California's St. Francis Dam Collapse

Along this journey created by nature, the river interacts with man’s influence to encapsulate the full geographic experience of this region. The succession of dams along the river’s path is a major contribution to how man has decided to mesh with the river. The dams have created reservoirs for water supplies, harnessed energy to provide electric power to the southwestern region, and controlled flooding. Flood control was the main concern at the time between the years 1905 and 1907 when large floods broke through the irrigation gates and destroyed crops in California. The flooding was so large it actually created a 450 square mile sea, named the Salton Sea. As a result of this major disaster, ideas were formulated to

With the rapid population growth during the year of 1902, Los Angeles had a larger demand of water than what they could provide and searching for a way to bring water was a must. William Mulholland, superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company, began to search for a new supply. He started looking on nearby local areas but it generated to nothing. In his search for a new source, he began by surveying all the rivers and groundwater basins south of the city. He found groundwater regulated and being used by agriculture. Additional groundwater use would limit the expansion of the neighboring country, which was the main basis of wealth of the area. Mulholland concluded Los Angeles would have to look elsewhere.

The purpose of this essay is to examine and analyze Katrine Barber's book, "Death of Celilo Falls". In this book, Barber successfully seeks to tell the story of a momentous event in the history of the West, the building of the Dalles Dam in 1957. Celilo Falls was part of a nine-mile area of the Long Narrows on the Columbia River. Despite the fact that the Celilo Village still survives to this day in the state of Oregon (it is the state's oldest continuously inhabited town), the assembly of The Dalles Dam in 1957 changed the way of life for the surrounding areas forever. Barber tells this story very well, and as it is the first book-length account of the inundation of Celilo Falls, it is a very valuable and insightful look at an influential

Dams represent a tame and modernized world. They hold back once wild and raging rivers, keeping them calm and as placid as a lake. All the inhabitants in the newly dammed lake are also tamed just like the people of Calamus and all over Oregon. Wade really helps to show this point after a conversation with Jesse. He thinks,“I couldn’t shake the idea of the millpond and those landlocked salmon we used to see there. If people were salmon, they’d be like those stunted lost relatives of Old Man Chinook” (194). This shows that the people of Calamus are like landlocked salmon, trapped behind a taming dam. The civilized people are just “shadows” of the old world people. Just as landlocked salmon are just shadows of the wild salmon they used to be. This idea is expanded by Jesse’s efforts to blow up the dam. Jesse believes that the dam has tamed the landlocked salmon. So he feels obligated to help them become wild once more. The modernized world has had the same effect on the Native Americans as it did on the landlocked salmon. They have become stunted in their souls. Lawrence, the best Native American fisherman around, who doesn't talk anymore because his voice has been stunted by modern society. Just like the salmon are physically stunted by the dam the native americans are stunted by

In the ¨River Restoration Project Offers a Sprinkling of Hope¨, Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Authority, said “We hope to get double duty out of that water by taking it the long way around.¨ As Jacobsma is a general manager of the Friant water Authority, this offers us his experience, his ideas and his thoughts of how we can have hope for the project. President Barack Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Bill in March, the agreement turned into federal law when he signed it. The parties had been working on the restoration plan for more than two years laying the groundwork for the physical changes to come. When the president signed it, it made them get the approval which he supported for them to continue the process. The credibility of the author right has now been believable because he provided us with the ethics of President Obama and Jacobsma. The river will not necessarily end up to its full, natural path along its entire length. Too much has changed in the decades since the dams construction. They would use canals along some stretches to carry the water short distances and to ferry the salmon upstream. This is showing us logos with facts and information it offers an explanation on how to solve one of the problems with the plan. A professor named Peter Moyole, from UC Davis also had his opinion on the project. He said “We have never done anything on this scale”, but we were willing to try it and approve of the

In the third section of John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, the author observes the discourse between conservationist David Brower and Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Floyd Dominy, on the merits of dams in the southwestern United States. Brower "hates all dams, large and small," while Dominy sees dams as essential to our civilization. The Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, which Dominy created, are the main issue of debate between the two men.

However, the dams were of faulty construction. Dam number one which caused the flooding was constructed of coarse mining refuse that Pittston had dumped into the Middle Fork of Buffalo Creek starting in 1968. This dam failed first on the heels of heavy rains. The water from Dam number three then took out dams number two and then number one. Dam number three had simply

Since the population of Los Angeles was increasing, the city needed more water. The city population was over the city’s water supply capacity that if it was kept going, the city would start depopulated. William Mulholland was the one who solved this problem and became a hero of the city. He just did not start being a hero. He moved from Britain to California, and entered the water business after 1877. Throughout his career as a hydraulic engineer, he voiced the belief that L.A. faced a perpetual water shortage, so he was asked for more efficient sources of water (Nicolaides 238). Basically to maintain his power and to solve the city’s problem, he decided to bring Owen’s river water through water pipes. Since the water would come from a different

1. Why was the building of the dam first proposed in 1919 and by whom?

March 1928, the St. Francis Dam failed and Mulholland’s career was in shambles. In the article

San Francisco was not the first to divert Sierra water for human endeavors. Another massive water project preceded the damming of the Tuolumne River, creating an 8-mile-long reservoir.

     As previously mentioned, the Boulder Dam was one of the most famous, and certainly most expensive (with the whole project costing about $385 million) public works program. To provide jobs and much needed money to unemployed Americans, the Bureau of Reclamation, under President Hoover, authorized the Boulder Canyon Project on the Colorado River in 1928. The entire project included a hydroelectric power plant and a reservoir to control floods of the Colorado River and supply power to the Pacific Southwest. The dam reservoir is Lake Mead, which can store approximately 28 million acre-feet of water, making it one of the world’s largest artificially created bodies of water. Besides providing many jobs, the project responsible for the officially named Hoover Dam (as of 1947), added about 3 million acres of national parks and monuments and expanded

There were many failure factors that were a result of Mulholland's decision. He neglected cracks that were observed after the dam was completed. The failure involved water pressure pushing horizontally against the dam’s wall and the weight of the dam directed downward. The resultant of the two forces was between was diagonally downwards across the toe of the base. This resultant force caused the dam to rotate and overturn about the toe. Mulhollands lack of knowledge in concrete structures showed when he did not include cut-off walls and grout curtains as they would be sufficient to reduce the possibility of water infiltrating beneath the dam. Without it, the water seeped under the dam and caused the dam to become buoyant. This geological hazard was the result of the failure, which was from sediment flowing into streams of water from landslides that pushed against the dam’s wall and caused it to tilt downwards towards the

Things came to a head in 1910 when Mysore, under Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar as the king and Sir. M.Visvesvaraya as Chief Engineer came up with a plan to construct a dam at Kannambadi village to hold up to 41.5 TMC of water. The dam was planned to be built in two stages. In the first stage a capacity of 11 TMC was envisioned, while in the second stage the full capacity was set to be realized. Madras however, refused to give its consent for this move as it had its own plans to build a storage dam at Mettur with a capacity of 80 TMC.

Up until the 1900s in America, private companies exclusively controlled the utility services. Then, during the early 1900s, American citizens began lobbying for government control over utilities. In response, the federal government created the Bureau of Reclamation, designed to bring water to the deserts and harness aqueous power to generate electricity. One of the most successful endeavors in this objective was the Hoover Dam, an engineering marvel and a public works success story. Behind that famous icon is a lesser-known one: John L. Savage, civil engineer. His modesty and reserve belied a sharp intellect and ambition, traits that carried him to the top of his field and beyond. Born and raised in Wisconsin, he rose from a modest upbringing to obtain a college education. He then worked his way up the ranks in the Bureau of Reclamation on merit, genius, and determination to become a world-renowned dam expert. Although Savage was the most important and reluctantly visible civil engineer of his age, “he was, bottom line, the engineer’s engineer” (Weingardt). John Savage is the true American civil engineering icon, pioneering innovative techniques to construct icons in their own right that affect people worldwide.