MORE STRANGENESS IN CALIFORNIA: THE OROVILLE DAM
Every now and then an article is emailed to me that is so off-the-beaten-track that I simply have to talk about it. Regular readers here will know why: I simply cannot resist an opportunity for high octane speculation. This is one such story, for Mr. V.Z. sent me story that I wasn't even aware of: not even the so-called alternative me has covered this one, except in one lowly article that is ostensibly about Trump appointing a "judge" to stop those "destroying America," but the bulk of which is curiously about a dam in northern California.
Yes, you read that correctly: a dam in northern California. Before we get to that article however, I want to stress that today's high octane speculation is probably better qualified as overboard groundless suspicion, since I haven't been able to find any confirmation of today's main article's speculations, except for some interesting "suggestive" comments from an article appearing in the Sacramento Bee. Nonetheless, the Bee's coverage of the story raises certain questions, which makes it important to at least communicate and entertain today's overboard groundless suspicion.
Here's how the Sacramento Bee first reported this story on February 7:
Engineers begin inspections at damaged Oroville Dam
Ok... so it's just a story about a big earthen dam with a big erosion problem in its major spillway.
But then, the next day the Bee is reporting this:
Oroville Dam officials find new damage after water releases, as reservoir level climbs
Now before we move on to the article that Mr. V.Z. shared, there are a number of things about this last article I want to draw to your attention; note these statements:
OROVILLE State engineers have found new damage to the Oroville Dam spillway, although not as much as they’d feared, after conducting two test releases to see how much water the scarred facility could handle, the state said Thursday. Meanwhile, reservoir levels continued to climb behind the critical flood-control structure.
The gash that was discovered Tuesday grew by another 50 feet after engineers released water for a combined six hours Wednesday and early Thursday, according to Department of Water Resources spokesman Doug Carlson. “They found additional damage to the spillway, which was predicted,” Carlson said. “It wasn’t as bad as they thought it might be.”
OK, fine: they tested a release in the spillway after discovering it was damaged to see how it would function. But later in the article, we read this:
Croyle, DWR’s acting director, said it was not yet clear what caused the crater to form. Three recent inspection reports for the dam – one from 2014 and two from 2015 – noted no visible signs of deficiencies along the chute.
Gary Leese and his girlfriend, Beth Bello, were among the first people this week to see that something was seriously wrong. On Tuesday morning, they hiked down the hillside adjacent to the spillway, something they’d done many times over the years. Leese said he knew something was amiss when they came upon a giant, angry splash of water instead of the normal gentle waterfall that runs down the sloping structure.
“I knew there was something up just because of the load roar it was making,” Leese said. “That’s when we walked a little closer and saw the plume of water coming up in the air, and we kept seeing the fragments of concrete shooting up in the air.”
The couple soon was asked to leave by state employees. (Emphasis added)
Now, this is where it begins - to my mind - to get more than a little suspicious. There was no evidence that the spillway was damaged to the extent that would cause the massive erosion beneath it. Moreover, while I'm obviously not familiar with "routine dam operations," I find it difficult to believe that no regular inspections are performed prior to major releases of water. Big holes in the middle of a spillway are probably going to be rather obvious to whomever is running the dam at the moment and pushing buttons and turning wheels to release major amounts of water. In this case, the damaged spillway was causing a plume of water to shoot up, containing chucks of concrete that were being ripped from the spillway by rushing water. The couple who discovered the damage are then asked to leave. But there are a number of unasked and unanswered questions here: did the couple call the dam authorities to alert them of the damage? Or did they discover it themselves? And if so, when?
With these questions in mind, we at last come to Mr. V.Z.'s submission:
Now, as the link above indicates, there's very little here about Mr. Trump, judges, and saving America, and a great deal about the Oroville Dam damage. Obviously, in reading the last article, the author or authoress, "Tapestry", has a "point of view" about California, subversives, Communists, and so on, and believes that the state government is intentionally trying to destroy California's once prosperous agriculture. On a personal note, I can honestly say that on a recent trip through California's San Joaquin valley with friends, including friend and colleague Walter Bosley, I was utterly dumbfounded and shocked at what I saw: the southern valley was a wasteland... the once lush and rich farms and orchards had almost been completely denuded. It was as if western Iowa had been turned into a vast desert wasteland. So I do suspect there is truth to "Tapestry's" allegations. Where I would part company is about the "Communists" bit, for it would be more likely that wealthy and powerful people and corporations are attempting to bankrupt the state's agriculture to pick up prime farmland for pennies on the dollar.
That said, now consider the major argument in the article:
The engineers are totally confused at what happened, and are saying they can’t explain it because “it was not supposed to do that”. That is engineering lingo for “there is something seriously unexplained here”. Yeah, like 2,000 pounds of high explosives.They probably will not be able to make the mental leap to that conclusion however, because, you know, the brain wash.
...
I strongly suspect it was destroyed by a bomb by communists and subversives in California’s government. I find it extremely odd that this enormous water resource has been crippled right when it could save California agriculture after an extended and proven fabricated drought, which absent the draining of the dams on purpose would have meant nothing. It is proven that the dams were drained in the name of giving tons of water to a fictitious fish called the “delta smelt”, which was an invasive species dropped in the Sacramento River delta by settlers 100 years ago. It does not belong there anyway, so saying it is endangered is pure fiction, and nothing but an excuse to destroy California. A textbook communist tactic.
Due to the well proven fact that California has been over-run by subversives who fully intend to destroy America, I believe it is perfectly rational to state a high but unprovable probability that the destruction of the spillway at the Oroville dam was done with explosives. “Made In America” does not fail at 28 percent capacity, “made in America” fails at 300 percent capacity, when this dam was built America usually overbuilt everything by that much. It is irrational to the fringe of lunacy to think that there would be any reason at all, other than intentional sabotage and destruction for this to have happened. (Emphasis in the original)
Now we reach the high octane speculation, or the overboard groundless suspicion of the day, because when I saw this article, notwithstanding its obvious tendencies, I began to entertain the same suspicion, though for very different reasons. I too entertain suspicions of a bomb, though certainly not 2000 pounds: all one would need would be a small but sufficient shaped charge to punch a hole in the concrete, a small one, and let the water erosion do the rest. Or perhaps only knowledge of scheduled water releases, and enough time to hammer a hole into the spillway. But who would do it?
What intrigues me about this scenario is when one places it in context of other "happenings" in northern California in the past few years, which I have occasionally blogged about. Recall a few years ago there was an attack on an electrical p0wer substation at the southern end of the silicon valley (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack). The attack was characterized by state authorities as highly professional: it was executed in short time, damage was created that showed precise knowledge, and the attack was carried out in a time that allowed the perpetrators to enter the substation, attack, and leave before authorities were able to respond. There have been other curious incidents in northern California, including attacks on internet cables - again, having all the appearance of having been carried out by professionals - in the San Francisco bay area (See https://gizadeathstar.com/2015/09/those-attacks-on-computer-network-infrastructure-in-the-bay-area-continue/). And notably, these incidents were in the same general region as the Oroville dam. And they all involve infrastructure.
So in answer to the question of "who would do it?", by putting the speculation into the context of other known infrastructure attacks in northern California, one has to answer: someone with professional training. Could it be radical leftists? Certainly. But it could equally be someone else with very different motivations. What those motivations may be remain to be seen. Tapestry may be right; it may be an attempt to damage California agriculture at a time when much-needed water could be supplied. But it could be a part of that larger picture of infrastructure attacks we've seen recently in the Bay area.
That is... if - and it's a huge if - this overboard groundless suspicion of the day has any basis at all.
See you on the flip side...
36 Comments
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Here is the best articles I have seen. I live 40 miles from the dam and have been watching closely. This is as close to the actual truth as I have found. (Oddly, from the UK!)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4225702/Evacuation-order-lifted-Oroville-Dam.html
Remember, this is the land of the Sonoran Aero Club, circa 1899, when certain German scumbags and reptiles were test flying electrovitics from San Francisco to Texas via Santa Rosa, Red Bluff, Chico and Reno. These poor brain-damaged plow-boys are tearing out whole orchards of kiwi,walnut, and peaches cuz nano particles of aluminum are poison for groundwater.
http://www.com/watch?v=_WNbNcTiLRA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WNbNcTiLRA
Here’s an interview from Peak Prosperity about the dam and future infrastructure costs.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/107126/expert-what-need-know-about-oroville-dam-crisis
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4215404/Water-flowing-emergency-spillway-tallest-US-dam.html#v-8052283937406142019
There she goes.. Water overflowing from the lake.
What I cant understand.. Is. why would they ressort to plain old explosions and chemical bombs when they can just Earthquake the Dam into rubble..
Ah.. Unless.. They only wanted the Causewayto be damaged to make whats happening in the video happen..
Or
Its a different part of the Deep Breakaway, that owns the Earthquake technology.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4215404/Water-flowing-emergency-spillway-tallest-US-dam.html#v-8052283937406142019
There she goes.. Water is now overflowing from the lake.
What I cant understand.. Is. why would they ressort to plain old explosions and chemical bombs when they can just Earthquake the Dam into rubble..
Ah.. Unless.. They only wanted the Slipway to be damaged to make whats happening in the video happen..
Or
Its a different part of the Deep Breakaway, that owns the Earthquake technology.
ah memories. let’s see, reports of blackwater teams and demolition teams in new orleans days before katrina hit. some of those teams (especially near levees) were caught trading fire with police after the police won one of these shoot outs and captured said federale mercenaries deputized by the state of louisiana. they happened to be working alot near the soon to be failed levees that failed to protect the ninth(?) district. oh yeh and they thought they were shooting it out with some of the myriad gangbangers who hung back to protect their respective drug turfs from um i don’t know drug looters?
then again, not unlike the three states of farmers below cairo, illinois a few years back when the mississippi was well beyond flood stage. somehow someway and suddenly the army corps (same group of nice gubmt men as in new orleans) decided that cairo was historically too valuable to allow it to flood. so they opened up the levees and thoroughly flooded the three states to the south. and all those farms. and all those farmers lost their equipment and their crops that year. and their insurance covered nothing since it was considered man made not an act of god. and the corps allowed no govt funding to help out the farmers’ financial failures since it was a necessary emergency maneuver to save cairo. and the only people who got advanced enough notice were soros’ traders who bought up all that land for pennies on the dollar making soros the third largest grain producer on the planet behind adm and cargill in 4 weeks of heavy trading.
hmmm. order ab chaos? never waste a good calamity? problem reaction solution? privatize profits socialize losses? ad infinitum?
makes one really want to put their foot down and make these guys do the right thing. what was that t-shirt i read? “wolves don’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep.”
Thanks for the reminders zeno
Thanks ZDB
Your comment strengthens the frame
from which to view the story.
“I knew there was something up just because of the load roar it was making,” Leese said. “That’s when we walked a little closer and saw the plume of water coming up in the air, and we kept seeing the fragments of concrete shooting up in the air.”
huuuuuuummmmmmmm
Where have such phenomenology been observed before?………………..
A revisitation to the Original Fukushima video with rarifaction rebound colimated debris? Or Perhaps the curious permafrost craters in Siberia? Huuuummmmmm
Hello there fellow campers, hangers on, and such.
In the hi def photos I can find no rebar. Either it rusted away from penetration, refreezing. One could imagine using interferometry to dustify the rebar, while leaving the concrete intact. The breaks are clean, and thinking of those luscious crop circles and smile faces in the volcano…
I spent a good solid 30 minutes researching spillways and it is clear that rebar is a standard part of the process, and that specialized techniques have to be used to make the concrete strong enough. It failed at 26% capacity, which is noteworthy itself.
One could also imagine the spot being chosen because of the prior work. Taking out the heavily Republican Feather River Valley would strength their hold, flood out a lot of people (as priori mentioned) to set up for the asset strip, depress land prices in the valley to push out more farmers. While it is important to find a healthy balance between naiveté and paranoia, my money is on this being an op.
I have noticed a biggggg drop in geoengineering lately.
Where is my ‘LIKE” icon!!!!! Thank you, Kelly Em! 🙂
I quite like the ‘Thanks’ button on Bill Ryan’s forum as a quick way to show appreciation for a post. I add my thanks to Kelly Em (& others- there are always worthwhile thoughts posted on here!). Wish the geoengineering *would* take a biggggg drop here in Scotland tho- we’re choking on trails & frying in doppler radar manipulation pretty much constantly.
Ellen Brown’s site has been digging into this/Numerous companies are poised to take advantage of the water crisis. Instead of protecting existing water supplies, implementing stricter regulations, and coming up with novel ways to capture rainwater, or desalinizing seawater, the corporate fascist agenda is ready, like a coiled snake, to make trillions off your thirst.
It’s the people against the new blue gold water barons: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto, the Bush family, and their ilk – who are buying up water all over the world at an unprecedented pace.
This corporate fascist exploitation of nature has reached such a rapacious pace that we are now imagining in mass a system engineering its own destruction.
This dam certainly symbolizes this environmental crisis where one engineered crisis serves another.
Are we damned?
In this relationship between corporate fascism and nature that state has exercised an intermediary or interface tole between the two. Because the logic of capital is blind and w/o limit, it draws profit from resources available to it – natural resources, as well as other kinds – to the point of their exhaustion. It has so far worked in the ruling classes’ long-term interests and allows the sustained exploitation of nature.
As such, the state organizes nature and places it at capital’s disposal/pleasure. The almighty market demands value a ceaseless production and destruction of nature. Capital does not achieve this alone; it needs the help of a body upon which it can confer tasks that it is not able to accomplish – the state.
We, as a people, need to pull apart the triptych of capitalism, nature and the state and to prevent the latter working in the interest of capital. In short, we need to exterminate corporate fascism. WW11 put it on steroids at Bretton Woods in 1944. Thank you Greatest Generation!
https://ellenbrown.com/2015/03/24/california-water-wars-another-form-of-asset-stripping/
http://usawatchdog.com/drought-number-one-emergency-in-california-ellen-brown/
Above says it may be purposed by HAARP…
pretty ambitious there kemosabe? we as a people? what mean “we”?
yep. nestle’s buying that dam with all the profits from the free water they received from jerry brown’s cali, then bottled and then sold back to cali folk.
There is no good reason for them to have allowed these dams to get such high water levels this time of year unless they are trying to create a problem. The water could have been released steadily through the main gates long before the lake got this high. They may be sacrificing this one dam to get federal money for infrastructure President Trump has promised.
It could be part of the elite “infighting,” as well – one group attacks Russia’s breadbasket in the Ukraine, and its elite targets America’s rich California land with drought and now this dam thing. (pun intended)
I was also immediately suspicious of this failure, as state authorities and FEMA have been on a crusade in Western states for the last decade or so to identify and mitigate any structural issues in regards to earthquakes. Earthen dams were way up on the list of structures they thoroughly investigated. It is highly unlikely they missed something this significant.
And, given Trump’s apparent sudden reversal on Crimea being part of Russia (I guess he can’t read history, either), I find things even stranger. Are the globalist elites threatening to destroy America if Trump doesn’t get back in line? Has he bitten off more than he can chew? He seems to be having quite a lot of trouble even in his own ranks.
It seems about 8 years ago there was a MSM cry for upgrading the public infrastructure with federal money. I get that any thing built must be maintained. But now that I’m more aware of the Breakaway Civ I’m thinking that an intentional little poke in the concrete may have been done to release the floodgate of manufactured monies to flow into the coffers of the PTB, a’ la FDR.
if something this concerning is being reported it cannot end well; I hope I’m wrong-
the JeffRense.com website is also covering this extensively;
please be well all-
Larry in Germany
Hey Joe!…..my first comment..been reading you for a while now, thanks for all the excellent work. ( commenters, too)
I read a book a few years ago called Cadillac desert by Marc Riesner
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
…and believe me, these dams are NOT over-constructed…see the comment above about Grand Tetons…the book gives you a play-by-play about what happened.
So, from an Occam’s razor POV , i think ” unfounded speculation” is correct.(Though i very much LOVE your speculating).
The thing that “hit me” was what the witnesses said….” chunks of concrete flying UP in the air…” ..now i know waters power to move things…(i spend a lot of time kayaking and hiking the lower Susquehanna)… but UP in the air sounds like a major grout and or subsidence problem, where the dam meets the earth, allowing reservoir pressure to “blow out” the hole. The only problem with this theory is when something like this starts it gets progressively worse real fast, leading to collapse….so,…and now I’m speculating…to get that photo of the blow-out in the article, it means the “leak” causing the blow-out has been plugged…either by more naturally shifting earth ( essentially plugging itself) or they had divers inspect and repair the breech….someone should see if any cement trucks have been dispatched to the area on the QT.
..Basta…yeah, I noticed the lack of re-bars sticking out of the broken spillway immediately….WTF?….you don’t build a cement boat ramp without re-bar..???
The problem with the sabotage meme of the third story is blaming the commies is a twentieth century equivalent of the protestant popish plot meme the devil made them do it. That some short sighted greed head might have sabotage this dam unfortunately is all to possible but simple negligence to just might be the answer. As Robert Heinlein said never underestimate human stupidity.
Seems to me that every one of these articles is omitting facts, or simply cherry-picking them to suit their agenda.
Bombs, lack of maintenance, even sabotage! oh my! So how about we add fault lines to the list?
When they started filling the reservoir, the weight of the water activated a dormant fault line causing an earthquake. (Turns out, this same fault line is why the Auburn Dam didn’t get built, because it ran under that location as well.)
Fast-forward to 2017, the lake has been extremely low (dry!) for 5 years, and now all of a sudden it’s taken on all that weight again. Now, here’s where I get ‘extreme’… Maybe, just maybe, that weight caused a small shift, creating a crack in the spillway and loosening the overflow, which allowed the water just enough leeway to undermine the structure. Of course, that leads us back to the whole ‘dam should have been properly inspected’ argument. But with a much more plausible cause.
So… Instead of making uneducated guesses and wild accusations, maybe people should wait until the scientists (geologists) get a close look.
I think it might be better to check for ground subsidence as an explanation for why the spillway failed before I went looking for Communist bombs. I don’t see anything on this map about sibisence directly under the dam, but I notice that it is documented in areas just downstream from those that are being evaucated. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/land_subsidence/california-subsidence-areas.html
Jim Stone has been speculating on sabotage to Oroville Dam for a while now. Goal: to keep the agricultural valley from being saved by rains. His website only uses the “basepage code” and refreshes several times a day, so googling him won’t get you there.
http://82.221.129.208
UN Agenda 21 or 2030???
http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=65916
Or, Disaster Capitalism:
http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=65916
O,r just plain incompetence?
http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article132528514.html
To echo Lost’s sentiments above, this is probably a function of shoddy maintenance as pointed to in the article below. That area was apparently damaged/repaired in 2013 as photos indicate.
http://archive.is/LgPwV
I’m just amazed that we are several days into this impending disaster and the Russians have yet to be blamed anywhere. I would add China on the list of suspects, if one suspects that the US and their weather modification capabilities may have played a role in the catastrophic flooding and dam breaches that occurred in China in 2016.
I lean more to the theory that it is some kind of crime of passion. Perhaps a spurned lover has decided that if he or she can’t have their beloved, than no one can. Or maybe a jealous girlfriend or boyfriend taking out a rival. Or a cuckolded spouse has decided to bury their marriage partner in a wall of water. Sabotaging a dam is a very forceful statement for a vengeful person to make and allows for quite a bit of plausible deniability. It also would guarantee that one of the tv networks would immortalize you and your crime of passion/mass murder in a made-for-tv movie.
The other scenario I wouldn’t rule out is the greedy suburban realtor trying to tamper with property values in his or her market.
Well I do heartily agree with Tapestry (the name evokes crystals, spent patchouli sticks, wind chimes, a stained-glass tree of life, and spidery avocados grown from pits on the kitchen windowsill) that California is overrun with subversives and Lenin’s useful idiots, I do not agree with her (?) unfounded assertion that the dam was well-constructed and “overbuilt,” and it was built back in the day when the US still built stuff well, and when men were men and all that.
Just consider another earthen dam of the same period, the Grand Teton dam, which collapsed catastrophically in 1976 if I’m correct. It was built on porous and heavily fissured basalt which sucked in the water like a sponge and the embankment just gave way spectacularly as they were topping off the reservoir for the first time.
As for an explosive, well all you have to ponder is that the spillway was not built with rebar — a huge slab of concrete (one wonders how thick, and of what quality) without any steel re-enforcement underpinning it and holding it together is like a crust of chocolate dribbled over ice cream. As long as the ice cream is frozen, the thin veneer of chocolate stays in place, but once it starts to melt, the chocolate is going to crack and disintegrate, and spawl off chunks.
This is sloppy, substandard work which apparently many people were very much aware of these past years, but everyone either passed the buck or just hoped it would never rain that much to really put these spillways to the test.
Actually Grand Teton dam is not an earthen dam.
Ah yes, it was the Teton Dam; there certainly was nothing “Grand” about it.
Nonetheless, Teton Dam was another big earthen dam which did collapse in 1976, killing 11 people and causing up to $2billion in damages, according to Wiki. I wrote from memory as I recall the event, which made a pretty big impression on people at the time.
BTW there are some pretty spectacular photos and videos of the whole collapse sequence out there for those who might feel cheated if this one does not in the end fail.
Sure, it’s possible that someone actively did something.
But what’s being ignored in the Sacramento Bee articles, and ignored massively (denied actually) by Tapestry: Weaknesses in the spillway design/engineering were well documented more than 10 years ago.
Things fail when they’re not repaired and maintained, and if there’s this anti-tax fever propounded by democrats and republicans public works fail, see the bridge carrying I35W over the Mississippi in Minneapolis, or that big earthwork dam in the south, South Carolina I believe.
Also, and this is obvious to anyone who’s read even a tiny big of Viktor Schauberger, trying to force water to flow in straight lines for long distances, say more than 100 fee, takes massive amounts of engineering. In other words, the straight line of the spillway provides a source for the energy destroying it.
Then modern concrete of the last 150 years can degrade over decades, particularly if water penetrates to the re-bar and freezes.
(I have no idea if this spill way was built with water proof concrete in 1968, but it’s possible to see concrete flaking off plenty of bridge columns supporting highways, and as most know, not Tapestry obviously, a tiny bit broken off leads to a point of turbulence in the water, which concentrates destructive energies from the water at that point leading to more destruction.)
So lots of things spring to mind that aren’t plots perpetrated by agents actively bent on destruction–unless you want to count those actively denying tax dollars to maintenance of public works as destructive agents.
They’ve been other LMH style “High Strangeness” in CA. There was the case of the alleged “Human / Alien CIA hybrid”, named Jeff Lash.. See cover story in link below.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3172296/It-s-worse-Twilight-Zone-movie-Decomposing-body-car-hidden-5M-gun-arsenal-missing-mother-two-believed-dead-man-alien-secret-agent-sent-save-human-race.html
If you look at the logistics of his cash only operation, he was set up to be a one stop banking, smuggling, logistics stop. The huge number of weapons can be explained by if the load of (drugs / illegals) were short he took weapons as payment. He also had a fleet (at least 14) A-Team style vehicles at various storage facilities that were still under investigation.. He could have outfitted an irregular light battalion with arms, vehicles, NVG’s, cold wx gear, tools, etc…
My Point: this style of operation could have sabotaged comm cables, performed sniper ops and blown up / sabotaged dams..