Thursday, June 23, 2011

Hold yer water

Some video of the flooding. The corps of engineers may have screwed up, and mother nature sent the rains, and as a result we are releasing record amounts of water for the next couple of months. Everyone from Montana on down. We've flooded a couple nuke plants.

Oahe dam is about 9 inches from having water running over the emergency spillway, which would be all kinds of bad. They have the floodgates open instead. 6 tubes, 18 feet in diameter, nearly 160,000 cubic feet of water per second. 1.15 million gallons per second. In a day, enough water to cover 480 square miles a foot deep. The water would be exiting the tubes at about 100 feet per second, by my calculations. [Edit, actually 72 feet per second, as some of the water is going through the powerhouse.] At this rate, it would drain the entire lake, all 23,500,000 acre feet in 76 days, except the water is coming in upstream just as fast.

There is a lot of video on youtube. I would like to make the trip to see this myself.

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