Western Railroad Discussion > So, has California Washed Out to Sea Yet?

Curious what routes have been affected by flooding so far? It's a long shot, but wouldn't mind some detours on the UP through eastern Oregon/

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

It seems the atmospheric river came ashore on the central coast between Big Sur and Santa Cruz.  I think the main stream missed Feather River Canyon and Donner Pass, with most of the moisture to the south.  Monterey and the associated communities along the coast the got slammed hard and most of the Monterey Pennisula has been without power since last night.  I believe the Coast Line survived without damage.  There is another strong storm coming through Tuesday that could cause problems.

 

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

This particular storm hit the central coast hardest, the next two will hit SoCal.  NorCal should actually be delivered only glancing blows by this series of storms.

There was a mudslide between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo tonight, photos on Facebook.  Sacate area which is where they've been having issues since the January storms.  Otherwise things seemed to go pretty smoothly.

Mudslide at Sacate was cleared enough to where the Amtrak's were able to get by. 

Some flooding up in Atascadero near MP 228. 

webmaster Wrote:
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> I believe the Coast Line survived without damage.

In the old days something would eventually give way underneath a freight on Cuesta Grade. Might take a few weeks, though. Nowadays, with just the Starlight, that's less likely.

When I looked at the Weather Radar on Thursday night, there was a lot of rain being dumped between Donner Pass and the Feather River Canyon, but mostly snow south of Donner Pass. Surprised it hasn't caused issues in the Feather River Canyon.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

Yep, FR Canyon still open as of midnight friday/Saturday. We'll see what monday-tuesday brings tho

Posted from Android

Water over the rail at Grover Beach.
 

On theTruckee cam it looked like they had rain most of Friday and over night it looks like it turned to a good snow fall. 

Maybe the FRC is doing exactly what a large deep canyon is designed to do, efficiently transport high volumes of water... only problem, large canyons typically have large mouths.

Mr. MRL 

One frequently discussed, but rarely implemented energy storage technique is something called pumped storage.  When energy is abundant, like the sun at 11 am or wind much of the time, water is pumped up into a storage reservoir. When energy is rare, like solar at 4 am, the water is released, and flows down through hydro facilities, generating power. The water is usually captured, and the process is repeated.  With huge surges of water flow, like now, the overflow goes out to sea.

Snowing on Donner above 5000 feet, so a fairly cold storm

MrMRL Wrote:
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> Maybe the FRC is doing exactly what a large deep
> canyon is designed to do, efficiently transport
> high volumes of water... only problem, large
> canyons typically have large mouths.
>
> Mr. MRL 

The FRC does, it's called Lake Oroville which has lots of room left.

MrMRL Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Maybe the FRC is doing exactly what a large deep
> canyon is designed to do, efficiently transport
> high volumes of water... only problem, large
> canyons typically have large mouths.
>
> Mr. MRL 


Hopefully lake Oroville can handle it this time.

Posted from Android

They're releasing water out of Lake Oroville to have room for what's coming down the mountains. Trying to keep it controlled vs the nightmare spillway mess they had some years ago.

I'm in San Luis Obispo and we've had 3.7 inches of rain since mid-afternoon Thurs. Over 31" for the season, maybe 10" over our annual average.
For us, a very warm storm, yesterday and today, by 9 AM it was already near our high of the day, 58 degrees, and it never dipped below 50 overnight both last night and Thurs night.
Incredible flooding all along the central coast, but beyond the Sacate issue down on the Hollister Ranch past Gaviota and water over the rails south of here in Grover, the Coast Line is holding up pretty well.

Looks like the Low that's off the Oregon Coast had more effect than expected, the 'AR' hit the Bay Area and south. In the past the AR or Pineapple Express melted snow at just about any elevation. The combination of the cold northern air and the southern AR is contiuing into the great basin and Rocky Mountains. That AR is continuing into the next week or two with a day or two in between storms.

For those with limited Weather coverage this guy seems to be doing a pretty good job of showing the larger picture, he's taking lots of buried NWS images and putting some description into the Pacific Coast activity:

https://www.youtube.com/@PacificNorthwestWeather/videos

The NWS is trying to use weather watches and warnings by County, maybe ok for some folks but it doesn't explain anything. The local NWS office has been describing the weather using road camera images. I guess they haven't had that window installed in the building yet.

But as somebody else tried to explain, when the 'official' weather folks or LEO says it's time to go, it's time to go.

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> One frequently discussed, but rarely implemented
> energy storage technique is something called
> pumped storage.  When energy is abundant, like
> the sun at 11 am or wind much of the time, water
> is pumped up into a storage reservoir. When energy
> is rare, like solar at 4 am, the water is
> released, and flows down through hydro facilities,
> generating power. The water is usually captured,
> and the process is repeated.  With huge surges of
> water flow, like now, the overflow goes out to
> sea.

Pumped storage as a flood control measure, or to capture excess runoff? That's really not what such a system is designed for . It depends on a relatively balanced sysem of equilibrium from a lower-level reservoir (and yes, sometimes run-of-river or lake) and an upper level reservoir that is filled, then emptied through generator turbines to generate electricity. It's not designed for the upper reservoir to just sit empty awaiting a major high flow event, and then to have high flow excess water pumped up there for storage and later release. That would generate electricity, yes, and earn some revenue. But likely not nearly enough to cover the fairly large capital cost involved in such facilities.

If the upper reservoir of such a facility had been emptied before a flood event, and if the inlet works at the lower level had the ability to fairly rapidly suck water from the flooding stream, process it (floodwaters carry a lot of debris, mud and sand that could be damaging to turbines either pumping it uphill or later capturing energy as it flowed back downhill), and then pump it to the upper reservoir fast enough, they could possibly help mitigate a flood situation by lowering the flooding stream's flow rate, perhaps even lowering a crest by some small factor. But that would be a tall order.

A more likely scenario to help in a flood would be to operate the facility on a "deficit" basis. Empty the upper reservoir and generate power before the flood event started, if there was sufficient advance notice. Also empty the lower level reservoir and its relatively clean, no-debris water into the river while still at lower flow levels ahead of the flood. Then during the flood, capture and store flood water in the lower reservoir, lowering the river level slightly and perhaps reducing a crest. Later, post-flood, exhaust the flood waters back into the river from the lower reservoir.

Also perhaps, if the flood water in the lower reservoir is clean enough when filled, and/or can be cleaned fast enough to move it through the turbine pumps, pump it up to the upper reservoir and store it there, then refill the lower reservoir again with dirtier, more debris-laden, later-in-flood-event water. After the flood event, water can be exhausted into the river and some energy generated. Both reservoirs can then be gradually refilled into normal state with cleaner, processed water for their usual cycle of operations. But post-flood, making sure that both reservoirs are clean of floodwater debris for regular pump uphill - flow downhill operations to generate electricity (often on a daily basis) could be a concern.

I've lived near two such facilities: Union Electric's / Ameren's Taum Sauk Pumped Storage facility (450 megewatts) in southeastern Missouri, and Consumer Energy's /  DTE Energy's Ludington Pumped Storage near Ludington, Michigan. The latter remains one of the larger hydroelectric plants in the nation at 2292 megawatts. Ludington is a little unusual among such facilities in that its lower source reservoir is not a controlled pre-filled and processed reservoir, but Lake Michigan - always with plenty of good quality water free from flooding debris. Taum Sauk has a managed lower level reservoir with an initial water source from the beautiful Black River, usually a gin-clear flowing stream famed with canoers, kayakers and for fishing, which I have floated and fished a number of times. But in full flood, it can turn into a destructive, raging torrent - like many streams. I'm not aware that the pumped storage at Taum Sauk has ever been used to mitigate floods on the Black River. A much larger traditional dam-created reservoir, Clearwater Lake and Dam, has that flood control function.

I vividly remember the day in December 2005 when the upper reservoir outer wall at Taum Sauk was overtopped due to a defective gauge, and the flowing water cut through the reservoir wall and sent a raging torrent of about one billion gallons of  water cascading down the slope of Profitt Mountain into the Black River valley at some 273,000 cubic feet per second.  I was living about 30 miles away at the time, and the event galvanized every community in the region. Miraculously, there was no loss of life due to it being winter, with the very popular Johnson Shut-Ins State Park through which the flood surged being mostly empty and unused at the time. The park superintendent's family was carried away by floodwaters when their house was swept off its foundations, but they survived with injuries by clinging to the branches of trees in the flood's path. The empty lower reservoir and its dam held, largely containing the flood, and sparing downstream communities. Ameren paid a $15-million federal fine in the incident, and was also sued by the State of Missouri and other parties. The upper reservoir has since been rebuilt to a much higher engineering standard, and the plant is back in regular service.

MC



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/11/23 11:55 by ironmtn.

The San Joaquin Valley and foothills/mountains to the east between Merced and Bakersfield have experienced extremely heavy rainfall.  There is extreme flooding all over the place with hundreds of people evacuating from dozens of areas.   All of this flood water is in more than a dozen rivers and major creeks, heading west into the San Joaquin River, which is already at flood stage.  I live just north of Fresno, between the UP and BNSF mainlines.....I haven't heard a train on either line for 12-14 hours.   All forms of transportation in the general area are going to be really messed up for a while.   

There is a 'pumped storage' set up in the Feather River Canyon operated by PG&E. There had been info on the web about it and I have posted that info at least once. I went looking for it again and found there's a system in the area of the today's big flooding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant

In that wiki there's a link to a large list of similar systems, interesting to note how many flags there are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

Last night I was able to dig out that 1983 was the year that the Feather River Canyon was basically scoured clean by the big storm. Seem to remember the new owners spent the summer getting it back in shape. Most of the info about the event have aged out and nobody has built up new sites. Maybe time to dig out those old Pacific News monthly magazines.