I've been fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with the Oroville Dam. At first, I was trying to figure out if there really was a danger to the towns below when it was overflowing. But now, I'm focused on just how bad the damage was.
The videos we all saw of the torrents of water coming down the broken spillway and over the emergency spillway were taken from so far away, the scale of the thing is just not possible to comprehend. This dam is massive. Even in this post, I try to show a picture of how massive it is, but files size restrictions won't let me.
Look at just the EDGE of the damaged spillway. Now look for the people. How many do you see? None? Look closer.
What I really encourage you to do is to check out the videos from drone footage from the California Department of Water Resources. Here' one from yesterday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpXtMZwpDqs Make sure to watch on a computer in 1080 mode with the video at full screen. It's amazing. As of this writing, only 178 people before you have looked at this video.
After it's over, take a look at some of their other videos.
Then look at some before pictures of the spillway. It looked perfectly fine.
Those fucking libtards in California, right? Ignoring that engineer's report that the dam spillway needed some maintenance. It's easy to think that this is just an isolated incident in California. But you've all seen those occasional news stories that come out that talk about old bridges that need work, and infrastructure, blah, blah, blah.
There is an Oroville Dam type of infrastructure problem in basically every city and county in the US. Not a dam, of course, but a bridge, or a highway, or a metro system, or a tunnel, or an overpass. You know which ones. You pass them all the time and ignore the crumbling concrete and rusty rebar poking out. They are EVERYWHERE.
This country was built by our grandparents, and its expiration date is here.
Good thing we're fighting about illegal immigrants.
But yeah, check out the videos. They are amazing. The scale.