More Oroville Video

That's pretty low resolution, but interesting none the less.

https://youtu.be/pTvp0QLHfOw

I wonder if they intend on using some form of water seal (Thompson's?) on the concrete surfaces. I'm not sure if it will merit the effort. To coin a phrase; It couldn't hurt.

Maybe something better, and a non-cracking concrete material that is stable to the applied seasonal stresses is not a bad idea, either.

How about liquidized waste rubber tires?

Has anyone ever experimented with water absorbing materials that expand upon wetting, yet allow the passage of great volumes of water at low velocity? I see this something like a giant spill absorber (except not for oil), lying almost flat on the spillway, until she overflows, then instead of allowing the flow to gain all that momentum, the absorbent expands, contains the entire flow profile, yet provides sufficiently low impedance to not back up all that water.

Instead of the water flowing in a shallow, wide, high velocity profile over the spillway run, I am just asking is there a sound engineering way to make a much deeper, wide, but lower velocity flow profile somehow?

Wow! What a project, and what interesting videos! I hope they become required viewing at least in some college construction management curricula...

I'm glad to see they finally got busy with such major repair efforts. Completed repairs may wind up costing more than the entire original Oroville Dam... Wish I was still young enough to be working on such a job...

(...and no bureaucratic beancounter would have signed-off on spending one-hundredth of those repair costs before the recent near-disasterous dam failure...)

The type of cement used in the top layer of concrete will be the (sealing agent) without anything additional being applied to the sloping channel surfaces...

(...unless a reeeeeeally good ''sales-job'' was done on the gov con reps, before hand...)

But, it remains to be seen if they can get enough done in time for the next rains...

They seem to be meeting a rather tight schedule, so far...

It will be interesting to see what the final configuration of the baffles will look like...

It should take quite a bit longer for these repairs to ''pipe-out'' too,,,

It often costs more to repair a cheap job than to "do it right" in the first place. (IMHO A fired bean counter's salary should partly pay for every expensive repair from cutting a few corners. I know, I'm dreaming.)

As for their schedule, remember the only runoff down this spillway is excess water. If they do meet the November dead line then the spring high volume of water from winter pack melt will be a good 4 to 6 months later. This should be a reasonable amount of curing time.