Dam! If it were April (May, June, etc), I'd be DEAD!

[Ncatyl]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/14/dam.co ... index.html

I host float trips for friends and family throughout the spring and summer about two miles downstream from where this puppy blew. According to local accounts (oh, hey, I have family there - everyone's checked in A-OK) there was a wall of water more than twenty-feet high moving at around 45mph that ripped through the campground we use.

Keep watching. This is bound to get ugly. It turns out that the new Director of Missouri's DNR was a sitting Senator when the state legislature voted to strip DNR of most of its treasury funding. That cut reduced the number of dam safety inspectors to 1. This poor guy is in charge of inspections, all the assorted paperwork, enforcement, meetings, all of everything for the whole state; meaning he didn't get a lot done.

Furthermore, for the past four years the agency has been moving further away from enforcing regulations and instead "playing nice" & working cooperatively with violators rather than citing them and letting the System handle it. This is due to both reduced funding, and political pressure placed on appointed managers by the legislative and executive branches. You see, if you're appointed, you can be very neatly "disappointed" if you fail to perform to the expectations of the executive branch (or with whomever's counsel s/he values most). That's nothing new, it's been that way for more than 30 years. But, as we all know, people and times have changed, and that affects how things are done.

FYI: Ameren UE has initially pointed to a computer error in Iowa as the culprit. In all actuality, this is possible: a lot of power companies switched to automated flow management to save money. You see, it's cheaper than having someone there at $15/hr, watching over things.

One of two things will result; they'll find there was a heretofore undiscovered weakness in the dam, or they'll find out the pump failed to turn off (for whatever reason) and resulted in the reservoir overtopping the dam. Likely the latter considering the characteristic shape of the breach.

Grab popcorn, stay tuned. Should be a helluva show. Then again, it could all just get swept into obscurity.

[thenetworkgod]

Good you're ok. Sorry for those that got hurt or lost their life

But good you're ok.