Hydroelectric Dam Sirens being installed

[Archon]

Excel installing Dam Sirens
This is in Northwestern Wisconsin



http://chippewa.com/news/local/article_ ... 3ce6c.html

[thewoog34]

I sure hope those are Whelens being installed, not Mods or i-Forces. Either way...looks like we might eventually have some videos of these sirens!

[md5]

The first of the solar powered warning sirens will be installed at Lake Holcombe. Each siren will be placed on 55-foot poles along the Lower Chippewa River.

When they mean "along the river", I am hoping they are a fair distance FROM the river. We all here have seen sirens installed alongside a riverfront or that tilted EOWS612 from a few years back next to that reservoir.

Either way, it IS good idea none the less. Just hope they think the system through rather plopping them in without the foresight to see disaster down the road.

The sequence would be repeated for 30 minutes or until warning is cancelled.

If these are electronic sirens, as to what this article intends it being with it sounding off in a "whoop" signal... 30 minutes non-stop? Hello high driver bills! Pretty sure that's just me nit-picking, but in the least assuming 3 minutes on, 5 minutes off.

[kx250rider]

I think it's important to have a siren network downstream from all dams. Scarily, I just read that the ones in Ventura County, CA which warn for Matilija and Casitas Dams, haven't been maintained since 2007, and now are more than half dead.

Anyone with doubt, should Google March 12, 1928. The St. Francis Dam, which was built to enable a hydroelectric plant to service Los Angeles County, failed. When it did, a 60-foot wall of water raged down Francisquito Canyon, erasing everything, then made a sharp right turn onto what's now Hwy 126 (near Six Flags Magic Mountain), which carved a new valley out of a mountainside. Then it rushed west all the way to the ocean; wiping cities off the map including Saugus, Piru, Fillmore, half of Santa Paula, Saticoy, and Montalvo (now called the City of Ventura). They'll never know how many died, as it's believed that most victims were Mexican immigrants who weren't counted in the census of 1920. 600-some Americans (most of the populations of those towns), was confirmed killed.

Had there been sirens, that would have been a MUCH lower casualty count. The proof is, that two policemen got a message from the railroad station in Santa Paula, that the water was coming fast. They jumped on bicycles, and rode along Telegraph Road shouting, and this saved a few dozen people who heard the police, and got out and ran up the hill. Everybody else, was found in the next few months washing up on the beach from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

People don't realize the power of water, and since I live not far from that floodplain, I ride motorcycles up there now & then. I can easily find chunks of concrete from the St. Francis Dam, which washed 40 miles downstream (of the 60 miles from the dam site to the ocean). I don't mean little chunks; I mean chunks of concrete and rebar the size of a Cadillac, and probably weighing hundreds of tons.

I guess I'm a little obsessed with that disaster, partly because of a sad story I heard (true story)... A teenage boy with autism, lost his whole family and home and farm in the flood in Fillmore. He was the only survivor in that part of the disaster. He was nonverbal, and he would not accept what had happened. He went on living in the riverbed for all the rest of his life (I think he lived to be 70 or older), and worked 10 or 12 hours a day, digging and trying to find his family. He wouldn't ever speak, or accept any help. A very few people knew him, and would probably take food out there, but strangers saw him as just another nut case homeless man in the riverbed. Nobody know how he survived, but I'd guess he was fairly resourceful and decided to go it alone emotionally. I have high functioning autism, and I can imagine how I could have been that boy, and how I might have reacted the same way.

Wow, I've railroaded this thread way off, but maybe it's still in the spirit of the topic of dam failure safety.

Charles

Links:
Ballad by Frank Black http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX6yDjh_irw

Digital re-enactment video of the failure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MdB_s6KhwA

[Ziginox]

Gah, I wish that we had sirens for the various dams around here. Both Ririe and Palisades would flood densely (for Idaho) populated areas...

[JMAN]

Eau Claire is one of the places getting these and I am guessing they will be modulators because we have a all Federal signal 2001 system right now.

[MattDean1003]

I also agree that sirens down river should be present. At Hartwell Dam, the only noisemaker they have is on top of the dam to signal a water release, and it's an absurdly loud, deep, bassy horn. Buford Dam has an electronic siren in the vicinity somewhere, to alert the same thing. Nobody could tell me, dam site nor county, if there are any flood sirens down the river. From what I could tell before, most people I asked had the general attitude that "It's never happened so we don't need it".

[Hacksaw]

"It's never happened so we don't need it"

Matt: Ask them about the Tocoa Dam disaster:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/news/historical-toccoa/

A list of other dam failures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

Charles: The Baldwin Hills dam disaster was caused by water injection into oil fields that caused the Newport-Inglewood fault to slip there.

Right now, I live in the flood area of Anderson Dam, which could rupture in a large Calaveras Fault slippage. No sirens here, either.

[JMAN]

Yes they are Whelen Omni sirens. There is one In Chippewa Falls across the bridge from burger king

[JMAN]

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=21 ... 2230&msa=0

Here i got a map of quite a few of them