Concrete Chemistry

Sawing a Dam in Half (on Purpose)
Practical Engineering

The chemistry of concrete is one of those things they gloss over when talking about building things out of concrete. I always found that those glossy explanations annoying. Nice of Grady to shed a little light on the subject.

The Wild Story of the Taum Sauk Dam Failure

The Wild Story of the Taum Sauk Dam Failure
Practical Engineering

Taum Sauk? Where the heck is that? Somewhere in southeast Asia? No, it's in Missouri of all places, named for a Piankeshaw chief.

Curious place. I mean, you never see a lake on top of a mountain. The dam was originally built in 1960-62. It failed in 2005, rebuilt and reopened in 2010.

The Infrastructure War

Map of western portion of Nord Stream Pipeline

A week or so ago, somebody blew up the undersea pipeline that used to supply Germany with natural gas from Russia until Russia turned off the taps. So the pipeline wasn't actually piping anything at the time. Germany apparently thinks thinking positive thoughts are going to keep them warm this winter. Meanwhile, Germans are busy cutting down all the trees, digging up all the coal and burning all their trash to keep warm. And it's only October.

Satellite Image of Crimea Bridge

A couple of days some troglodyte set off a bomb on the Crimea Bridge causing some damage and some disruption to traffic. Also killed three people who were unlucky enough to be passing the truck when it blew up. No mention of the truck driver.

Ukraine War Hot Spots

Top to bottom: Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Plant, Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, Mariupol, Crimea Bridge, Sevastopol Naval Base

Yesterday, Russia attacked Zaporizhzhia with a bunch of missiles. Ukraine, naturally, complained that the missiles landed in a residential part of town and killed a dozen people. Thought that was a little odd. Why are they attacking this town which doesn't seem to be involved in the latest fighting? So I look and here's what I find.

Dnipro Hydroelectric Station

A giant freaking dam and power plant. The dam was built in the 1920's. Look what happened to it when the Nazi's tried to cross the Dniper river in 1942.

The dam at Zaporizhzhya after being blown up by Stalin's secret police in 1941. 

The Russian's blew it up. I suspect the Russian's were trying to repeat this event with their missiles. It might impact the water supply to Crimea which would be bad for Russia. Or maybe they were really trying to blow up apartment buildings and weren't trying to hit the dam.

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Ethiopia has built a giant freaking dam on the Blue Nile River just a few miles from their northern border where the Blue Nile River crosses into Sudan. Al Jazeera has a story.

With a planned installed capacity of 5.15 gigawatts, the dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa when completed, as well as among the 20 largest in the world. - Wikipedia

They started building it in 2011 and it started generating electricity this year.

I was thinking about putting up a post about this, just because I had never heard of this project before. Seems like I should have heard something about a big deal like this, but no. A couple of days ago I started reading Maelstrom by Peter Watts and somewhere in the first few dozen pages he mentions this dam. Well, I can't ignore a coincidence like this, so this post. I've read a couple other books by Peter Watts and he's pretty great.

Looking for information, I dug up some maps.

River Nile Map

Note that the Blue Nile branches off of the main river at Khartoum. It heads southeast toward Ethiopia and just after it crosses the border is where the dam is.

Google Maps doesn't do a good job of portraying waterways. Can't say as I blame them, only a small fraction of the population gets out on the water, and the government has a whole army of people devoted to mapping water. So if you want to look at maps of rivers, search for images of maps using your regular browser.

Still, Google Maps is terrific. Here we have two views of the area being inundated by the water being held back by the dam. Both maps are about 14 miles across. First is the map view:

Map View of Blue Nile Dam area

No sign of any lake. The black line along the left hand side is the border with Sudan. Now look at the satellite view:

Satellite View of Blue Nile Dam area

Not a lot of contrast between the land and the water, but if you look carefully you might be able to pick out the shore line and see that the lake is extensive.

Update two days later.

Main Dam and Saddle Dam of GERD (Source: Hydro World, 2016)

Looking at the satellite view of the lake I noticed a large, curved line in the lower left quadrant. A little digging reveals this is a three mile long saddle dam. The water hasn't reached it yet, but it means the lake is going to get a whole lot bigger in the coming years. The saddle dam is 160 feet tall. Not giant, but still substantial.

Lake Oroville Drought

Lake Oroville Drought
1st photo - 2018
2nd - april 27, 2021
3rd -last week

Lake Oroville is the one that had problems with the spillway not too long ago. Looks like the California drought is pretty serious.

Via Posthip Scott

On the Rocks

The incredible ibex defies gravity and climbs a dam | Forces of Nature with Brian Cox - BBC
BBC

I had seen pictures of these guys before, but I thought they just like climbing on rocks and maybe nibbling on a little lichen or something. Looking for salt makes more sense.

The dam is the Cingino Dam in the Italian Alps.

This giant frigging dam is the little gray smudge along the bottom edge of the lake.

Via California Bob

Pic of the Day

Spillway gates for the Akkat power station dam in Sweden

Playing Geoguesser this morning and this bizarre artwork showed up. From some road signs I deduced it was in Sweden, but I still ended up 300 kilometers from the dam. A little Googling got me to a Wikipedia page that names the artists responsible.

When I first saw this I thought it might have been native American Indians from the Northwest USA, then I thought maybe from the Southwest, but these paintings look like they were deliberately crudely painted, something you don't see in any public display of American Indian art.

I don't quite understand this tendency towards ugly. I ran into some exceptionally ugly paintings in a brew pub in downtown Portland last week. If that is the best you can do, well, okay, I guess, but why would anyone put it on public display? I suspect limousine Bolsheviks, people who are well ensconced by a thick wad of money, but have no appreciation for any real beauty or talent. It reminds me of Inland Empire, a horrible, pointless idiotic film by David Lynch. I've seen several other of his films and I thought they were pretty great.

Maybe this is the low end of class warfare. Some people are exceptionally talented, and they are celebrated and praised. Then we have our average folks who go about their jobs, raise their families and drink their beer. Then we have people who got short changed in the valuable skill department, but are still doing their bit without much in the way of recognition, so they do things like this.

Oroville Dam, Part 2

Lake Oroville Spillway March 2, 2017
Little bit of damage to the half-mile long spillway here. You can see the undamaged spillway on Google Maps now. Part 1 here. Via Post-hip Scott.

Oroville Dam

California Pumped Power and Harvey's Bomb
Oroville Dam is at the upper left, Helm's Creek Pumped Power Plant is at the lower right.

There is trouble at the Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in North America. A claim like 'the tallest' cannot go unchallenged, so I check, and yes it is the tallest. Not the biggest, or widest or most expensive, but the tallest, and it's made out of dirt. There is also an underground pumped power station there. Hey, wait a minute, didn't an underground power station figure in the story about the bomb at Harvey's Casino at Lake Tahoe? Yes, it did, but it's a different one, the Helms Pumped Power Station, 200 miles to the Southeast.

As you can see from the map the Oroville site is much closer than the Helms Creek site, so why did John Birges go to Helms Creek to steal his dynamite instead of Oroville? Probably because construction had finished at Oroville ten years earlier but was ongoing at Helms Creek. It would have been more likely to find dynamite at an ongoing construction site.