I worked on the rebuild, we trucked 4/6 ton boulders 24/7 from the Feather river to the dam. 100 trucks, dozers,excavators and helicopters working together to save the town of Oroville.
Growing up in Oroville this was our Sunday after church entertainment. We would stop at Foster Freeze and get ice cream and head up to check the new hight of the dam. There were 4 overlook parking areas built for viewing at the dam. I went on a tour of the powerhouse after completion and a viewing of the penstock valves after installation. It was a way to spend time with my dad and the memories are still strong ❤❤
You mean, this dam whose service spillway fell apart due to corner cutting (missing anchors) and whose emergency spillway was much more erodable than it was supposed to be? I guess it does represent America, a third world country built on lies and cut corners hiding behind a facade of prosperity.
My family would go watch the dam being built. Never knew or saw what it took in the background. Amazing. Now I know how the current rock piles was built
The tailings used for the dam was laden with gold because the old dredges weren't that efficient. But combine no real advances in gold retrieving technique and gold prices on the low back in the 60's the tailings were deemed perfect building material. So you could say the oroville dam was literally built on gold.
Sometimes it can be difficult to find content that I find interesting on this channel, I think that's party because I'm not American, but I don't see that as an issue, as there is such a depth of content here, I can always find something to watch. Now and then I'll come across a video like this one, which is a pleasure to watch, from start to finish.
I spent some time at Lake Oroville and up the Feather River Canyon when I lived in Chico in the early 80's. A friend's dad worked for PG&E and was part of the installation and early operations of the hydro station there.
Fascinating indeed. What still blows my mind is the level of earth moving destruction those miners were able to accomplish with their primitive equipment.
Yes, because digging up a bunch of dirt will destroy the earth. Everyone knows nature never heals, and an area once cleared and dug up will never ever recover.
Bucket line dredges work in a similar manner to that Macdowell Wellman wheel excavator, the buckets turn on a chain like. a huge chainsaw and dump into a rotating trommel then into sluice boxes and the tailings get shot out the end, while the trommel tailings go onto a stacker conveyor that spreads the tailings in repeating series of rows, mile after mile of lovely earthmoving destruction. 😂
Today, it would take ten years at least, just to set up the processing facilities BEFORE work on the dam started. For some mysterious reason, construction takes several times longer than it use to in the early sixties. Back then men were men, they just rolled up their sleeves and went to work, and got the job done. Today, " men " have trouble figuring out what sex they are, and what restroom to use. The 1920`s up to the early 1970`s were the good old days when men knew how to work, raised, and cared for their families, and worshiped God on Sunday. May we return to those days.
Yeah there's a reason why they don't rush through construction anymore. A great example is this very spillway which collapsed a few years ago due to shoddy workmanship. "They don't make them like they used to" is a good thing.
@@dougc190 i remember the report on the failure (just google "oroville dam failure report", it should be the first link by damsafety). a lot of it was design and construction problems, worsened by poor maintenance. among the issues: poor bedrock conditions not factored into design, or ignored during construction. ground not cleared to solid bedrock (some sections were effectively built on DIRT). ceramic drainage pipes installed incorrectly. drainpipes protruding into the spillway slab. slab not thick enough to begin with. rebar anchors insufficient. almost as soon as the thing was built cracking and high drain flow rates were reported.
Youve no idea. Permits take longer but setting up a reclaimer and conveyor system is 10 times faster these days. And production will be 10 times higher with 10 times fewer workers.
johno The reason they went with a railroad is it was more reliable than a conveyor. If one part of the conveyor breaks everything stops. With the railroad you just set a car out and keep going.
It only cost 100,000,000 to build the whole thing (adjusted for inflation). To repair just the spillways cost over 1,000,000,0000….. sounds like all the consultant and contractors got vacation homes and retirement plans out of the deal…
Different construction standards in those 50 years. For the rebuild, the dozers needed rollover protection systems. The umbrellas used in the 1960s were not quite strong enough. I am sure there were other safety differences among other things. There is a lake to consider during the rebuild too.
Who were these films made for originally? I don't mean jist this one, I mean all the great engineering docs. There is nothing like them today, who were they for at the time?.
They're so well done aren't they?! Superb informative filming, no 'arty' camerawork which is so common in modern so-called documentaries, nothing but good quality imagery, no pretence of 'entertainment', or that ghastly non-word, 'infotainment'. A camera which pans slowly and is steady, unlike the seasickness inducing modern filming. Informative, fact-rich narration of technical value, no irritating and loud soundtrack of pseudo-music. Modern documentary makers could learn so much from the quality of this film. Now, it seems that the ability to produce an informative documentary has all but disappeared, with endless close-ups of a 'presenter' muddling their way through a nausea-inducing set of largely irrelevant arty camera angles, showing little of value, while the viewer struggles to decipher the cliché-ridden language of the uneducated beneath a raucous too loud soundtrack which overwhelms their juvenile prattle.
A lot of these cheaply-produced documentary films from the 50's, 60's, and 70's were shown in public schools. I saw lots of films like this in various classes when I went to school in the 60's and 70's, mostly in middle and high school. The teacher would setup a portable movie screen in front of the class and play the films on 16mm projectors that had sound. By the 80's, the "multi-media technology," as they called it back then, had moved on to videotape and TVs.
@@wtxrailfan I went to elementary school in the 1980s and we still spent many days watching documentaries just like this one on 1950s era projectors. I think TVs were just too expensive for many public schools at the time so teachers made do with the older equipment. We had one TV in the whole school that teachers had to reserve in advance. By the time I reached Junior high school in the 1990s most of the projectors had been replaced with TVs. Then the documentaries shifted towards more National Geographic and Nova type stuff.
I'd like to make a request but I'm unsure if you have the footage if you do the 15 freeway the Cajon Pass in California if that's available that would be amazing
Back in '95, I was with the California Conservation Corps. We did weed abatement around the lake. They drained some and we could get low and take out a bunch of manzanita trees.
Oh man! that’s so cool, I like the old Hough rubber tired bulldozers. that company invented tue articulated wheel loader. they merged with International Harvester.
"The power to load 1 ton of cobble is 1/10th of 1 kW" That means 907W/t. work=force*displacement force=mass*acceleration Assuming we lift the cobble 1m off the ground work=907*9.81*1 w=8888j power=work/time 100=8888/t t=88.88 assuming 100% efficiency it takes 90 seconds to lift 1 tonne of cobble, Or 0.73ton per minute. Which is a long way off 240 ton per minute
What was the cost to the salmon that had their spawning beds cut off from them? Did they build any hatchery facilities? That was a vast water way that supported many species of fish, birds and herds of deer.
It is not the only waterway in the state, dude. Plenty of other rivers still around for salmon to use. I would like to see you come up with a way to provide water for the people of the state if you aren't allowed to dam any rivers. And I don't see that it had any cost to the salmon in the river. The ones who lived there were not killed by the dam. At worst it prevented their offsrpring from being born, but it had no effect on the fish that existed then. And it seems strange for someone who probably fully supports the right of women to kill their offspring before they are born to complain that it metaphysically was wrong to preemptively murder yet-to-be-born salmon by taking away their spawning grounds. Yet you seem to think it would make the murder of their prospective offspring okay, if only we had provided a place for _other_ salmons to procreate and create an equivalent number of offspring. Do you think that makes it okay for a salmon who has bee prevented from procreating, that at least an equivalent number of _other_ salmon have been provided with a place to procreate? Is that what matters most to a salmon, that the overall birth rate of their species stays static? Is it in fact a wrong to the salmon of a particular river that the overall birth rate of their species has been reduced by a fraction of a percent? Do you suppose salmon care? Do you think they would be appeased by the fact that someone built a hatchery to spawn a bunch of salmon every year to release into the river, so at least there would be _some_ salmon alive. Not _them_ , and not their actual descendants, but _some_ salmon. It is also not as if salmon have no other rivers they can use, or they only live in that particular river. They are not going to go extinct because a single river out out of the hundreds of thousands was cut off from them. I am not for the idea of never doing anything that might possibly have an ill effect on any animal life anywhere, regardless of the benefit it would have provided humans to do it. Sorry, can't build roads, animals get hit and it cuts off their habitats. Not just endangered species, ANY species! Can't build cities, they also take up habitat. Can't have farms, think of the destruction that causes to the wildland that should naturally exist where those fields are. So growing food is right out, totally. Maybe we can make an exception, and only allow humans to live in the most sterile and lifeless deserts, maybe in underground tunnels, living off of algae-based food supplements, so as to not negatively impact any of nature anywhere. But even that is probably no good. Even if we packed all 7,000,000,000 humans into a few hundred square miles of the most lifeless desert terrain, no doubt we would still displace hundreds of individual animals that happened to inhabit that area, and that is morally wrong. So you are right, the only answer is to destroy ourselves and remove ourselves from the planet, because our very existence inevitably mean the destruction of nature and wildlife. We can't even be vegetarians without robbing millions of acres of land to use as farms. And even if we tried to live as hunter-gatherers, all 7,000,000,000 of us, think of how many animals would be slaughtered just to feed us every year. Even if you cut out the "hunter" part, you would still have a massive amount of cumulative damage to the environment from 7 billion people foraging for food (not to mention there probably literally is not enough wild resources to feed and house 7 billion people living "in nature" without any efficient farms. It took hundreds of thousands of acres for a tribe of a few thousand Native Americans to support themselves off the land. Not sure that would work for seven billion people.)
@@jamescoleakaericunderwood2503 And there were only 4 billion people on the planet in 1974 after this dam was completed. Doubled in less than 50 years. WW is right. Our species is a cancer.
For the time. These days it looks like a hell of a lot of double handling. Why not run conveyors from the pits straight to site, Do your mixing at the input rather than an intermediary step? Well because technology wasnt quite there at the time. But yeah its pretty cool to see just how good things were back then. Not too far distant from today but a huge leap from just a few years earlier.
Love these old presentations. No music, no frills, just pure information.
Love these old films of projects. Back when men were men and women were glad of it! Blue collar America at its finest!
Exactly! Ever since Obama happened men think they are women! 😞 thanks obama
I worked on the rebuild, we trucked 4/6 ton boulders 24/7 from the Feather river to the dam. 100 trucks, dozers,excavators and helicopters working together to save the town of Oroville.
Where did they pull all that gravel from for the rebuild in just curious 🧐
@@maxgelein2614 there is a pit on hwy 20 outside of Marysille.4 ton boulders.
@@dangarrison3503 I know the area you are talking about 👍 that place is massive! Crazy how big some of those piles are
Growing up in Oroville this was our Sunday after church entertainment. We would stop at Foster Freeze and get ice cream and head up to check the new hight of the dam. There were 4 overlook parking areas built for viewing at the dam. I went on a tour of the powerhouse after completion and a viewing of the penstock valves after installation. It was a way to spend time with my dad and the memories are still strong ❤❤
Remember when America was Great and Americans built great things? This Project was finished when Ronald Reagan was Governor of CA
Yeah and the spill way was garbage and the boomers who built it didn't bother to make it correctly so people on 2018 had to.
You mean, this dam whose service spillway fell apart due to corner cutting (missing anchors) and whose emergency spillway was much more erodable than it was supposed to be?
I guess it does represent America, a third world country built on lies and cut corners hiding behind a facade of prosperity.
My family would go watch the dam being built. Never knew or saw what it took in the background. Amazing. Now I know how the current rock piles was built
The tailings used for the dam was laden with gold because the old dredges weren't that efficient. But combine no real advances in gold retrieving technique and gold prices on the low back in the 60's the tailings were deemed perfect building material. So you could say the oroville dam was literally built on gold.
its spelled OROVILLE WQITH A CAPOTL O nowe a small O. THANKE YOUE!!!
Just imagine of all that material was ran with modern equipment I bet it would have produced near what was removed in the 1800s
Great video! My dad and both my brothers were born on Oroville. My grandparents owned a duplex on Oroville Dam road AKA Washington Blvd...
Well. That was very timely
Someone needs to email this to Juan Brown at the Blancolorio channel. He's got a lot of great content on the rebuild of the Oroville dam.
Hey @SouthJerseySoun I think Blancolorio used footage from this video in some of his videos ..
@@mikeskidmore6754 that's possible, it's super interesting! what achievements men, and mankind made, in those days and more historical ones before..!
Wow~that dumper unit was amazing tech for 65...
Sometimes it can be difficult to find content that I find interesting on this channel, I think that's party because I'm not American, but I don't see that as an issue, as there is such a depth of content here, I can always find something to watch. Now and then I'll come across a video like this one, which is a pleasure to watch, from start to finish.
I ride my dirt bike through that train tunnel almost every day 🤘🏻
That was good, I'd rather watch this kind of stuff than anything on TV.
I backpacked in the area around 1979, when I lived in San Jose.
I spent some time at Lake Oroville and up the Feather River Canyon when I lived in Chico in the early 80's. A friend's dad worked for PG&E and was part of the installation and early operations of the hydro station there.
Fascinating indeed. What still blows my mind is the level of earth moving destruction those miners were able to accomplish with their primitive equipment.
Yes, because digging up a bunch of dirt will destroy the earth. Everyone knows nature never heals, and an area once cleared and dug up will never ever recover.
Bucket line dredges work in a similar manner to that Macdowell Wellman wheel excavator, the buckets turn on a chain like. a huge chainsaw and dump into a rotating trommel then into sluice boxes and the tailings get shot out the end, while the trommel tailings go onto a stacker conveyor that spreads the tailings in repeating series of rows, mile after mile of lovely earthmoving destruction. 😂
Today, it would take ten years at least, just to set up the processing facilities BEFORE work on the dam started. For some mysterious reason, construction takes several times longer than it use to in the early sixties. Back then men were men, they just rolled up their sleeves and went to work, and got the job done. Today, " men " have trouble figuring out what sex they are, and what restroom to use. The 1920`s up to the early 1970`s were the good old days when men knew how to work, raised, and cared for their families, and worshiped God on Sunday. May we return to those days.
Yeah there's a reason why they don't rush through construction anymore. A great example is this very spillway which collapsed a few years ago due to shoddy workmanship. "They don't make them like they used to" is a good thing.
@@rubiconnn that was because of deferred maintenance,is why the spillway did what it did so you have to blame the state agency not who built it.
@@dougc190 i remember the report on the failure (just google "oroville dam failure report", it should be the first link by damsafety). a lot of it was design and construction problems, worsened by poor maintenance. among the issues: poor bedrock conditions not factored into design, or ignored during construction. ground not cleared to solid bedrock (some sections were effectively built on DIRT). ceramic drainage pipes installed incorrectly. drainpipes protruding into the spillway slab. slab not thick enough to begin with. rebar anchors insufficient. almost as soon as the thing was built cracking and high drain flow rates were reported.
Youve no idea.
Permits take longer but setting up a reclaimer and conveyor system is 10 times faster these days. And production will be 10 times higher with 10 times fewer workers.
johno The reason they went with a railroad is it was more reliable than a conveyor. If one part of the conveyor breaks everything stops. With the railroad you just set a car out and keep going.
It only cost 100,000,000 to build the whole thing (adjusted for inflation). To repair just the spillways cost over 1,000,000,0000….. sounds like all the consultant and contractors got vacation homes and retirement plans out of the deal…
Different construction standards in those 50 years. For the rebuild, the dozers needed rollover protection systems. The umbrellas used in the 1960s were not quite strong enough. I am sure there were other safety differences among other things. There is a lake to consider during the rebuild too.
IT MOORE COMPLICATED. OT WAS CONCRETE AMND STEEL. IT BEE DOFFERNE NOW THAN WHEN THEM BUIOLT IN IN 1865.
Cheaters think that everybody else cheats too.
Safety is expensive.
Constructing the dam resulted in 34 deaths. The spillway repair finished without a single injury. Big difference.
This was done back when America could, and would, do amazing things. Today our government is so partisan they can just barely agree on a budget.
That's because Republicans are too busy lining up to kiss Vladimir Putin's ass. Traitors, every single one of them.
Explains why the spillway and emergency failed in 2017. Boomers can't do anything right, they're the "made in china" quality generation of america.
Aren't all governments partisan, isn't that sort of their point?
@@yakacm not all the time. Good leaders can, and will, put their politics aside to solve a problem for all the country not just their supporters
How about building another one for more storage during drought years?
Who were these films made for originally? I don't mean jist this one, I mean all the great engineering docs. There is nothing like them today, who were they for at the time?.
They're so well done aren't they?! Superb informative filming, no 'arty' camerawork which is so common in modern so-called documentaries, nothing but good quality imagery, no pretence of 'entertainment', or that ghastly non-word, 'infotainment'. A camera which pans slowly and is steady, unlike the seasickness inducing modern filming. Informative, fact-rich narration of technical value, no irritating and loud soundtrack of pseudo-music. Modern documentary makers could learn so much from the quality of this film. Now, it seems that the ability to produce an informative documentary has all but disappeared, with endless close-ups of a 'presenter' muddling their way through a nausea-inducing set of largely irrelevant arty camera angles, showing little of value, while the viewer struggles to decipher the cliché-ridden language of the uneducated beneath a raucous too loud soundtrack which overwhelms their juvenile prattle.
Yes documentaries are produced on a 3rd grade level now days.
A lot of these cheaply-produced documentary films from the 50's, 60's, and 70's were shown in public schools. I saw lots of films like this in various classes when I went to school in the 60's and 70's, mostly in middle and high school. The teacher would setup a portable movie screen in front of the class and play the films on 16mm projectors that had sound. By the 80's, the "multi-media technology," as they called it back then, had moved on to videotape and TVs.
@@wtxrailfan I went to elementary school in the 1980s and we still spent many days watching documentaries just like this one on 1950s era projectors. I think TVs were just too expensive for many public schools at the time so teachers made do with the older equipment. We had one TV in the whole school that teachers had to reserve in advance. By the time I reached Junior high school in the 1990s most of the projectors had been replaced with TVs. Then the documentaries shifted towards more National Geographic and Nova type stuff.
This one seems to have been made by the construction company.
New title. "The collection of gravel to build a dam".
More like the film was commissione as a publicity and marketing scheme by the company selling or operating the excavator. Someone had to pay for it.
I'd like to make a request but I'm unsure if you have the footage if you do the 15 freeway the Cajon Pass in California if that's available that would be amazing
I second that
Thank you
thankyou so much for posting so imformative.
Back in '95, I was with the California Conservation Corps. We did weed abatement around the lake. They drained some and we could get low and take out a bunch of manzanita trees.
Too bad they didn’t build 5 of these back in the day.
Awesome
That was a good year
Oh man! that’s so cool, I like the old Hough rubber tired bulldozers. that company invented tue articulated wheel loader. they merged with International Harvester.
Didn't see a mention of the spillway. (Like the video's Title implied.)
(I'm just sayin' ✌)
#ConstructiveCriticism
#DontShootTheMessenger
As seen on the show Fun With Dirt, part of the friday night lineup on UHF Channel 62.
It comes on after Underwater Bingo For Teens.
Wheres the Ironworkers!! Just rock?
"The power to load 1 ton of cobble is 1/10th of 1 kW"
That means 907W/t.
work=force*displacement
force=mass*acceleration
Assuming we lift the cobble 1m off the ground
work=907*9.81*1
w=8888j
power=work/time
100=8888/t
t=88.88
assuming 100% efficiency it takes 90 seconds to lift 1 tonne of cobble, Or 0.73ton per minute. Which is a long way off 240 ton per minute
You did all that math to come with the wrong answer. Typical engineer 🙄
Say what? Huh?
Your work/force- power-time is off
What was the cost to the salmon that had their spawning beds cut off from them? Did they build any hatchery facilities? That was a vast water way that supported many species of fish, birds and herds of deer.
It is not the only waterway in the state, dude. Plenty of other rivers still around for salmon to use. I would like to see you come up with a way to provide water for the people of the state if you aren't allowed to dam any rivers. And I don't see that it had any cost to the salmon in the river. The ones who lived there were not killed by the dam. At worst it prevented their offsrpring from being born, but it had no effect on the fish that existed then. And it seems strange for someone who probably fully supports the right of women to kill their offspring before they are born to complain that it metaphysically was wrong to preemptively murder yet-to-be-born salmon by taking away their spawning grounds.
Yet you seem to think it would make the murder of their prospective offspring okay, if only we had provided a place for _other_ salmons to procreate and create an equivalent number of offspring. Do you think that makes it okay for a salmon who has bee prevented from procreating, that at least an equivalent number of _other_ salmon have been provided with a place to procreate? Is that what matters most to a salmon, that the overall birth rate of their species stays static? Is it in fact a wrong to the salmon of a particular river that the overall birth rate of their species has been reduced by a fraction of a percent? Do you suppose salmon care? Do you think they would be appeased by the fact that someone built a hatchery to spawn a bunch of salmon every year to release into the river, so at least there would be _some_ salmon alive. Not _them_ , and not their actual descendants, but _some_ salmon.
It is also not as if salmon have no other rivers they can use, or they only live in that particular river. They are not going to go extinct because a single river out out of the hundreds of thousands was cut off from them. I am not for the idea of never doing anything that might possibly have an ill effect on any animal life anywhere, regardless of the benefit it would have provided humans to do it. Sorry, can't build roads, animals get hit and it cuts off their habitats. Not just endangered species, ANY species! Can't build cities, they also take up habitat. Can't have farms, think of the destruction that causes to the wildland that should naturally exist where those fields are. So growing food is right out, totally.
Maybe we can make an exception, and only allow humans to live in the most sterile and lifeless deserts, maybe in underground tunnels, living off of algae-based food supplements, so as to not negatively impact any of nature anywhere. But even that is probably no good. Even if we packed all 7,000,000,000 humans into a few hundred square miles of the most lifeless desert terrain, no doubt we would still displace hundreds of individual animals that happened to inhabit that area, and that is morally wrong. So you are right, the only answer is to destroy ourselves and remove ourselves from the planet, because our very existence inevitably mean the destruction of nature and wildlife. We can't even be vegetarians without robbing millions of acres of land to use as farms. And even if we tried to live as hunter-gatherers, all 7,000,000,000 of us, think of how many animals would be slaughtered just to feed us every year. Even if you cut out the "hunter" part, you would still have a massive amount of cumulative damage to the environment from 7 billion people foraging for food (not to mention there probably literally is not enough wild resources to feed and house 7 billion people living "in nature" without any efficient farms. It took hundreds of thousands of acres for a tribe of a few thousand Native Americans to support themselves off the land. Not sure that would work for seven billion people.)
@@justforever96 8 billion..7.96 Billion as of today...
My November...this year 8 billion
@@jamescoleakaericunderwood2503 And there were only 4 billion people on the planet in 1974 after this dam was completed.
Doubled in less than 50 years.
WW is right. Our species is a cancer.
@@justforever96 let's make sure we kill all the Salmon before we become Hunter gathers again
Someone forgot to mention that our flood control ways have basically turned our Rivers into canals... We've meddled way too much and can fix it
Efficient.
For the time.
These days it looks like a hell of a lot of double handling. Why not run conveyors from the pits straight to site, Do your mixing at the input rather than an intermediary step? Well because technology wasnt quite there at the time.
But yeah its pretty cool to see just how good things were back then. Not too far distant from today but a huge leap from just a few years earlier.
man are dams aren't ready for an AR atmosphereic river storm or an ARK 🤣🤣 we will all be screwed