Reservoir Breach in Missouri

[Elspode]

I've stood at the lip of the Taum Sauk Reservoir on a couple of different occasions. Each time, I felt a sense of uneasiness about the thing. It is so incredibly unnatural, so obviously precarious, that you simply cannot be near it without thinking "What if?". Built by blasting out the peak of one of Missouri's highest 'mountains', the reservoir towers over the surrounding landscape as it serves its purpose as a pumped-storage power generation facility, providing electricity at peak daytime consumption hours by drawing its water level down through the generator turbines and into the lower reservoir, then using those same turbines to pump water back into the upper reservoir at night.

Yesterday morning at approximately 5:30 AM CST, "What if" became "WTF!?" as the Taum Sauk Reservoir, overfilled and possibly compromised by 40 years of seepage, burst open and released a billion gallons of water in just about 12 minutes. As it gushed downhill to the Black River, it utterly destroyed the home of the superintendent of Missouri's most popular State Park, Johnson's Shut Ins, and very nearly killed the superintendent and his family. His three children, one only seven months old, are in a hospital in St. Louis in serious to critical condition.

Miraculously, there were no other serious injuries in this event, but Johnson's Shut Ins has been devastated, according to first reports. It is there that Mrs Elspode and I took our first camping trip together as a couple some ten years ago, and just downstream from there along the Black River where we took a July 4th canoe weekend in 2001 wherein I first discovered that I needed heart surgery. This part of the Missouri Ozarks is some of most beautiful and historic land in the state, and the only blessing about this disaster is that it did not occur at the peak of tourist season, when there would have certainly been hundreds of visitors in the Shut Ins campground and surrounding areas.

Wikipedia info here.

What a mess.

[zippyt]

Damn that SUCKS !!!!!

It just goes to show ya , don't fool with mother nature !!!!! ( sorry it had to be said )

[Perry Winkle]

Wow. It's been years since I've been there. The last time I was there was about 10 years ago when my grandfather took me and three of my cousins there for on one of our weekend expeditions to random places.

It was always kind of eerie and foggy when I was there. Very unsettling.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Poor fish.

[Beestie]

Water always wins.

Always.

[Griff]

Yep, and everything we have built is decaying. We can try to control the schedule but it will eventually fail.

Was that thing an EARTHEN dam? The civil engineer's nightmare? Oh, well, just one more bit of infrastructure that wasn't maintained because we are too busy destroying the infrastructure of Iraq and paying Halliburten and Dick Cheney an outrageous sum to rebuild over there.

[Elspode]

Rock and concrete. Probably some earth and clay in there somewhere, though. You can pretty much suss the construction looking at the picture, as it makes a pretty nifty cross-section.

[footfootfoot]

Holy mackerel.

[Elspode]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Was that thing an EARTHEN dam? The civil engineer's nightmare? Oh, well, just one more bit of infrastructure that wasn't maintained because we are too busy destroying the infrastructure of Iraq and paying Halliburten and Dick Cheney an outrageous sum to rebuild over there.

Also, much as I'd like to blame this screwup on the current administration, this is a *privately owned facility*, and as such, not maintained by the Corps of Engineers. No, this was an industrial accident, apparently caused by the failure of a level-sensing system which allowed the reservoir to be overfilled, resulting in overtopping and breaching of the impoundment.

Water *will* always win, especially if you pump it hundreds of feet above the surrounding terrain, and attempt to hold it there in a tenuous structure. If you've ever visited there, you can see quite clearly that it leaks, and it has done so ever since it was constructed. Numerous photos can be found (with a Google search for "Taum Sauk") which show the enormous lining project that was done a year ago in an attempt to stay the leakage. That was pretty much successful, but it is still unknown how much hidden erosion of the structure might have occurred during the life of the facility, if any, and whether or not such unseen scouring contributed to the failure of the overfilled reservoir.

Just last year, AmerenUE withdrew a proposal to build another unit like this, only four times larger, on a nearby peak, because the lower impoundment reservoir would have inundated too much environmentally significant land. Public complaint quickly squelched the project.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Elspode

No, this was an industrial accident, apparently caused by the failure of a level-sensing system which allowed the reservoir to be overfilled, resulting in overtopping and breaching of the impoundment.

Water *will* always win, especially if you pump it hundreds of feet above the surrounding terrain, and attempt to hold it there in a tenuous structure.

But then read details. Notice how few were harmed. Billions of gallons never reached Lesterville and Centerville because the dam - like all dams should be - was apparently built making plans that also assume the dam would fail. IOW the design had redundancy. Back in the 1960s, someone with an American attitude was at least planning properly.

Do you have that attitude? Do you always apply the parking brake? Or do you plan to fail - maybe kill someone - by only placing transmission in park?

Unfortunately Taum Sauk had obvious failures. Current management had two choices. Fix the problem or never fill the reservoir high enough that leaks would occur. Apparently, recent management chose to install a plastic liner - to only reduce the leakage. Apparently choose not to solve the problem using reasoning that also murdered seven Challenger astronauts. Apparently choose a 'cost control' solution so often found in MBA trained managers.

Any dam that is leaking will fail - often when disaster occurs at a worst time. Meanwhile Federal inspectors should have seen the problem during those many nationwide inspections of every dam in the country. So why did the dam continue to operate with leaks? Is this just another example of purchasing Bush-Cheney?

Move forward by learning from this failure. Who are those top managers in AmerenUE electric company? Are they MBAs and lawyers just like First Energy who then created a massive Northeast US blackout? If so, then we should be asking about things such as the Callaway Nuclear Plant located between St Louis and Columbia in MO. Asking because we don't forget how this same mentality killed so many even in New Orleans. 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. Did something change in AmerenUE that means citizens in MO and IL should start worrying?

Who are the top managers and BoDs in AmerenUE? That is a most important question.

[xoxoxoBruce]

No, this was an industrial accident, apparently caused by the failure of a level-sensing system which allowed the reservoir to be overfilled, resulting in overtopping and breaching of the impoundment.

No matter how well it was built and maintained, if it overtops, it will fail, guaranteed.
Once it starts to flow over, it will siphon the water behind it as if it was in a hose coming out of your gas tank. But it's not in a hose and therefore rips up the ground it flows over.... it'll even tear up concrete.
For just that reason, dams would prefer to dump excess water through discharge pipes rather than over spillways as they can get out of control when they have to dump a lot of water quickly.

[footfootfoot]

Not only do I apply the parking brake, I turn my wheels to the curb.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Careful of that parking brake in the winter. Freezing slush can lock 'em up and they don't thaw out by running the engine.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Careful of that parking brake in the winter. Freezing slush can lock 'em up and they don't thaw out by running the engine.

I find the heat generated by forgetting to release the brake does a pretty good job of thawing them out. [snicker snicker, voice of experience]