Flash flood warnings? In Torrance, CA? You betcha!
I’ve lived in LA nearly 17 years, and have never seen one of these until today. Crazy. Hope it’s all helping with the drought though.
Looks like three of the storm cells NW of me are worse than the last hurricane we had. Another one on the way through Orange County later tonight. That’s me. Looks nasty. Gonna be a long night. Slight positive? Fast moving.
PDS tornado watch just north of me. Particularly Dangerous Situation. Extremely rare for Florida. More of a mid-west thing. Wonderful.
Edit: First PDS in Florida in 20 years according to weather guy.
Tornado warning here now. Nice to know you folks.
I was playing a game an hour ago and some guy said “Shit! Everything in my yard is blowing away!” and then disconnected. I’m going to assume he was from Florida.
Hahaha yeah probably. I had the kids do a yard check earlier because it’s really pretty bad out there.
Rich, you don’t really have to worry about the tornadoes here unless you’re on a boat. Even if there’s a watch or warning about them. Just stay indoors. The ones we get here aren’t bad.
Looks like a dam might fail in CA.
The situation is a bit nuts. They started using the main spillway for the first time in a number of years, then it developed quite a hole. After looking at it, they turned the spillway back on and–SHOCKER–the hole got a lot bigger. It’s easy to see why, you have thousands of gallons of water dumping into the hole and back out of it. So yeah, it’s going to gouge out even more and more as it goes.
But officials decided to use the emergency spillway instead, which is basically a dirt berm off to the side of the main spillway that hadn’t been used. Ever. So what happens when you run a lot of water onto land that hadn’t experienced flows like that? It eroded. A lot. Again, common sense, right?? Engineers thought they saw a massive hole near the top of the emergency spillway and concluded that it could potentially cause a massive breach in the spillway (not in the dam itself, but it still sucks).
So now they’re switching back to the main spillway and hole–which now has spanned across the entire spillway–be damned (ooooooh the pun). And engineers admitted the hole isn’t as big as they thought and think literally dropping rocks on it should be okay. Meanwhile, after residents complained they weren’t getting any information right around the time the decision to use the emergency spillway was made, they got too much information and clogged the highways thinking they were all going to die in an hour.
— Alan
Both spillways in action:
Watched the engineers go over what the auxiliary spillway looks like now (this screengrab is actually a lot tamer than some other shots I saw, which were incredible):
And this was the main spillway after the hole widened considerably. That’s 300 feet from the left side to the right side of the spillway.
Sacramento Bee’s coverage is pretty phenomenal.
Oh and northern California is due for more storms starting Wednesday. My thinking is that they’ll continue to use the main spillway and suffer the consequences–they’ll need to sustain as much damage as they can until the end of the rainy season when they can start making serious repairs. So for the next 2+ months or so it’s going to be a delicate balancing act.
— Alan
Guess what? A certain Republican President and Republican CA Governor (their agencies) were specifically warned that action needed to be taken to avoid this from happening. Did they listen? Of course not. Unless it’s to build a wall in the south Repubs don’t care about infrastructure. (edit - or a build a sports stadium at taxpayer expense while cutting education budgets)
What’s interesting is that it basically went down exactly as the warning described.
But no one’s gonna care or change anything as a result.
I’ll be honest… while I don’t want to see loss of life or property damage, I’d love to see what would happen if that dam burst and that entire lake rushed down the valley. So, in a mythical world where we could let that happen and then rewind and prevent it… yeah, I’d be totally stoked to watch it happen.
I’d like to point out that the water governing bodies that were entrusted with this are the same ones that refused to order water mitigation due to the drought because of the interests of real estate tycoons and the agri-business lobby. It’s also why there’s no “pay more the more you use” type of pricing for the scant water resources. It’s this group + lobbies Governor Brown had to fight tooth and nail to get water saving measures in place.
If you look at the the awful comments in both the tweeted message and the link above (it’s a cesspool) it is filled with Xenophobic and racist comments, wanting to get rid of the EPA, and continual propaganda from the Trump machine blaming it on anyone that’s not a Republican. It’s sick.
Some 57 minutes after the South Fork Dam collapsed, the flood hit Johnstown. The residents were caught by surprise as the wall of water and debris bore down, traveling at 40 miles per hour (64 km/h) and reaching a height of 60 feet (18 m) in places.
Not meant in a negative way. I feel for the people that had five minutes to leave their homes when they got the emergency message. But still.
— Alan
If there was ever a blaring horn signifying that we need to get off our asses and fix these infrastructure issues, it’s this.
On my Facebook feed, my lovely back-woods Missouri relatives are making post after post saying, essentially, “serves you libtards in California right!”. They also keep reposting articles saying that since California has been anti-Trump that the Federal government should provide any money or assistance.
Spring came early this year. 76 on Tuesday, 72 on Wednesday… oh, wait, it’s 9:25 on Thursday and it’s 30 degrees with “thunder snow”, dropping an expected 5 - 8 inches of snow in the area.
These whiplash weather changes are one of the many joys of living in the Midwest.
We got the same in Pennsylvania. It’s not normal as far as I recall. But we are having the same kind of crazy swings, sometimes within a single day, where I go to work and it’s 35, leave work when it’s 70.