstream media. Constantly repeating the same bit of information as if it was new data. Mostly talking about the drama of the evacuation. Juan’s in-depth reporting , showing graphs of water inflows/outflow and his no nonsense style got me watching his RUclips channel regularly.
you cant appreciate the sheer size of the project until you see people stood next to the damaged spill way. watching those excavators clear the river, massive project and a small window of opertunity, really impressive seeing the progress
The excavators looked like tiny toys on a driveway. There was so much volume backfilled that even the numbers are meaningless to our scale of understanding.
If you're ever feeling like your job is overwhelming, at least your boss didn't hand you a shop-vac and ask you to go vacuum 500,000 square feet of hillside (11:48). That blew my mind!
Same. I was like wait, are they really vaccuuming the rock? lol
I had to stop and watch that part several times....I couldn't belive what I was seeing.
An army of shop vacs!!!
at least the workers got actual shop vacs not some fancy crap dyson turbo noisers.
The one intern that had to go to every home improvement store in the area and buy out their entire stock of shop-vacs.
I was an engineering student at Utah State University when they created the model of the spillway. It was really cool. We got to take a tour of the facility and see them test the model. It was really impressive to see it in action and only reinforced my decision to want to be a civil engineer.
"Aggies all the way"
Yes, because they had no choice but to use reinforced concrete!
We are doing a hydraulic model same as above from sri lanka..
@@upekshaliyanarachchi5180 he just wanted to vent
See how Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP shore spillway made (it has 5 water-slow-down-reservoirs at 5 levels or five-stage drop consists of 5 disperse wells, 100 metres wide and with the length from 55 to 167 metres, divided by the dams). Water slows down from 30 metres per second to 4-5 metres per second at the exit to the river it becomes slower.
11:50 - that clip of the workers using shop-vacs to prepare the rock is absolutely hilarious but also a testament to how meticulous they were in their work. Absolutely awesome 👍
It genuinely warms my heart to see so many people come together to engineer, construct, and regulate such a massive project. These people are under appreciated heroes.
Grady: I know you receive thousands of comments and it seems unlikely you will ever be able to read them all, but I just want to thank you for the consistently skilled, insightful and engaging content we are blessed to enjoy because of your commitment to excellence. Not everyone knows how much work is involved in running a channel of this caliber; Those of us who do, do so in spades. Thank you.
Oh, and Merry Christmas!🎄🎁 🎅🏼👍🏼
I love revisit / updated videos it makes you realize civil engineering is constantly happening around you
Agree! The disaster is the start of the story, most research and engineering happens after that!
Indeed, while this sort of stuff isn't usually what I watch, I came here because I had been waiting for the end of this story, having watched the earlier videos on this.
Juan's coverage of the failure and construction was significantly better than any of the media coverage during and after the crisis. Thank you for crediting him, and of course the mighty Luscombe, as both of them kept this downstream dweller informed and up to date. Stay safe and warm, and have a Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to you too! I love Juan's coverage, and Grady's engineering viewpoint. It wrapped it all up nicely!
I religiously watched Juan Brown as I was one of the unfortunate Oroville residents that had to evacuate. I lived just below the dam at the bend of the Feather River. His updates were FAR better than any news outlet and brought peace of mind as they were detailed and fact based. I still watch his channel to this day even though I moved out of state right after the Paradise fires. Wish all news channels were as good as Blancolirio!
I came to the comments section looking for this acknowledgement of Juan's great work. Love that guy.
i've watched every video juan put together from the very first one he made on the subject. he did an amazing job and everyone that followed him always knew exactly what has happening at oroville. he's an airline pilot that also breaks down a huge number of aviation accidents as they happen and as any new reports come out on accidents he's previously covered. very interesting stuff.
Link to his channel ?
@@realf1rme ruclips.net/user/blancolirio
@@realf1rme ruclips.net/user/blancolirio
I asked him about the channel name; he said it originally was started by his wife, an amature jewler. He took it over when she lost interest...
I also found Juan's channel due to his dam videos!
I was a labor working on the rebuilding of Oroville dam best job site in my life to date
This is surely one of the most ambitious reconstruction projects ever attempted, in this country or anywhere else. The coordination of so many elements from design to pouring concrete is beyond comprehension. This is what makes America great: we are humbled by the efforts of so many to repair and restore this facility.
As the local representative of the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) it was a lot of fun to see our equipment in this video. I personally wasn’t a part of the project (I started working at UWRL in 2019), but everyone who was still talks about the Oroville Dam model with pride. Any time that tours come through, it’s brought up. In my fluids classes, it’s brought up. In pictures at UWRL buildings and on the USU engineering buildings, it’s a conversation starter. So thank you, from us at the UWRL, for your excellent video and for taking a good look at all the people involved.
It’s been a lot of fun getting messages from nearby neighbors who also watch your videos calling us up and asking if that was us in your video.
great job! never heard of rolled concrete before this massive repair project.
I hadn't either but it's very similar to how a shower pan is built except ramped up by a factor of a gazillion.
Interesting that it generates less heat - I was wondering why the videos didn't show embedded cooling pipes like at the Hoover Dam that kept the concrete from splitting as it cured from internal heat buildup.
@@us89na That is interesting. The heat comes from the reaction between water and the cement, but my idea has been that the reason that less water makes for stronger concrete is that all the water is used up in the reaction whereas in normal concrete that flows easily there is water left over that weakens the concrete. Clearly there is something wrong with my theory.
I think it was from this channel, but RCC is has been mentioned before as essentially why ancient Roman buildings still stand!
@@davefoc
A quick currying concrete can use less cement as well as less water with a lot of high range water reducing admixture. With less cement its not as strong, but it's only meant as a base, a roll typically filled by native soils, in this case, native rock and this Rolled Concrete (I've never heard of this before this video, but it makes sense). Normal concrete has 2% to 5% of air content depending on use; mixing it gives it a basic air content, admixtures can increase that for icy conditions. I bet this RC concrete is more like asphalt, in the 5% to 10% range.
I’ve worked on designing modifications for two spillways post Oroville and that event looms large over the industry. Luckily we have learned a lot, this time thankfully without loss of life.
This was incredible. The negligence which led to the original disaster was nigh unspeakable, but the ingenuity and dedication in the redesign and rebuild was astoundingly heartwarming. I couldn't help but think of how proud my father in law is to be a part of all the jobs he does (it's honestly adorable, he always takes pictures and has to show EVERYONE, it's like a little kid), but I think now I'm really proud of him too. This story was inspiring, I've never cried at a construction project before, but I think there's something really special about the people of the engineering and construction team that was able to pull this off. Bravo! Bravo!
Juan Brown asked intelligent questions at the press conferences as opposed to some of the nonsensical questions posed by many of the reporters that attended the press conferences. You could clearly see this as whoever was conducting the press conferences would call on Juan first, almost to the point of ignoring the other journalists. Juan and his RUclips channel becme famous for his reporting on this event.
The mere fact that a contractor finished a public project on time is an achievement that is quite remarkable all by itself.
Think about it, this could have turned into a huge political / legal mess of finger-pointing stalling any reconstruction effort -- like the SF Millennium Tower which is going nowhere except sideways.
That's what happens when you also put the approval board on a time crunch, and also in the same trailer.
Well, for a billion dollars…
@@edwarddiekhoff859 higher upfront costs are way better than having to pay butt loads after a disaster strikes. Do it right the first time.
Well unlike the millennium tower, construction needs to be done before the rains come back and the spill way might need to be used. Can't milk a project that if you don't deliver on time you could end up making the dam fail and flood a town and kill a bunch of people.
The SF project has no functional consequences as to its completion, hence is qualified for graft, corruption, kickbacks, and cheating.. all of which enrichen useless commie politicians, enrichen the developers, and hurt the public it is supposed to serve.. Nothing in socialism benefits the 'people' ... it is the peon people that benefit the elite in control by being heavily taxed and controlled by heavy handed regulation.
I have watched that project from the very beginning because of one good man and his small airplane. Commercial pilot Juan Brown (Blancolirio chanel) took up his Mighty Luscombe to fly around the lake showing us what was happening. He also spoke with the construction teams and engineers during the whole project and then posted them on RUclips. You have added another level of understanding from what I learned from Juan. Well done my friend !
Hey Grady, would love to see a video on geotechicinal drilling. There's not a lot of good information out there besides what's passed down from driller to driler.. the only commonly available book I've found on the subject is "Basic Procedures of Soil Sampling & Core Drilling" by William Acker (I've actually had the opportunity to meet the man and him and his family have decades of knowledge). If you'd like me to reach out to you with any additional information from a drillers perspective just let me know. I'm a 3rd generation geotechicinal/diamond driller.
In my opinion and expirence it seems like drillers are like an unsung hero when it comes to engineering projects. Absolutely vital to a planning stage but often overlooked when the projects completed. Just to see a mention of the kind of work I do brought me joy
thanks for helping drill the holes that humanity needs to thrive.
Jason DeJong had a decent video on his RUclips page. It’s about an hour going over the types of drilling and sampling for geotech. But Grady would make a cool video, and I love anything drilling
@@formu1fan most of the stuff I've seen on RUclips relates to environmental drilling. While it's very similar, of course it's not exactly the same. Most environment drilling doesn't include coring, mostly angering and soil sampling and installing monitoring wells. There's a couple videos from Australia and Canada on diamond drilling but that's on the other end of the spectrum per say, only concerned with coring and not with soil sampling (typically). I've been lucky to learn a lot from my family first hand and access to the few resources out there on drilling, but for the average Joe, in depth information is hard to find on the subject. And if you watch this channel you're probably like me and love to learn about anything.
Some may say it's a boring subject 😅
But I would be fascinated. +1 🙂
Props to the people who captured all those images of the dam before, during and after repairs. Those are high quality and will inspire and inform people for decades.
I made my living as an Engineering Geologist (CEG) for over 30 years, and this presentation is EXCELLENT. My complements for clearly explaining a complex mitigation without “speaking in tongues”!
PS: A CEG colleague worked at DWR when this happened, and was one of the first visitors to The Hole. He said the sheer size of it was humbling. The subsequent successful repair while ticking off days on the calendar was truly remarkable.
What do I say.. loving it. Your love to details. The work you put in to tell this amazing story ❤️
Good luck fighting your way through written English on your GED.
Settle down dude
Thanks! - This project is both amazing and frustrating, they did some amazing work here. The engineering is impressive, the design and how quickly they got the job done. It really is incredible, yet its also frustrating because it shows what can be done. Yet too many civil engineering projects are delayed, existing structures decaying and in need of maintenance and some critical infrastructure is in a woeful state like the Hudson Rail Tunnels (possible video topic perhaps?).
The success of this project shines a spotlight on all the issues surrounding all of the civil engineering and infrastructure problems.
"Shows what can be done" ... yeah, it shows what can be done when you've got a billion dollars to spend on it. It's impressive, to be sure, but I'm not sure what lessons there are for projects that don't have that kind of money lying around.
@@ps.2 exactly, the original dam construction cost was $13.7M in 1968, inflation adjusted that's $101M in 2018. The emergency repairs cost $1,100M nearly 11x and that was just for 2 spillways, not the dam itself or the power plant. Basically all it shows is what an amazing team of engineers and construction workers can do with an open checkbook.
@@andrewfidel2220 I'm too lazy to check your numbers but that doesn't quite pass the smell test. If $57 billion becomes $101 billion in 50 years, that's an inflation average of 1.15% per year. Including through the 1970s. So, I doubt that.
@@ps.2 sorry it was $13.7 million in 1968 to $101 million in 2018, had two different articles open and grabbed the wrong number for the 1968 figure.
@@andrewfidel2220 Well, go figure, when I posted my reply, I said _billion_ twice in place of _million._ (I stand by the calculation though.)
So...yeah. If the repairs cost 10× or 11× the (inflation-adjusted) original project cost, that does say something, doesn't it?
This is a time when the world - or at least the part of the world that is "me" - desperately needed a good news story. And this is even better than a simple "good news" story - it's a story of people actually fixing the problem. Thank you for posting this, and Happy Solstice!
Absolutely! We need more problem solvers and "do'ers" and less complainers.
@@JeffreyBue_imtxsmoke complainers are at most irritating, people that actively work against solving the problems (either by denying its existence or by actively prohibiting/defunding work on it) are the real problem
@@JeffreyBue_imtxsmoke In fairness, I think most problems get solved. Maybe not the really big ones like, say, homelessness, but most of them. The thing is, we never hear about those solutions - just that the problem happened. So that's why I'm grateful that this video got posted.
"Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza"
- Michelangelo Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
The story of Oroville reminds me of the near failure of Glen Canyon Dam back in 1983, it came extremely close to dam failure because the spillways started to fall apart and in the aftermath there was a rebuilding effort of the spillways alot like this one.
That’s beyond amazing. I can not even begin to imagine organizing a project like this. Coordinating all the workers operating the massive pieces of heavy equipment. Certainly an amazing feat.
I'll never forget seeing water pour down the eroded canyon next to the spillway as I installed inclinometers on the adjacent hillsides. This video was a great recap of the whole process I was able to experience onsite over the course of a few years.
That project was so massive, is actually difficult to really comprehend how big it is... Massive props to everybody involved in fixing this piece of infrastructure
Those views of workers standing on the spillway are just a breathtaking image of the scale of this project. They're absolutely dwarfed by the massive structure! It boggles my mind what kind or project management and organizational planning is required to pull something like this off. Thank you for posting this follow-up, I found it very enlightening and enjoyable to watch.
With seeing the winter runoffs after the 2022 winter...makes me very grateful for everyone who worked on the rebuilding of this, it's actually amazing and the timing is a great silver lining to the testament of good engineering.
Kudos to all involved in the project but I’ve gotta say it’s a legend of a project manager that can get a project like this across the line. On time. On budget. No incidents. Outstanding 🙂
We live 15 miles away from Oroville and watched the whole project. Juan's videos and interviews with the construction company's that were involved were front row seats of the progress. I can't say enough praise for the primary contractor of the job with the speed and safety of all involved. There wasn't a job related injury on the entire project.
11:47
I can't believe they're literally vacuuming and dusting the hillside. It's amazing to see what humans will do to ensure safety and predictability when they build things.
I think their vacuuming up gold.
what a phenomenal achievement. the team of engineers and workers should be immensely proud of what they were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
ive seen another documentry that says few million dollars were spent in repair. you took it from millions to billion..... hats off guys👏👏👏
being able to construct something so real, is a privilege
And huge responsibility.
It is almost impossible to imagine such coordination, efficiency and speed in my country. Amazing how the various engineering firms collaborated instead of all pulling in different directions. Awesome video.
Seen it before here
Its mostly impossible in America too, lots of politics, conflicts of interest, and endless red tape. However, when a project has no choice but to get done, they can get done at unprecedented pace.
For a billion dollars you can get people to do what you want them to do. One thousand million.
I watched Juan Brown's entire series on the Oroville dam as he released them. It was AMAZING information! He truly out did EVERYONE in all of the details that he dug up and especially in the way that he shared!
In these times when big civil engineering projects are seemingly always way over buget and delayed by decades: is there a lesson to be learned how this massive emergency project got managed and the "get it done!" attitude?
Was it more expensive compared to a regular project? Were regulations skipped? How did they cut the red tape more quickly?
Could this be used for regular non-emergency projects?
Not in the industry, but once you're running 12+ hour days, you're not using that for anything but emergencies
@@leakingamps2050 well, one could use multiple shifts, I think?
It's just beautiful to see that this project seems to have been done efficiently and quickly, which sadly doesn't seem to be the norm at all anymore.
@@leakingamps2050 Large construction projects typically run 58-hour weeks = 5x10+1x8.
It's usually a case of "cheap, quick, and good, but you can only pick two"
Most construction projects are cheap and good but not quick. This project was quick and good but not cheap.
@@micahned with another constraint being you never DONT want to choose "good". so really your choices are good+cheap or good+quick
Great job! We watched that rebuild blow-by-blow, and Kiewit and Juan Browne did awesome jobs. It's stunning how efficient the government and corporations can be when they absolutely need to be. That spillway was critical not only for California Central Valley but ultimately for the nation.
The skill to managed such a project successfully is incredible.
When America wants to come together and do things, we still have it. Even if we are spending large portions of our GDP on entertainment these days.
Juan did an awesome job in reporting and informing real information to the citizens of the area. Along with providing one of a kind coverage for those of us with a question of what happened and how are they going to keep it from happening again. His real world questions just showed how the main media had no idea how to report on this, and I think all of those involved with answering questions were relieved to get a real question from Juan. This event just shows how a single person can hopefully influence some young people to get 8nto the heavy construction and engineering industry. Great job, Juan!!
All the MM out there cares about is that damnable green spot! 🤣
@@nicotti I remeber Juans facepalms on the dam(n) green spot
Journalism started to die during WW1, was walking dead during WW2, and finally thoroughly killed and pillaged in Vietnam. Instead of doing their best to report objective facts, the media realized it was much more profitable to make people as upset as possible, because that kept eyeballs on their channels and papers, and clicks on their websites.
This event in particular highlights just how devastating the power of water can be, specifically the hydraulic force of water. Water is used as a cutting agent in water jets because it can't be compressed, cutting through steel and rock.
The spillway failures turned the dam's outputs into massive water jets.
Too bad a lot of people don't understand the power of water. Maybe they'd stop trying to cross fast flowing flooded roads ;)
@@jasonwood7340 It's human nature to ignore danger and just send it I guess. :D
There's published facts on how much lift a foot of water can apply to a vehicle, people attempt to cross unsafe bodies of water anyway. I watched several people earlier this year during a record flood try to cross water over the highway that was about 6-7 feet deep. Fortunately for them it was not moving water.
I watched hundreds of hours of the reconstruction through the live feeds from the first day to the first real testing, as well as all of Jaun Brown's coverage, it was one hell of a project for sure. It was certainly food for thought for all the other old reservoir sites across the US, and we even had one of our dam spillways here in the UK (Whaley Bridge) let go in a much less spectacular fashion as the Oroville project closed down. Hopefully Oroville was a once in a lifetime event for it's sheer scale, but given how corners were clearly cut during it's original construction, you have to wonder how many others built around that time are really holding up.
Thank you. 💙
It IS good to know that we CAN construct "safe for individuals" projects.
This job was an incredible achievement of expertise, cooperation and project management. I think the choice of RCC was brilliant, it has so many advantages, but proper compaction is everything with this material. I also love that they re-used eroded materials from the site to make the RCC.
Fascinating project. The true marvel of engineering as opposed to pointless half empty pencil skyscrapers on Manhattan. This is what engineering should be about. Thank you for making this video.
I have a hard time believing that a project that large, on that timetable was only $1B. It's truly impressive that the contractor was able to pull such an impressive feat.
Not enough time for politicians to embezzle funds out of the project without looking very sus, just my opinion. but 1b is still a hefty amount tho.
That should help you have a better concept of how much a billion dollars really is, and help us all understand how much our government wastes on many other projects.
A billion is a thousand million. The original cost for the ENTIRE project was half that much.
what's more crazy is that this damn is owned by a company yet their negligence was subsidized by the taxpayers... what a fucking scam
@@melaniecotterell8263 you could pay 1000 people, 1000$ a day for a 1000 days... if you think about it like that the contractor probably pocketed more than 100 million
Engineering may be nerdy, but this video shows how freaking cool it is.
Incredibly interesting, absolutely fascinating. Every single person from engineers to workers on site are to be commended for something I can't imagine possible. Kudos to all.
This is just incredible how much work it takes for something that the average person may view as entirely unsubstantial and straightforward. Great work covering this!
I don't have any relations with the engineering field, nor live in the US, but I really enjoy watching your channel, Grady. Everything is well-explained and relatively easy to understand, even for a layman like me.
Thank you for the knowledge.
I don't believe there was an actual evacuation as the roads became clogged and no one could move. It was covered extensively on the Blancolirio Channel. Your summation is good. The contractor from the state of Nebraska completed the work on schedule which I found amazing.
Yeah kiewit did an awsome job on it
it was, until the roads got clogged, lots of people went to homes above the dam
Not true my father worked in the damn and my brother and sister lived in Oroville at the time of evacuation. They definitely were required to evacuate
You're right - evacuation was a dream, not reality. Existing roads in the region can't handle emergencies of flood, or fire. My brother nearly died in the traffic jam of the mass-casualty event of the Paradise fire...
If the 2nd spillway had failed - I would have potentially lost most of my extended family.
Most of the population of 3 counties were told to leave at the same time. The bottlenecks are lack of river bridges, and lack of East/West highways.
Easy lesson:
Don't build dams, or cities in fire/flood country if you're not going to build evacuation routes also.
Yes the great flood....
I was able to get off work at about 10 finish my shift....
My parents and fam left around 8..
I was able to take back roads and get to my cuz house in about 25 min...
My fam took the main roads and i didn't see them show up to my cousin house till about 2 hours later... The roads where super jamed i could see rows and rows lights bumper to bumper mean while i was on lone back roads.. i know the roads a bit better since i don't have a phone so i have to have these a all memerized so i know where I'm going... The following days where a mess since at the time i was in college they still expected us to do school stuff think i was at my cousin's house for about 5 days or so till we could go back.. wild times
Truly impressive what people can accomplish when everyone's working together for a common goal
Thank God spin cannot exist in the world of engineering. This is why some of the best and most honest men in the world are engineers!
This was all new to me. I really appreciate the way you explained it because I'm not an engineer and would have otherwise found the process of rebuilding the spillway difficult to understand.
Seeing how many people worked on this project, makes me kinda wish that the US had a preventative approach to infrastructure, and not only an emergency first response approach. Seems like we could put a whole bunch of people to work, literally at any moment.
it gets tried now and then. politics frequently gets in the way.
@@kenbrown2808 Well duh. The tax money to fund that stuff is taking valuable cocaine out of the noses of our executive classes. Taking away that nose snow from the wealthy elite is communism.
The spillway worked fine for decades, until one winter when the construction deficiencies made themselves known.
Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. Maintaining and keeping things running smoothly doesn't impress the public because they don't even realize all that goes into it. Therefore, politicians, who only care about the next election, don't care. It doesn't have the same electoral impact to maintain infrastructure as it does cutting inaugural ribbons.
@@spencerjoplin2885 Rarely things work perfectly well until they catastrophically fail. With proper oversight, inspection and upkeep, the deficiencies would have come to light much earlier.
Juan's coverage of this event truly was excellent! I don't live in the area but I watched the videos with interest as he posted them, and have continued following him (his coverage of the 737 MAX issue from a former 737 and current 777 pilot's perspective was interesting as well).
I like you very much enjoyed Juan's coverage early on. For those who were interested and like you not in the area, his reports were the only newsto be had. Then I think he started smelling himself, at least about the dam projects.
The maddening part of this entire incident is this: prior to the failure, California experienced 5 (count them, FIVE) consecutive years of severe drought. This was more than ample time to have inspected the dam and discover flaws and initiate repairs! The damn dam owner, and not the ratepayers should bear the costs associated with this disaster!
The owner is The State of California. Logic is not allowed to be used in their decision-making processes. Personnel must include LGBTQ or you are fined. Identity outweighs all other qualifications. This disaster was preceded by another disaster that nobody knows about which led to this disaster. Story is so unbelievable that I cannot even repeat it. Turkey fryer incident. Unbelievable
The dam owner is the State of California, and, thus, California taxpayers.
DzyMsLizzy
"California experienced 5 (count them, FIVE)"
One, two, three, four, five.
Yay, I can count to five!
Mr Owl
The spillway would be a really fun ride up till you die at the end part of it.
@@melaniecotterell8263 even if that were true, why would being LGBT make someone a bad engineer? the problem here is there’s no incentive for decent maintence on any american infrastructure, that’s why all our bridges and everything else are in such dire condition.
in other words, the problem is that the government and anyone else in charge of structures like this are lazy and negligent because it doesn’t suit their profit margins, and there’s nothing pushing them to act _before_ the structure fails.
trust me, i understand the anger, just don’t direct it towards things that have nothing to do with the problem.
What a tribute to the fantastic achievements of the engineers, workers and planners that all came together to solve this gigantic headache, to demonstrate huge resolve in the face of adversity and to overcome gigantic obstacles to rebuild this flawed and demolished piece of critical public infrastructure. Congrats to all and a big "well done"!
fantastic achievements? I had the impression that the whole point of the engineering was "more concrete, more steel!"
@@GP-qi1ve I know what you mean - and your statement has nominal merit. But if you look at the unbelievable scale of the project, the sheer number of metric tons that had to be moved, the amount of raw material that had to be placed and / or poured, the short time frame and the looming, POTENTIAL next desaster if the deadlines were not met, I'd have had wobbly knees just SIGNING some of those delivery contracts. Add to that the re-engineering that had to be done concurrently, testing and approval procedures that had to be done while being forced to already order the materials just to meet the deadlines, the unproven drainig system, ...
I still think this project was a 6 month road to hell, and those leaders that fearlessly took that road are to be commended, considering the wall of obstacles they were facing. I've built my fair share of "critical stuff" all across the globe and am not easily impressed, but THIS project strikes me as a whole different level of nasty.
Perhaps you've had more experience than myself at this type of construction project, and have a better feel for this project than I have. And anyway, alternative views are obviously always just as valid.
@@christheswiss390 what I see is: a giant dam, which is ecologically very, very bad and the solution to a problem: put a shit ton of money and just build it bigger. There isn't a lot of smartness or skill in that, just a lot of money. Once the dam has failed, you can just abbandon it at all.
I love your channel. No BS.. but i used to consider being a civil engineer major, but life got in the way. Everytime i watch one of your videos i am again enamored by the idea of going out there and fixing something that benefits a community.
It never ceases to amaze me what humans can achieve when we put our minds and effort to it. Thanks for the video.
😮- my face at 11:57, at that sight of those poor buggers vacuuming and washing every g-d rock that was left from the original spillway foundation
they got paid good money right?
right?
*Right?*
@@PrograErrorProbably more than you realize
I live 10 miles from Oroville. When this was going on I was just happy the 6 year draught was over. Then it continued a year later and we are still in it. Least they had dry weather to rebuild it.
Dam buddy. You call this only a summary? That was a lot of learning in only 20 minutes! The US could use more educators/smart guys like you--very well done!
An incredible feat of engineering and proof that massive impact full work can still be accomplished quickly with good leadership
Great video! I confess I was hoping to see some video of you and Blancolirio flying over the dam. I hope your videos give people a better appreciation of civil engineering projects like this, and those projects that are “invisible” infrastructure.
Someday!
@@PracticalEngineeringChannel Well, you're getting close to 2.5 million subs... Maybe then?
Is it still on incompetent rock?
No discussion about earthquake effects, or did I miss it?
If the foreman handed me a shopvac to dust off a giant field of rocks, i would propably just walk off in disbelief
Those guys were thinking it was a time and materials job. We can stretch these hours if we use shopvacs.
Heck no, I would have been taking that dirt home and running it through my sluice box!
I've seen construction workers use pressure washers to clean rocks for concrete pouring
It's probably for good adhesion with the rocks. Thank goodness they don't have to use those stupid sticky pads for removing dust before something goes in a paint booth, lmao
And you'd be walking away from (probably) the highest paying job you've ever had.
Repairs didn't cost $1,000,000,000 because the labor was being paid minimum wage....
Very good explanation and documentation of this. The spillway is a engineering marvel built like it should have been built years ago. The amount that went into that project is insane escpailly given the contractor had less than 6 actual months to get everything done. Massive achievement.
I love showing your videos to my son. He is always wondering how he will use his math. I want him to see that he is working on the building blocks of really important work that makes our modern lives possible.
I remember being with the first group to start the rebuild and the last to leave. This project was amazing!!!
Great to see Juan Brown got a mention, it was his channel that kept me hooked on the story since it broke (pun intended)
as always, super well done. We studied this a few years back at the annual FEMA Dam Safety conference in Maryland. Just amazing failure and even more amazing recovery.
My husband worked on the Oroville Dam Spillway beginning in 1966. If they could only have seen the future. He did not live to see the destruction of the spillway and I can't help be think that may be a good thing, Everyone was so proud of that dam and spillway,
Thank you for giving a shout out to Juan!
We were living in Live Oak on 99 at the time of both catastrophes, the spillway and the Camp fire. We didn't evacuate because we had utilities, a home and food. That was a very sad couple of days watching bumper to bumper traffic headed south, 20ft from my recliner. And then the never ending convoys of trucks and equipment headed north. It was an experience that you don't forget.
How does utilities, food and a home help you against wildfire and catastrophic flooding???
@@Jehty_ Were you there? Do you have any clue where most of those 200k people ended living for weeks? The dam wasn't going anywhere. The emergency spillway may have given way to undercutting but we lived far enough away that had it get go, our place wouldn't have flooded. You take care of yours and I'll take care of mine. Merry Christmas.
@@tstahler5420 They were likely just confused at your sentence structure, as "utilities, home and food" have nothing to do whatsoever with the dangers of flooding or wildfire. I would bet everyone that evacuated also had utilities, a home and food. Just an odd, completely unrelated thing to bring up. You also seem a little defensive that they asked how those were related. Would have been much clearer to say "we didn't evacuate because we were far enough away to be out of harm's way." Far more straightforward.
It's incredible how many moving parts a project like this has. So impressive that they navigated it all. Really great story telling in this video to help us appreciated their great work too!
I believe that the world knows about Oroville due almost entirely to Juan's covering of the entire event. Without his tireless reporting, I think it might not have been a blip on the radar to most people. It was barely mentioned on the news here in northern Illinois.
Great video, Grady!!!
This man teaches me more than school
Engineering and construction is so cool! It’s amazing how fast this was done too!
This and the first half are fantastic videos - a great summary of the project! I was just at Oroville a few weeks ago - while much has been restored since the construction, the contractor (Keiwit) is still on site today, presumably still working on extended site recovery and reclamation projects.
Thanks for your crediting of "Blancolirio" in this video. I live in the SF Bay Area and he was the most reliable source of information throughout this entire ordeal ..... His complete coverage of this disaster is in a playlist on his channel ...... remember that this "reporting" is/was not his primary job - he is an airline pilot by trade and his channel covers many aviation topics as well ....... just sayin'
This is probably one of the only positives of the drought California has gone through over the past 4-5 years. Luckily the dam's spillway failed during the beginnings of the drought.. I can only imagine the devastation if the failure occurred during normal, or worse, el nino type rainy conditions, I'm sure the town of Oroville would have experienced a catastrophic flood as the dam completely failed, and/or heavier rainy seasons would have made the rebuilding process more difficult as the rains would have started sooner or significant summer showers (if el nino conditions).
Thank you for your straightforward explanations and reliance on real data.
MOSTLY Thank you for not hyperbolizing and for not trying to be PC and mentioning the climate, ... 🙂
Engineering technology wasn't advanced in 1968 as it is today. Awesome footage.
Glad I found your channel.
Cheers from Idaho
I followed this reconstruction in detail through Juan's reports, it was amazing! And now, a great summary by you, Grady!
Worked in flood control years ago, and knew of a few folks involved in response/ repair of dam project. The calls/texts being sent those first few days were the “worst case scenario” stuff in EOC trainings! Yrs later I met the person who made the call to evacuate and got to shake his hand. Legendary incident and project! Keep up the great work. I work wastewater now and use your videos a lot to brush up and/or better explain engineering terms/process during facility tours! Thanks for making me look smarter lol ;) #nonengineer
I've been watching this channel on and off for years... and this one video feels like the pinnacle. This was immensely interesting and left me with a feeling of "wow I can't believe we, as humans, know what we know". The careful level of planning, execution and delivery on schedule were on point... and this channel did a great job of editing it all together and telling an informative story.
I even stopped 3 minutes in to watch the first video detailing the collapse of the spillway in the first place. It was just all so interesting and I'm thankful for the hard work Practical Engineering put into covering this, subscribed.
I followed this in real time with Juan Brown. I really enjoyed his reporting.
Juan Brown was my go to fella