I’m sure we have all witnessed the crumbling infrastructure of a couple of water dams due to the heavy rains and flooding in California this month. You cannot blame it on the weather because mankind has no control over that. What you can blame it on though is inept and dumb engineering, or the lack of engineering. The state of California must have searched high and low to find the dumbest, cheapest priced engineer that money could buy when it came to designing the emergency spillway for Oroville dam. The “emergency spillway”amounted to nothing but a cement wall setting on dirt. That’s right, dirt! Any country boy knows what happens to dirt when you pour water on it; it erodes ! And sure enough, when the level of the lake rose above it , it started washing away the bottom of the spillway and they had to evacuate close to 200,000 people that was in the path of the floodwaters. If I was the governor of California I would damn sure find out who is the engineer that designed that and jerk his license, and put him to sweeping streets. But that would not be politically correct would it? Like I have stated publicly many times, political correctness is pure poison to common sense. One of my best friends lives in Yuba City, and he told me that if that emergency spillway had collapsed he would’ve been inundated with 3 to 5 feet of water in his house. All because some stupid engineer could not design the spillway properly, with large, wide, and deep, flumes to dispose of the water safely. Add to this, the collapse of the regular spillway due to inefficient inspection practice’s. It is going to be interesting to see who governor Moonbeam blames this on come summertime.
Add to that the stupid spillway design at Lake Don Pedro on the Stanislav River. On television the other night they showed a road at the very bottom of the spillway that was washed out. Makes you ask the question, who is the rocket scientist that put a road at the bottom of the spillway? The commentator on television said they couldn’t understand why the road got washed out, because the spillway was 15 feet deep, but it looked like about 25 feet of water coming down the spillway to me ! Said they were merely releasing 70,000 cubic feet of water per second. Well folks let me tell you what 70,000 cubic feet of water amounts to. A cubic foot of water contains 7 1/2 gallons and weighs 62 1/2 pounds. That’s one cubic foot. Now then here are the figures concerning that amount of water, that is 525,000 gallons per second, and it weighs 4,357,000, 500 pounds. And they wonder why the road and bridge got washed out? You can’t fix stupid.
I know some of you folks right now are thinking that I have a very low opinion of engineers as a whole. You know what? You are right. I worked in heavy construction all of my working life as a pipefitter/welder. I worked on everything from canneries, to nuclear powerhouses and everything in between. The last 15 years of my working life was spent primarily in supervision on large construction projects, and as a consequence I dealt with engineers on a daily basis. In those 35 years I only met two engineers who knew anything about pipe, and both of them graduated from Cal poly school of engineering. Come to find out, before they were given their diplomas they had to spend a year working in the field with their hands, acquiring hands-on experience. One of them was fairly young and fresh out of school, but he would really listen to what I had to say, and by the time the drought relief project we were building back in 1976 was completed, I had him “knowed up”pretty good. He was an engineer for East Bay mud utilities District, and I work together with him on another project for East Bay mud four years later, when we were building a powerhouse a Comanche dam.
Why do I have a low opinion of engineers as a whole? Here are two examples of educated idiots that I was witness to when we built the new Melones dam back in 1976. I was working for Guy F Atkins contractor, who at the time was one of the largest earthmoving contractors in the world. The dam is an earth fill dam on the Stanislaw River, and is 625 feet high, 40 foot wide at the crest, and about 1200 feet in width. At the bottom of the dam is a powerhouse that is supplied water through two 72 inch pen stocks for the turbines. Projects like this have temporary piping running everywhere primarily for water and compressed air for the drillers who are grouting the rock walls of the canyon that the dam will be mounted on. Pipe size can be anywhere from 2 inch to 24 inch and in between. my working partner Dave and I were repairing temporary piping adjacent to the penstock one afternoon when the”engineering brain trust”showed up. The”brain trust””was composed of four fat overweight engineers who always wore a short sleeve white dress shirts and ties, and drove a white 1970 Ford four-door sedan. The largest one of the four, who Dave had dubbed lard butt must have weighed 350 pounds, and was about 5’6″ tall.
The pen stocks were at about a 35° angle to the riverbed. Just to make conversation with these educated idiots, I asked them when they were going to install a couple of 35° elbows on these penstock to direct the water down the canyon when they tested the 72 inch ball valves for proper operation on the upstream side. Lard butt looks at me and says; why would we do that? So I told him to keep from washing out the opposite side of the canyon which is about 100 feet away, and supported the only road in and out of the whole project. He gets all puffed up like a toad frog, looks down his nose at me and said, WE have calculated that the water will fall right in the middle of the canyon riverbed when the valves are tested ! I asked him how full of Lake was going to be when they tested the valves? To which he replied about 600 feet of water. So I told him that with that kind of head he was going to have 259 pounds of water pressure shooting millions of gallons of water every minute out of those 72 inch penstocks and by the time they got those valves closed there would be no more mountain or road. Once again he looked down his nose at me and said; what in the hell does a pipe fitter know about that? I assured him that he would find out when the valve are tested. Thankfully, I got laid off the job two months later and went to a better job that paid more money. Two years later, my working part on the job call me up one evening laughing his butt off! Dave said, boy JD were you right on about washing the mountain down the canyon when they tested the valves on the penstock. He said the water shot out like a cannon in a straight line and it took about 5 min. to get the valves closed but by that time have the mountain and the road was down the canyon. He said they couldn’t leave the job until two o’clock in the morning when they finally get the road rebuilt. Got paid for every minute of it doubletime. Dave said I reminded lard butt what you told them two years ago.
Same job, same”brain trust”of engineers. At the old dam they had a small powerhouse on the south side of the river. Waters was supplied to the turbines in the old powerhouse through a tunnel in the mountain. They had to blast a new tunnel into the mountain a bout 100 feet so they can plug off the old tunnel penstock to the old powerhouse. The face of the new tunnel was about 100 feet above the canyon floor. They had a crew of miners drilling a matrix of holes in the granite for the explosives.this tunnel is about 12 feet wide by 12 feet tall with an arched top. They drill a series of holes and load them with dynamite with micro fuses on them that are timed differently by the microsecond. The interior matrix explodes first, followed by the perimeter, to perfectly formed the tunnel. Come the day for the first “shot”in the new tunnel. All vehicles have a radio on them and we were advised to clear the area by at least a mile. Me and my partner Dave parked on top of the mountain by the haul road that went down to the bottom of the canyon. About that time, the”brain trust”drove past us and parked the car and got out. They were directly in front of the blast zone about 200 yards from it. Dave and I both yelled at them to get out there because they might get killed. Lard butt yells back at us; what do you dumb pipefitters know? I yelled back; you’re gonna find out in about 10 seconds. We watched Rex the foreman attached the wires to the blasting mag, said on his radio, fire in the hole! Pulled the handle up on the mag, give it a quick push down and all hell broke loose! Granite rock the size of watermelons flew across that canyon, hit the opposing wall and started writing on top of them dumb bastards. You should’ve seen those guys trying to get underneath that car ! The rock knocked most of the glass out of that car, and half caved in the roof. Surprisingly none of them were killed, but they were all covered in that red dust and when they went by us about 100 miles an hour we both yelled at them; that’s what pipefitters know about dynamite !
That’s only two of the many instances I had to deal with educated idiot engineers on the job. Sometimes I’ll tell you about one that insisted we cut a 1 inch electrical conduit with a hacksaw to get it out of the way so we could put a stainless six-inch line through.we all refused to do it, so he grabbed the saw and started cutting. All I can say right now is he lived through it. You can’t fix stupid ! We live in exciting times folks!
