Tag Archive for: Dams

Escondido Discusses Rehabilitating Lake Wohlford Dam

/in , , /by /The Coast News Groupby Tigist Layne Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

The Escondido City Council met on June 3 to discuss options for rehabilitating Lake Wohlford Dam, instead of building a replacement dam, and to award contracts for the Lindley Reservoir Replacement Project.

The council heard a report on the possibility of rehabilitating the Lake Wohlford Dam, which was first constructed in 1895 as part of Escondido’s local water system, to address seismic deficiencies rather than replacing the dam altogether.

According to the report, replacing the dam would cost more than $46.4 million, an amount much greater than the 2012 preliminary cost estimate of $30 million. Furthermore, it would cost an estimated $3.5 million to offset known negative impacts to the environment.

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Green Infrastructure Can Be Cheaper, More Effective than Dams

/in , /by /Scientific Americanby Daniel Cusick

Hundreds of studies on nature-based solutions to extreme events show that “green infrastructure” is often cheaper and more effective than engineered projects like dams, levees and sea walls, according to a new analysis.

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California Assembly Passes Expedited Dam Safety for Silicon Valley Act

/in , , /by /Engineering News-Recordby Tim Newcomb

In an effort to move forward a $576 million Anderson Dam Seismic Retrofit Project, the California State Assembly passed AB 3005 on June 8, the Expedited Dam Safety for Silicon Valley Act, facilitating the construction of the project.

Assemblyman Robert Rivas (D-Hollister, Calif.), who wrote the bill, says the overwhelming vote of bipartisan support shows the importance in fixing the dam. “The clock is ticking on a catastrophic dam failure in case of a large earthquake,” he says, “and we can’t allow bureaucratic delay to increase risks to public safety, water security and environmental protections.”

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The Next Generation of Pumped Storage

/in , , /by /Water Power & Dam Construction by Jim Day

The first slide of Daybreak Power’s first-ever presentation to potential investors quotes Paul Allen, the legendary co-founder of Microsoft, asking what he calls the most exciting question imaginable: “What should exist? … What do we need that we don’t have?”.

The answer I reached in the years leading up to co-founding Daybreak in 2018 is this: A bunch of big-honkin’ pumped storage hydropower projects, for the simple reason that we’re going to need a ton of cost-effective, proven, long-duration energy storage if we, as a society, are to have any hope of integrating high levels of intermittent wind and solar power, and thereby slash greenhouse gas emissions to put the brakes on catastrophic climate change.

Plus, we can create a lot of jobs and maybe make some money on it!

Joyce Patry, a former MBA classmate, and I founded Daybreak in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, as an early-stage developer of these massive infrastructure projects.

Despite extremely limited resources, we pulled together some engineering and cost-configuration studies that had previously been conducted on potential pumped storage sites at US Bureau of Reclamation dams around the West. In late 2018 we filed a FERC preliminary permit application for the 1540MW Next Generation Pumped Storage project near Hoover Dam/Lake Mead, and followed that up with a July 2019 application for the 2210MW Navajo Energy Storage Station near Glen Canyon Dam/Lake Powell on the border of Utah and Arizona.

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Mexico Poised to Breach 75-Year Water Treaty with US

/in , , /by /bnamericas

Mexico is at risk of breaching a 75-year old water treaty with the US if it does not come up with a new strategy to deliver 457,800 acre-feet (565 million cubic meters – Mm3) of water to its northern neighbor by October 24.

That amount represents 350,000 acre-feet of water that the Latin American country is expected to deliver annually under the US-Mexico water treaty of 1944, in addition to making up for the delayed delivery of around 108,000 acre-feet that it has postponed during the 2015-20 cycle.

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The Problem America Has Neglected for Too Long: Deteriorating Dams

/in , , /by /National Geographicby Maya Wei-Haas

Aging and undermaintained infrastructure in the United States, combined with changing climate over the coming decades, is setting the stage for more dam disasters like the one that struck Midland, Michigan, last week.

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Thousands of Run-Down US Dams Would Kill People If They Failed, Study Finds

/in , , /by /The Guardianby Emily Holden

More than 15,000 dams in the US would likely kill people if they failed, and at least 2,300 of them are in poor or unsatisfactory condition, according to recent data from the federal government’s National Inventory of Dams.

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Opinion: Keep Momentum Going to Remove Klamath River Dams and Restore Salmon Runs

/in , , /by /CalMattersby Frankie Myers

With the outbreak of COVID-19, many Americans are starting to realize how fragile our economy and social safety nets really are.

Many people face economic uncertainty and food shortages for the first time in their lives. For Indians, confronting economic uncertainty and food shortages has been part of life since Europeans arrived in our lands. We have known for a long time that in order to survive, we must prioritize the protection of our salmon, acorns, mushrooms, eels and the hundreds of other sources of food and fiber in our environment.

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California Dam Operators Can’t Dodge Fish-Endangerment Claims

/in , /by /Courthouse News Serviceby Martin Macias

Federal and regional operators of Southern California’s Twitchell Dam lost their bid to dismiss claims the dam causes unlawful killing of endangered steelhead trout, but they won’t face an emergency injunction restricting their operations, a federal judge ruled Friday.

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Largest US Dam Removal Stirs Debate Over Coveted West Water

/in , , /by /Associated Pressby Gillian Flaccus

KLAMATH, Calif.  — California’s second-largest river has sustained Native American tribes with plentiful salmon for millennia, provided upstream farmers with irrigation water for generations and served as a haven for retirees who built dream homes along its banks.

With so many demands, the Klamath River has come to symbolize a larger struggle over the American West’s increasingly precious water resources, and who has claim to them.

Now, plans to demolish four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath’s lower reaches — the largest such demolition project in U.S. history — have placed those competing interests in stark relief. Tribes, farmers, homeowners and conservationists all have a stake in the dams’ fate.

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