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Great video as always! 100 year Rapidan Dam south of Mankato, MN had a 'failure' back in June effecting bridge footings as well as a family owned restaurant as well as the downstream impacts. If you look into it and find it worthy of a story I would enjoy your review. Thank you either way!
Rather then using the strap down sensor system; why not just paint the depth on the concrete at multiple spots and stick some cheap cameras on those spots to monitor the water depth in the control room? Seems far cheaper and less chance of problems. Besides as cheap as cameras are these days why would you not have camera eyes on the water levels at all times?
@@Morristown337Something not widley known is the reason the probes were moved was they needed to know NOT how high the water was, but how much water was in the reservoir, silt pulled up from the lower lake was filling the upper reservoir and thus they had to raise the full level in order to keep the same amount of water in the pool. The sensor wasn't really what should have stopped the pumps, it was more to tell them how much power was available, and thus it had to be moved up more and more with more silt.
Have a look at the Vajont disaster. The dam is still there, perfectly built and with no reservoir anymore. The owner knew the mountain was going to fall and was building a bypass on the mountain side, when it fell off. Entire villages where wiped off the chart. Yet, as a monument to both human ingenuity and foolishness, the dam stood and still stands.
Retired Hydroelectric Operator here. I was still working when Taum Sauk happened. It’s a familiar pattern of mismanagement, ignoring bad instrumentation/controls. We were plagued with management taking the attitude “we can probably get away with it.” At the time, there was no mystery within the trade as to what happened.
I suspect money would have been a big contributer to the decisions made. Doing things properly would have 'cost too much'. Not as much as the fines ended up costing the company in the end.
@@barryrahn5957 It is. This time of year is beautiful with the leaves turning color but most people like to go when it's warmer so they can enjoy the water.
I'm so very grateful to my college engineering professors who took integrity so seriously. They often tried to impress upon us how allowing seemingly small things through can turn into disasters that cost lives.
The problem is it's being taught by professors. They usually have the luxury of not being part of cost benefit. Engineers are always being coerced into complying with legal and technical hurdles in the most economic way possible.
@@xevious4142 Tbh, every (good) CS-Professor tells the students how bad it is to cut costs or take shortcuts. The problem are the companies that cut costs and then wonder why the code is low quality, hard to maintain and unstable
@@leon81061 it's a lot more institutionalized in engineering. Every engineering professor emphasized our work could kill people if we didn't do our best. CS doesn't have the same urgency unfortunately.
I had the privilege of being part of a student geology group that was allowed to tour the area the following spring, hiking from the base to the top. It was an excellent educational opportunity, and the new rock exposures in the scour were amazing. I recall a professor sampling a freshly-exposed unit that was previously unmapped in the area, dubbing it the "purple smarty" rock due to its color and texture.
I also got to visit the exposed outcrops 5 years ago with the University of Kansas and the purple rocks (I think they're rhyolites, it's been a while) are still very much there haha I can only imagine what it was like visiting it the next spring!
I grew up in this area during the time of the disaster. I heard people say “Taum Sauk” over and over again but I didn’t understand how it happened. From their stories, I always imagined a wall exploded or something. This really helped me understand the history of my old region. Thank you!
I used to hike from Taum Sauk down to Johnson Shut-Ins a lot back when I was at school in Rolla. I seem to recall that one could see the reservoir from the trail, but I could be way off-base after 20+ years.
@@Sturmcrow1 You could actually hike a relatively short distance to the reservoir from a spur from the trail. I did so several years before the disaster, not realizing the reservoir was even there. It was surreal to me to suddenly see this huge placid "lake" sitting on the peak of a "mountain" (in Missouri terms ;)). Felt like I was in some Area 51 type scenario.
My mom and I camped at Johnson’s Shut-ins the summer before this occurred. I took my family there a couple years ago and seeing the drastic difference in what the park looks like is incredible. The boulders left scattered all over the old campground are absolutely massive!
Fascinating. As a retired Safety Engineer I'm surprised the original over topping was not a critical event requiring immediate review and corrective action. It would seem they would check to make sure everything in the reservior was still in spec with the original plans and that any changes were fixed immediately. Apparently they did not understand the failure possibilities and results. I might have to go visit this dam!! Great video!
From 12:20-12:25 he mentions that the "red flag" of the original over topping was missed because the owner hadn't notified the regulator that it had occurred. Agree that the corporate culture at the owner clearly did not include sufficient safety oriented thinking.
They did send divers, they _thought_ they identified the root cause, and they _thought_ they applied sufficient mitigation. But they didn't follow up on whether the mitigation was sufficient and whether the detected cause could explain the issue sufficiently. Especially sad was the issue of redundant overfill sensors connected in an AND configuration and set at a point too high. Those are the issues that a person stationed can see and start thinking "now why is that happening". Machines are really good at following orders, but they don't have common sense.
@@Validole its a sign that no one thought at all. As usual. On the land - because "its not my task to think, I am not paid for this", in office - because they do not know whats going on somewhere in 1000s miles, and "its not my task, I am Great Fuehrer, deciding about millions, not $100 sensors, let some stinky engineer down there thinks!". Kaboooooom.
I don't believe the public can access the site. (Maybe you have contacts?) But before the disaster, you could drive right up to it and walk to the top. You could also drive down to the power plant at the bottom of the mountain. There was a really nice little natural history museum at the gatehouse that was worth a visit, too. I sometimes wonder what happened to that.
I was one of the reinsurance claims adjusters working on the Taum Sauk dam collapse. I was surprised the event did not make the main stream press (CBS and ABC). on the other end I legally could not talk about the event. Its amazing there was no loss of life!!!
That's the problem. Corporations issue these NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS which is counter to the Constitution. There is no transparency or truth when you are allowed to keep hiding it. It is asinine.
@@OneAdam12Adam it's not "counter to the constitution". the right to free speech is SO poorly understood, and here's exhibit A. the constitution projects your right to free speech from the government, NOT private institutions. this is why speech can be moderated in places like online forums or social media sites, and they can ban things like hate speech. however, the US government is NOT allowed to do that, which is what the First Amendment actually dictates. same applies to the right to protest, the right to religious freedom, etc etc. companies are completely within their lawful and constitutional right to issue NDAs to their employees, and you can only break your NDA if you're reporting a crime. "i think they did a shoddy job", even if well substantiated, is just an opinion, it's not a crime. unless you can concretely point to criminal activity as a whistleblower, you can't just flap your mouth about company practicies no matter how scummy you personally found them to be, at least not until the NDA's termination (most NDAs have a kind of expiration date and aren't indefinite). now, having said all that, do i think it's right for companies to hide shoddy, scummy business practices behind NDAs? no, not at all. i think they frequently abuse NDAs to cover their butts. that doesn't make it unconstitutional, it just makes it scummy. it's BAD. but not illegal. (the NDAs i mean, some of the practices they hide are illegal though)
All I can say is that Ameren got very very lucky this happened in the offseason for Johnson shut ins. This could have killed 100s of people if it was in the summer because it wipped out the entire camp ground and rushed through the shut ins which is packed during the summer.
@@TheNighthawk00 it drains and refills almost everyday during the summer. It drains for power during high power need times usually in the afternoon during the heat of day and then is pumped full at night during low power need times.
@@KenHauptfleisch It was only survivable if you went up a tree I would think. The ranger and his family survived because the structure they were in absorbed the force of the impact as it was knocked off the foundation and it was lighter so it stayed on top of the water and debris.
It’s very cool to walk through. done the hike through it a few times and it’s pretty much completely grown over now unfortunately but very cool hike after it happened.
@@Cody_michael damage is neat when it is intentional too. You can learn so much about the structure of things by watching them fall apart. scheduled demolition of towers is always fascinating to watch. We're unravelling the secrets of the universe by watching subatomic particles shatter. Automotive safety has been improved astronomically by people who are fascinated by the results of crash tests. Nothing wrong with being interested in the results of an event. There's something wrong with hoping for the event or acting to cause the event though.
The excess soil in the rock embankment reminds me of the Kansas City Hyatt disaster. A classic case of where the construction crew didn't adhere to the engineering specs and the engineers didn't double check that their instructions were being followed. I'm an electrical engineer with over 40 years of experience and I've lost count of the number of times that corners were cut behind the engineer's backs.
@@jeromedrescher1402No, they did not. While the change was discussed between the contractor and the engineering team, it was not properly analyzed or approved by the engineer in charge, Jack D. Gillum. The lack of a detailed review of the new design led to the failure of the connections under load, causing the collapse of the walkways during a crowded event, killing 114 people and injuring many more.
@@AncientWildTV Corners were cut in the construction of the Hyatt Regency skywalks for a variety of reasons, including miscommunication, pressure to meet deadlines, cost considerations, and inadequate oversight during the construction process. 1. Simplification of the Design for Easier Construction: One of the main reasons corners were cut was the decision to modify the original skywalk design to make construction easier. The original design called for continuous support rods running through both the second- and fourth-floor walkways. To make installation simpler, the contractors changed the design to use two separate sets of rods. This change was meant to save time and reduce complexity in the construction process but led to the fatal increase in load on the upper walkway’s connections . 2. Lack of Proper Review: The modification to the rod design was not properly reviewed by the structural engineers. The engineering firm, Gillum-Colaco, was overwhelmed with other projects at the time and did not perform a thorough analysis of the changes. This inadequate review allowed the flawed design to proceed unchecked  . 3. Cost and Time Pressures: The Hyatt Regency was a high-profile project, and there were likely pressures to keep construction costs down and meet deadlines. Cutting corners by making design modifications without full review might have been seen as a way to keep the project on track. Unfortunately, these shortcuts came at the cost of safety . 4. Miscommunication and Lack of Accountability: There were several communication failures between the contractors and engineers. The engineering firm assumed that the contractor would seek approval for any significant design changes, while the contractor assumed the changes were minor enough not to require such approval. This lack of clarity in responsibilities contributed to the eventual collapse  . In summary, a combination of time-saving measures, poor communication, and insufficient engineering oversight led to the corners being cut, ultimately contributing to one of the deadliest structural failures in U.S. history.
great job on this. I worked at Johnson's Shut Ins in 2003 and 2004. We always talked about what would happen if the dam broke. So glad it was in December and not July with a full campground of up to 500 people. the Park Superintendent Jerry Toops and his family discussed it several times when I was there. It's amazing they survived the cold water after being swept away. I also still have piece of the original inner black liner material from the reservoir.
I had to go to college to learn about engineering disasters. That was back in the 90s. I visited Johnson Shut Ins as a child and coincidentally I was there just a few years ago. I never knew about this catastrophe until I watched this video. There's a lot of value here.
Even the most rainy countries in the world barely have about 3,000 millimeters of rainfall per YEAR. That's like 10 feet max. So in case the exits are clogged AND you know that a heavy rainstorm is coming, you'd only need the water level to be 10 feet below the max capacity and you'd be good for an entire year to fix the clogging even in the most rainy country in the world. And that's if we exclude the possibility of simply using emergency drainage systems like they have in dams.
Most rain falls infront off mountains, because of the fall of temperature by every meter of hight and vapor pressure. And like others already wrote: it can be calculated by weather forcast.
Howdy - I wanted to let you know, your videos, especially those on energy production and dams, inspired me to return to college this Fall. My college career so far has been pretty messy, but watching your content reminded me of how much I enjoyed my electrical engineering course in high school. I'm now attending Texas State University, hoping to one day work at a hydroelectric facility, or in other renewable energy fields. Keep up the wonderful work! I'm sure I'm not the only one to be inspired by your love for infrastructure. Thank you :)
Congrats on the decision to go back to college. Now go get yourself one of those Ground News subscriptions that Grady advertises. As a college student, you will be subjected to a lot of one-sided indoctrination. Ground News can help you find a balance of news sources. Good luck in school!
I live a few miles from Tom Sauk. I have flown my airplane over it several times. The entire hillside is still completely stripped. There are huge boulders scattered in the fields below it. It's wild looking.
I live about 85 miles north of Taum Sauk. I remeber the failure. I have not seen a better explanation of the event. Well done. The camping at Johnson Shut-ins and water activities are great. The failure did a lot of damage, but the restorations to the park went well.
Visited it as a kid in the 70's. Shame it did damage to Johnson Shutins which was an awesome state park in that era. Seems like it was poorly designed from the start. Add poor maintenance and you have a recipe for disaster.
@@martincox9691 l do not know. I remember the natural waterslide of the shutins and diving off of the cliffs around the corner from the shutins. I jumped from about thirty feet but people were jumping from what looked like 60 feet. I was so taken with the river that l recall nothing about the campground except we camped in it.
I operate a Pumped Storage Dam and we have training about this incident! We have automated sensors AND a live camera to physically verify the Upper Reservoir level. We also have a spillway as a last resort lol
A true understatement, I think most people watching this have no idea how bad that would have been. The main attraction of the park is basically a meat grinder, the lucky ones would be swept away
Things I love about this video: (1) the intensity with which you deliver the words "and what the investigations found would change a lot about the field of dam safety", (2) the fact that I am immediately 100% hooked and want to learn all about dam safety and how the field changed as a result of these investigations
I bought a project truck in the area about 10 months ago. On my way home is when I first noticed the structure. I had no idea what it was, but it looked absolutely magnificent and monstrous. I had to find a spot to pull over and look on satellite imagery to find out what it was and was totally amazed! I had no idea such a reservoir existed. This is the first time even hearing about the failure. Thanks for the info!
Grady.... I'm in my late 60's; but I want to share something - admittedly "..again" - but it certainly bears repeating: "The WORLD ought to see your videos".. I sincerely believe that. To that end, I have purchased your book, etc ... all in the service of doing what I can to further your channel. Just not enough words to express how highly I think of your efforts.
Wow, I use to camp at that beautiful state park and its river in the 90's and remember being disturbed that we couldn't go any longer due to this incident. Being a kid at the time, I never really grasped what had happened and never saw any photos of the area. Thanks for this deep dive into a disaster? and its aftermath.
Trust in Jesus Christ, not antichrist. + I hope and pray that folks change their view and invite the Lord Jesus Christ into their life to rule and reign. + (Proverbs 16:18 > Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.) + Satan is referred to as the prince of the power of the air for good reason, he owns the airwaves on planet earth and is the god (little g) of this world. It is my hope and prayer that you choose the God (Big G) of heaven who controls the destiny of your eternal soul. + (Matthew 10:28 > And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.) (Proverbs 9:10 > The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.) (2 Corinthians 4:3-4 > [3]-But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: [4]-In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.) (Romans 10:9-10 > [9]-That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. [10]-For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.) (Romans 10:13 > For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.) (Ephesians 2:8-9 > [8]-For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: [9]-Not of works, lest any man should boast.) (Revelation 3:20 > Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me.) Is Jesus knocking at the door of your heart? Is this your opportunity for eternal salvation? If it is, I hope and pray that you open the door and invite Him in to your heart and life, in Jesus' name. Amen! All glory be to God. Amen!!
@@AquaAdventuresTTV Buddy, they are a porn bot. They are spamming UA-cam. These users are all over the place. Did you think this was a discussion about careers? Snowstorm temp IQ over here
I was about to say "Sounds like a Normal Accidents scenario", then Grady chimes in! Excellent book, definitely a must read for anyone who wants to study failures in any system, especially complex ones
@@andrewjames4786 The "Swiss Cheese Model" seems more on point: a bunch of (relatively) minor errors and failures that, combined in just the right way under just the right set of (normal) circumstances, permits the entire system to fail. You do wonder how anybody could see water over-topping the dam, without running with hair on fire to the engineer in charge. While it's true that it has to over-top _somewhere_ along the upper edge, not being curious enough to discover that the dry side is a full two feet higher indicates a "tell the boss and let him worry about it" mentality. (The boss failing to actually worry about it is the most egregious of the many errors.)
what in god damns name makes this a Normal Accidents scenario. This was complete incompetence at every "minor" issue. ONE TEST would have showed the redundant systems did not work. If this is considered a Normal Accidents scenario then we are forgiving the idiots that made those errors has if it was easy to make. You have to be completely brain-dead to implement these systems and not do it right or just test the thing.
Grady, here in Chattanooga, we have one of the only pump storage facilities that are both on top of the mountain AND mostly a “natural” reservoir. Raccoon Mountain Pump Storage operated by the TVA utilized a retired quarry in addition to a wall created to close up the U-shaped reservoir. Check it out!
I've started working on Energy Security in Britain very recently and your videos have been very insightful in getting some basic understanding over the technicalities of such projects and the challenges they may face. Really appreciate the knowledge you share with us!
As someone that spent a few years inspecting foundations and designing upgrades, mostly related to fixing settlement, I saw a lot of undermined foundations and footings. EDIT: It's always due to water as well. During a large rain storm see where all the water is running off your roof, or your concrete patio, etc, and make sure it isn't going by your house or garage or anything supporting a lot of weight.
@@hughoxford8735 makes sense. For some reason I always conceptualized the "mining" part of it as a much bigger sort of...well, mine-sized hole! Always seemed like a horribly inconvenient way to try to get at somebody, but your explanation makes more sense 😝
I work at Mt St Helens. We have 4 earthen dams up here. 3 created by the eruption and landslide, and one man made to hold back sediment. An early retention dam failed in the 80’s. The army corps of engineers constructed spillways on 2 of the natural dams, and Spirit Lake, the most well known one, had a tunnel constructed to act much like the hole in a bathtub. To this day the tunnel has issues (turns out in a. Volcanic landscape, there are faults… and the retention dam had to be built bigger recently. Nearly 45 years later and still dealing with it!
I backpacked the Taum Sauk trail a couple years ago that runs around this, with no prior knowledge of it existing. Atop one of the adjacent peaks you get a great view, but man was it quite the sight to come upon... Almost gave you an uneasy feeling, but no doubt an engineering achievement.
Being involved in a rural water system with a reservoir, I've seen the filling telemetry fail many times and an operator is not always present. While there is an overtopping mechanism, I'm not really sure the hillside below could withstand sustained flow. I think I'll open this question again. Thanks!
You ought to cover Ellicott City, Maryland and how they've coped in the aftermath of back-to-back "historic" floods. I had friends watch their cars float away on the torrent from the second story of a bar they couldn't leave due to the floodwaters. An enormous mitigation project is in the works to try to "floodproof" the historic downtown. One issue that's been brought up is now rampant development on the hills above the town has decreased the amount of land available to absorb rainfall, leading to streets becoming waterfalls and rivers in heavy rains.
A similar project was built between 1969 - 1972 at Turlough Hill in Wicklow Ireland. One of the 1st plants of this type in Europe. My Uncle died in the building of the plant. He was one of seven people who died during the project. It’s still integral and critical to Ireland’s Electricity supply, because it allows the regulation of supply at peak demand.
I really enjoy watching your videos about engineering and even though I'm not an engineer at all I still like listening about places like the Taum Sauk Dam in the Ozarks and it's eventual failure have a great week and thank you.👋☕🖖🇺🇲
When I was a kid in Boy Scouts we would camp in the group camping area at the far northeast side of the old campground setup along the creek… it would have been a deal if we were there when the water came.
I am a process controls engineer, and I just want to say that very complex projects that are many orders of magnitude greater than this failure run every day all over the world. I understand what Grady is saying about complex systems being more vulnerable to issues, but if they are constructed right, checked by the right process, and the correct risks are managed they are just as effective as relatively simpler processees. There's a reason complex pharmaceuticals and boilers both run every day; one might be more complicated but both can be done safely and reliably.
Only if the operator checked the monitor. Being human he probably would not have done so after the first month or so on the job. It still needed a spillway, and a very simple safety cutout.
On a chemical plant I worked on we had a tank overflow. It had a high alarm but the operator missed the alarm, didn’t switch off the inlet pump and the tank overflowed. So a pump cut out was added if the level exceeded the alarm by a few percent. Sometime later there was another overflow. Turns out the operators had started relying on the pump auto cut off to do the job, ignoring the alarm and not intervening manually. Wish I could remember the next step (was probably 30 years ago!). The moral is if you going to add auto cutoffs you’d better make sure of its reliability and its demand rate and design the cutoff system appropriately with the required reliability.
I was going to suggest overflow sensors, but it sounds like they thought of those. *sigh* A failsafe feature doesn't matter if it doesn't stop a disaster when the anticipated failures occur.
Loved the video! I was actually at Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park recently, and you can still make out where the spill happened as all of the trees are much smaller/newer than the surrounding forest.
Great video as always! I am just curious how nobody noticed that their dam is filling up over designed capacity. Also having no emergency spillway looks like cost cutting measure. At least now they have spillway channel deforested for them...
Certainly for cost cutting though not necessarily because 'they were being cheap' but more because they essentially had complete control of water input to the reservoir it wasn't really necessary and so was an unjustified expense. There are only two ways for water to get into the reservoir. Pumping it, and natural rain that has a catchment area equal to the area of the reservoir (and so 1 inch of rain is equal to roughly 1 inch of rise in water level) The pump can be turned off and has failsafes to do this (and 40 years of demonstrated experience that it worked when installed correctly - it was a redesign that introduced an installation flaw) The rain can't be turned off but even the most torrential of downpours possible in the region can be drained from the reservoir faster than the rain can fill it up. With 2ft of freeboard planned, that's equal to about half the average annual rainfall of that location and so even if you had it filled to the top of its 2ft limit the natural cycling of every 1-3 days of drawdown for power generation would put it back under the 2ft limit.
@@dorvinion Agreed, they did not see it as necessary, as usual in private business with little regulation or oversight. Nevertheless, substandard composition of the dam core is another clear proof of cutting corners where possible. So its like "Oh, we dont have to build this spillway, we have complete control over this overtopping phenomenon", while putting aside everything that you need to do to be in that complete control. Like measuring soil settlement over time, dam profile and such. Also the absence of CCTV is mindlowing, cost of operation of such device is very cheap compared to damage it can prevent. In my country alarms and red flags would be raised much earlier - just because you cannot have leaking embankment dam. Thats a huge NO-NO, prompting complete study about the dam condition.
@@openttd-cztr191Listen, your country might be great, but I bet the reason they have not had a failure this big is because they don’t have anything this big. Engineering is hard for everyone.
@@CptJistuce In pretty same way as today. Leaks are measured in terms of volume, location and pressure. If anything goes over set limits, you evacuate the water, conduct survey and fix the problem. Its engineering. Its not that it did not happen in my country. Heck we have memorial for dam burst from 1916, which swept whole villages, and it was because leak in the dam was ignored and downplayed. In time when CCTV and modern measurements were not available. Thanks to that and other experience we have pretty strict regulations. For example safety inspections are done by separate and independent body from the owner - even when some dams are owned by the state and the regulatory body is also responsible to the state (ergo people). Dams are awesome, but if neglected or mismanadged very dangerous - water kills and destroys pretty much as fire if unleashed.
This is going to be a good one! Johnson Shut-In's is a state and national treasure! It's a shame what happened, however I think the state made some upgrades to the camp sites after the power company settlement. They now have cabins, which I don't recall any being there when I was there as a kid. Anyway, there was a lot of arrogance on the part of the power company on the original dam. That being said, we need more pumped hydro in this country, and I hope this is a learning lesson.
@@benoithudson7235 Batteries work fine but they don't have the capacity like pumped hydro. The main drawback to pumped hydro is the amount of head pressure needed in order for it to work. Usually cities don't have the amount of fall needed in order to make it effective.
@@adammuncy8475 : A single battery cell has a lot more storage capacity than a raindrop. Doesn't matter, because the grid doesn't rely on a single one of either, it relies on huge numbers. Utilities and related companies have clearly decided that batteries is where it's at, because over the past few years, they dramatically increased the amount of storage they're buying and it's almost all batteries.
Hi Mr. Grady, I want to say that I think your videos are better (In my opinion) than the old "How it's made" series because you have a good content per unit time with no fluff, and I appreciate that.
I go to Johnsons Shut-Ins with my kids all the time, and have hiked that scour. I have been waiting for someone to make a good video on what happened there in 2005, thank you Grady!
I'm (morbidly) interested to see what the results of a battery fire in one of these grid scale storage facilities will be like. Doubly interested for the results of said fire when the facility is inevitably built near something that really shouldn't be exposed to all that heat.
I assume without evidence that they will space out the batteries in a grid-by-grid pattern to isolate any such fires from spreading. Seems the obvious cheap solution.
The cheapest chemistries are LFP and sodium ion. Both need very high temperatures for thermal runaway, preventing battery fires from spreading from one cell to another. Battery development clearly trends towards even less energy density, meaning future developments will be even more resilient. Batteries have truly become amazing in the last 10 years.
Another excellent video by Grady. I have just one nit: At time 3:50, he says, "... but, there are no valleys at the tops of mountains". The Bath County pumped storage project took advantage of a valley at the top of a mountain for its upper reservoir. 🙂
There are plenty of pump storage facilities in the alps which span heights of more than 1.000m. Like Lac des Dix. But even if you could say they are on top of a mountain, they are still valleys, but quite far up a mountain.
I love that the reservoir did exactly what it was told to... Garbage in, garbage out. I have _been_ that reservoir. One of the perks of being a machine is, nobody will blame you for doing exactly what you were told to do!
There's no replacement for a nice, big E-STOP button ... also, paying attention to what's going on! Trusting PLCs to run your gear for you is fine ... only if you're aware of and *ready for* the consequences when they fail.
This wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been so cheap. If they had installed a water level sensor every so often around the entire reservoir the settling wouldn't have mattered, the pumps would've shut off properly, and it wouldn't have overtopped. If your interval is every 100', even if one or 2 neighboring sensors fail you should still have plenty of them working to avoid overtopping.
@BobBobson failure mode cound be at the plc not the sensor. Mechanical fail safe seems safer, spill way for not if but when. Also the settling of the wall, 2 feet, wasn't detected by those sensors.
@@BobBobson Grady is on the money that this was a Normal failure. Anyone looking at the design and management would predict there could easily be a failure, just like how if you look at the reporting on Boeing management it's no surprise their planes are breaking.
16:24 I strongly encourage everyone to read the "Ageing Water Storage Infrastructure: An Emerging Global Risk" report from 2021 - it is eye opening to realize how many such structures were built and that they need to last decades if not centuries. Also, about storage: what happened to hydrogen? I remember it to be a hot topic on energy storage at some point, but I'm not quite sure what happened later as I wasn't following the news.
@@proosee True. Worse problem with hydrogen though. It is innately explosive in our atomsphere. Batteries at least rely on their chemistry to remain stable. A little hydrogen leak would be a big problem.
Hydrogen is just not a great energy storage medium; the issue is that electrolysis and back-conversion (either thermal or fuel cell) to electricity is quite inefficient so you end up losing something like 80% of the energy you put in. Batteries or pumped hydro are, generally speaking, better solutions.
Hydrogen is very difficult to manage. It's extremely low energy density at atmospheric pressure, so you either have to compress it to pressure levels that no pressure vessel can tolerate, or cool it to -253°C so it liquifies and keep it there. There's ways to lock hydrogen in material matrices, but then the challenge is getting it out when you need it. @benjaminchung991 Your numbers are a bit off. Water electrolysis is about 70-80% efficient and hydrogen fuel cells are around 40-60% efficient, so at worst you are 28% efficient over the whole cycle. But yeah that's not great, the full cycle needs to be a lot better to be viable as energy storage.
The lead for this video should have explicitly stated where the heck this was! As a Northwesterner, I had never heard of the dam nor the disaster. And it was 20 years ago! It looks there are many lessons to be learned! Have all of them been taken to heart? Do we have any dams at the top of hills anywhere that are not supervised now? Do all dams now have designated *safe* spillways now? One twist in this tale was how it was designed for 100 fill/refill but was enhanced to 300 refills Has that subtle kind of overloading been applied to anywhere else where it should be reconsidered?
Not the tom sauk!!!! I loved that reservoir 😢 Edit: lmao should’ve started the video first, I thought this had happened this year, turns out it was like 20 years ago
Nope. But you can float them on the water, with the added upside of reducing evaporation. Not sure how much this would intefere with the pumps when extracting energy though. Probably not worth it.
It's a good thought, just wrong resource. This is used for peak time when it is daylight. Most pumping occurs overnight. So wind would be the better renewable energy to use.
17:49 - "There's no such thing as a purely natural disaster when it comes to flooding"...very interesting. Never really thought about it. Wish you would have elaborated on that some.
That also gave me a little pause, like... really? But yeah, all rivers have flood plains, that's just the natural coarse of the river. We build on those flood plains and try and control flood water, but that is a purely human endeavor. Similar concept for tides and storm surges, we choose to build there, the water is just doing what it always was. I would argue, tho, that now with climate change and larger and more frequent hurricanes, some places that might otherwise have rarely or never seen a storm surge, will now be destroyed, so in that respect, that is human-caused flooding.
I like how they "blame" the embankment material. The embankment material was never intended to resist rushing water over the side of the dam. Even if it was "clean crushed rock" it would have failed in a similar manner. The settlement would have been greater with the addition of soil in the mixture. However, I've seen several projects similar to this where the rock fill is simply dumped with no compaction. The geotechnical designers are mistaken in allowing construction in this manner in most cases. These materials will re-arrange over a short amount of time as the fills are completed. So putting SOME compaction into the materials, limiting the lift thicknesses, and quality control of particle size is warranted. The current thought process is to protect the downslopes of dams with some type of armoring to prevent this undercutting during an unexpected overtopping. They didn't even plan for that here....
It feels like maybe you missed the part where the issue with the embankment material was that it had a higher concentration of soil than expected leading to exaggerated settling resulting in low points in the wall, which was one of the primary causes of the failure. Nothing was said about any expectation of the embankment to resist rushing water over the side of the dam, you are correct in that it was never intended to withstand that.
@@TheQuicksilver115 Perhaps it could seem like that. I was merely pointing out the finer points of material selection AND proper monitoring in the field. Armchair engineering here, but I think the soil in the embankment fill was a contributing factor, but not the primary cause. My bet is that this condition was prevalent throughout the dam embankment, and that other contributing factors such as compression or movement of underlying strata had more to do with the settlement that occurred. That all being said, a project such as this being put into service without any type of post construction monitoring of elevations and subsurface movement was a mistake.
@@daveharness70 Just want to note that I said "a" primary factor not "the" primary factor; it was certainly a confluence of issues. That said, Grady did mention that some of the sensors installed to detect overfilling happened to be on a section of the wall that was higher than the low point anyway, thus indicating that the low points of the wall were definitely a big part of the problem. I hadn't considered settlement of the underlying earth, that's a good point. And clearly, in hindsight absolutely correct on your last point there! Unfortunately, hindsight tends to be a good deal better than foresight 😅 I guess the point that I was making is that the erosion of the embankment was how the dam failed but not necessarily why the dam failed, and I didn't hear Grady placing the blame on that specifically.
Thank you for doing this video. The story of the MDC employee in the Johnson Shut-ins is absolutely incredible. Thanks for including the miracle story.
Best information I’ve lived by since a child. “If it’s going to fail, it will fail” I’ve always “over engineered” everything I do. 2 straps good? Why not throw another on it. Always over do it, over plan and you’ll never need to.
Yeah, they're insanely low energy density. They're useful for instant power so you can stabilize an electrical network with them, they act as capacitors of sorts, but you're not storing any significant amounts of energy with them. Not until we have materials that can withstand unspeakable forces. Also, if you want to store energy for a long time in a flywheel, you actually have to reduce friction as much as possible and have to actually take the rotation of the earth into account and mount the most frictionless bearing you can have on a gimbal while having the most weight possible with the highest speed possible with the largest wheelspan possible. It's a nigh impossible engineering challenge.
They're getting pretty good with flywheels now. Basically you dig a hole and you put the flywheel down in it sideways and the flywheel can flatten the duck curve by storing access energy during the day and then releasing it for the first hour after dark as solar dies down and energy demand increases.
@12:50 "Unfortunately, when you rely on complicated systems for safety, the likelihood for things to go wrong goes way up." Now, about those "self-driving" cars, and the fact that each such auto is a complicated system trying to navigate in the presence of a multitude of other, independent, complicated systems...
Not defending self-driving vehicles - they still have a long way to go before true autonomy is realized. From a process control perspective they are a much more controllable "known" than human drivers. They don't get distracted, drunk, mad at other drivers, care about the music, etc. Their downside is that they still don't handle well in adverse conditions such as rain, snow, etc. And because of that, human drivers that need to take over are now less experienced because they don't drive regularly. The next 10 years or so will be interesting to see play out.
Humans are terrible, complicated drivers though. In a lot of ways, a computer is MUCH simpler. There are still lots of bugs to be worked out, but I genuinely believe once it is figured out, it will save countless lives. My main concern is how little transparency there is with the production and testing processes
Great video Grady! I think the utter most important thing to take away from this is that the more complex things are, especially human made complexity, the more things can and ultimately will fail.. Scary stuff.. Especially a huge water mass on top a mountain...
I love how all these disasters always have an affect to cause other facilities to up their safety measures. I have heard it said once before at a seminar, "Nothing else gets management excited for a disaster recovery plan like a fire across the street."
As he said they had switched with similar function, but they where on parts of the wall that had settled less so they never triggered. A float switch would have had the same problem unless placed in a lucky (lower) spot.
@@scania9786 I'm not even close to being any kind of engineer, but I am a licensed electrician of almost 40 years. This may sound like stone-aged tech, but the first thing I thought of when mentioning the float switch - and keeping in mind the issues they had with penetrating the liner and anchoring - was to just build a light-weight steel structure that's just sitting on the bottom and extends to the top. The switch can be attached to that at any level you want. If the water ever lifted the float up, down go the pumps. That's just my one minute thought of a fix based on my experience.
Then you really should've done your research on the St. Francois Mountains because you would've come to learn that your state is home to the oldest mountain range in north america. (pre-dates the appalachians by around a billon years & the 8th oldest on the planet) the rockies are supposed to be completely eroded away in around 375 million years just to give you an idea of how tall they once were
We shouldn't underestimate the risk of large scale battery storage. Fire is a huge one, and very toxic fires too. There's a tendency to underestimate the risk of new technology, just because it hasn't been around long enough for there to have been many accidents yet.
Batteries also wear out in a way that they can't be easily repaired to extend their lifespan they have to be disposed of and replaced. Unlike water infrastructure that can be much more easily retrofitted or updated.
This is Great! I live out that way and I hike the ozark trail section nearby, between Taum Sauk State Park, and Johnson Shut Ins when I can. You can easily see the reservoir from a couple spots along the trail. Awesome to see a video about its history!
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Great video as always!
100 year Rapidan Dam south of Mankato, MN had a 'failure' back in June effecting bridge footings as well as a family owned restaurant as well as the downstream impacts.
If you look into it and find it worthy of a story I would enjoy your review.
Thank you either way!
Rather then using the strap down sensor system; why not just paint the depth on the concrete at multiple spots and stick some cheap cameras on those spots to monitor the water depth in the control room? Seems far cheaper and less chance of problems. Besides as cheap as cameras are these days why would you not have camera eyes on the water levels at all times?
@@Morristown337Something not widley known is the reason the probes were moved was they needed to know NOT how high the water was, but how much water was in the reservoir, silt pulled up from the lower lake was filling the upper reservoir and thus they had to raise the full level in order to keep the same amount of water in the pool. The sensor wasn't really what should have stopped the pumps, it was more to tell them how much power was available, and thus it had to be moved up more and more with more silt.
I thought I read "Hawk Tuah" in the title 😂😂😂
Have a look at the Vajont disaster. The dam is still there, perfectly built and with no reservoir anymore. The owner knew the mountain was going to fall and was building a bypass on the mountain side, when it fell off. Entire villages where wiped off the chart. Yet, as a monument to both human ingenuity and foolishness, the dam stood and still stands.
Retired Hydroelectric Operator here. I was still working when Taum Sauk happened. It’s a familiar pattern of mismanagement, ignoring bad instrumentation/controls. We were plagued with management taking the attitude “we can probably get away with it.” At the time, there was no mystery within the trade as to what happened.
I suspect money would have been a big contributer to the decisions made. Doing things properly would have 'cost too much'. Not as much as the fines ended up costing the company in the end.
62 year Hydro boy here, when we heard about it we said - it's going to be a very rainy day at the bottom of that hill.
@@MrNeocortex what does money have to do with a pump shutoff? This was pure negligence.
So many disasters have happened because "we got away with it last time...".
@@empowl1607 - okay, that was funny!
Great video. I worked there for two years restoring the state park after the event. It’s interesting seeing a video explaining what actually happened.
good job on keeping the pump not turning off lols
@@SYOTOSVLOG Reading comprehension: Get some.
I've heard of Johnson's shut in state park. It looks gorgeous. I'll have go there soon.
Are you saying it wasn't common knowledge in the area what actually happened?
@@barryrahn5957 It is. This time of year is beautiful with the leaves turning color but most people like to go when it's warmer so they can enjoy the water.
I'm so very grateful to my college engineering professors who took integrity so seriously. They often tried to impress upon us how allowing seemingly small things through can turn into disasters that cost lives.
That is great to hear. Unfortunetly I don't believe these lessons are being consistently taught these days.
The problem is it's being taught by professors. They usually have the luxury of not being part of cost benefit. Engineers are always being coerced into complying with legal and technical hurdles in the most economic way possible.
I wish computer science had that same integrity but having experienced both, engineering was way more up front about it.
@@xevious4142 Tbh, every (good) CS-Professor tells the students how bad it is to cut costs or take shortcuts. The problem are the companies that cut costs and then wonder why the code is low quality, hard to maintain and unstable
@@leon81061 it's a lot more institutionalized in engineering. Every engineering professor emphasized our work could kill people if we didn't do our best. CS doesn't have the same urgency unfortunately.
This is the best dam safety video I've seen all week
I see what you did there. 🤣
@@abpsd73
Beat me to it!😅
Cool to see you make a video on this! A couple years ago, I hiked Taum Sauk with some friends when we took a trip to Missouri. Beautiful landscape.
I had the privilege of being part of a student geology group that was allowed to tour the area the following spring, hiking from the base to the top. It was an excellent educational opportunity, and the new rock exposures in the scour were amazing. I recall a professor sampling a freshly-exposed unit that was previously unmapped in the area, dubbing it the "purple smarty" rock due to its color and texture.
You must have had the chance to learn abt the geological processes that led to the formation of that rock right?
I have no memory of the events before but there was a big bang ;) @@AncientWildTV
@geotubedude you hiring recent geology and climatology grads wherever you are working? Asking for a me
I bet you were a Rolla “Miners” student
I also got to visit the exposed outcrops 5 years ago with the University of Kansas and the purple rocks (I think they're rhyolites, it's been a while) are still very much there haha I can only imagine what it was like visiting it the next spring!
I grew up in this area during the time of the disaster. I heard people say “Taum Sauk” over and over again but I didn’t understand how it happened. From their stories, I always imagined a wall exploded or something. This really helped me understand the history of my old region. Thank you!
I used to hike from Taum Sauk down to Johnson Shut-Ins a lot back when I was at school in Rolla. I seem to recall that one could see the reservoir from the trail, but I could be way off-base after 20+ years.
@@Sturmcrow1 You could actually hike a relatively short distance to the reservoir from a spur from the trail. I did so several years before the disaster, not realizing the reservoir was even there. It was surreal to me to suddenly see this huge placid "lake" sitting on the peak of a "mountain" (in Missouri terms ;)). Felt like I was in some Area 51 type scenario.
Haum Tuak
My mom and I camped at Johnson’s Shut-ins the summer before this occurred. I took my family there a couple years ago and seeing the drastic difference in what the park looks like is incredible. The boulders left scattered all over the old campground are absolutely massive!
Fascinating. As a retired Safety Engineer I'm surprised the original over topping was not a critical event requiring immediate review and corrective action. It would seem they would check to make sure everything in the reservior was still in spec with the original plans and that any changes were fixed immediately. Apparently they did not understand the failure possibilities and results. I might have to go visit this dam!! Great video!
From 12:20-12:25 he mentions that the "red flag" of the original over topping was missed because the owner hadn't notified the regulator that it had occurred. Agree that the corporate culture at the owner clearly did not include sufficient safety oriented thinking.
They did send divers, they _thought_ they identified the root cause, and they _thought_ they applied sufficient mitigation. But they didn't follow up on whether the mitigation was sufficient and whether the detected cause could explain the issue sufficiently.
Especially sad was the issue of redundant overfill sensors connected in an AND configuration and set at a point too high. Those are the issues that a person stationed can see and start thinking "now why is that happening". Machines are really good at following orders, but they don't have common sense.
@@Validole its a sign that no one thought at all. As usual. On the land - because "its not my task to think, I am not paid for this", in office - because they do not know whats going on somewhere in 1000s miles, and "its not my task, I am Great Fuehrer, deciding about millions, not $100 sensors, let some stinky engineer down there thinks!". Kaboooooom.
I don't believe the public can access the site. (Maybe you have contacts?) But before the disaster, you could drive right up to it and walk to the top. You could also drive down to the power plant at the bottom of the mountain. There was a really nice little natural history museum at the gatehouse that was worth a visit, too. I sometimes wonder what happened to that.
I was going to say they didn't notify any authorities on the issue.
I was one of the reinsurance claims adjusters working on the Taum Sauk dam collapse. I was surprised the event did not make the main stream press (CBS and ABC). on the other end I legally could not talk about the event. Its amazing there was no loss of life!!!
That's the problem. Corporations issue these NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS which is counter to the Constitution. There is no transparency or truth when you are allowed to keep hiding it. It is asinine.
@@OneAdam12Adam it's not "counter to the constitution". the right to free speech is SO poorly understood, and here's exhibit A. the constitution projects your right to free speech from the government, NOT private institutions. this is why speech can be moderated in places like online forums or social media sites, and they can ban things like hate speech. however, the US government is NOT allowed to do that, which is what the First Amendment actually dictates. same applies to the right to protest, the right to religious freedom, etc etc.
companies are completely within their lawful and constitutional right to issue NDAs to their employees, and you can only break your NDA if you're reporting a crime. "i think they did a shoddy job", even if well substantiated, is just an opinion, it's not a crime. unless you can concretely point to criminal activity as a whistleblower, you can't just flap your mouth about company practicies no matter how scummy you personally found them to be, at least not until the NDA's termination (most NDAs have a kind of expiration date and aren't indefinite).
now, having said all that, do i think it's right for companies to hide shoddy, scummy business practices behind NDAs? no, not at all. i think they frequently abuse NDAs to cover their butts. that doesn't make it unconstitutional, it just makes it scummy. it's BAD. but not illegal. (the NDAs i mean, some of the practices they hide are illegal though)
All I can say is that Ameren got very very lucky this happened in the offseason for Johnson shut ins. This could have killed 100s of people if it was in the summer because it wipped out the entire camp ground and rushed through the shut ins which is packed during the summer.
Nvm I was completely wrong
@@TheNighthawk00 it drains and refills almost everyday during the summer. It drains for power during high power need times usually in the afternoon during the heat of day and then is pumped full at night during low power need times.
@TheNighthawk00 Tell me you didn’t watch the video without telling me you didn’t watch the video…
@@irocz11can imagine how long full recovery would take, they'd be finding body parts for years in that blender
@@KenHauptfleisch It was only survivable if you went up a tree I would think. The ranger and his family survived because the structure they were in absorbed the force of the impact as it was knocked off the foundation and it was lighter so it stayed on top of the water and debris.
regardless of the damage, it's neat to see the side of a mountain after a powerwash.
@@TheSprockee There's still so much mud on it, do you think it needs another rinse?
It’s very cool to walk through. done the hike through it a few times and it’s pretty much completely grown over now unfortunately but very cool hike after it happened.
You can blame aliens then..... 😅
Yeah Damage is neat when not intentional. Tell me more satan 😂
@@Cody_michael damage is neat when it is intentional too. You can learn so much about the structure of things by watching them fall apart. scheduled demolition of towers is always fascinating to watch. We're unravelling the secrets of the universe by watching subatomic particles shatter. Automotive safety has been improved astronomically by people who are fascinated by the results of crash tests.
Nothing wrong with being interested in the results of an event. There's something wrong with hoping for the event or acting to cause the event though.
The excess soil in the rock embankment reminds me of the Kansas City Hyatt disaster. A classic case of where the construction crew didn't adhere to the engineering specs and the engineers didn't double check that their instructions were being followed. I'm an electrical engineer with over 40 years of experience and I've lost count of the number of times that corners were cut behind the engineer's backs.
off topic but can you tell why they often cut corners in construction?
IIRC the construction team got engineering approval for the changes at Hyatt 😮
@@jeromedrescher1402No, they did not. While the change was discussed between the contractor and the engineering team, it was not properly analyzed or approved by the engineer in charge, Jack D. Gillum. The lack of a detailed review of the new design led to the failure of the connections under load, causing the collapse of the walkways during a crowded event, killing 114 people and injuring many more.
@@AncientWildTV Corners were cut in the construction of the Hyatt Regency skywalks for a variety of reasons, including miscommunication, pressure to meet deadlines, cost considerations, and inadequate oversight during the construction process.
1. Simplification of the Design for Easier Construction: One of the main reasons corners were cut was the decision to modify the original skywalk design to make construction easier. The original design called for continuous support rods running through both the second- and fourth-floor walkways. To make installation simpler, the contractors changed the design to use two separate sets of rods. This change was meant to save time and reduce complexity in the construction process but led to the fatal increase in load on the upper walkway’s connections .
2. Lack of Proper Review: The modification to the rod design was not properly reviewed by the structural engineers. The engineering firm, Gillum-Colaco, was overwhelmed with other projects at the time and did not perform a thorough analysis of the changes. This inadequate review allowed the flawed design to proceed unchecked  .
3. Cost and Time Pressures: The Hyatt Regency was a high-profile project, and there were likely pressures to keep construction costs down and meet deadlines. Cutting corners by making design modifications without full review might have been seen as a way to keep the project on track. Unfortunately, these shortcuts came at the cost of safety .
4. Miscommunication and Lack of Accountability: There were several communication failures between the contractors and engineers. The engineering firm assumed that the contractor would seek approval for any significant design changes, while the contractor assumed the changes were minor enough not to require such approval. This lack of clarity in responsibilities contributed to the eventual collapse  .
In summary, a combination of time-saving measures, poor communication, and insufficient engineering oversight led to the corners being cut, ultimately contributing to one of the deadliest structural failures in U.S. history.
Same thing happened with the Oroville Spillway failure. The spillway wasn't built on sound rock.
great job on this. I worked at Johnson's Shut Ins in 2003 and 2004. We always talked about what would happen if the dam broke. So glad it was in December and not July with a full campground of up to 500 people. the Park Superintendent Jerry Toops and his family discussed it several times when I was there. It's amazing they survived the cold water after being swept away. I also still have piece of the original inner black liner material from the reservoir.
I had to go to college to learn about engineering disasters. That was back in the 90s. I visited Johnson Shut Ins as a child and coincidentally I was there just a few years ago. I never knew about this catastrophe until I watched this video. There's a lot of value here.
You telling me there wasn't an overflow spillway? What if the exits are clogged and it rains a lot? This is obvious stuff.
It is just crazy...
And this is not the being smart after the fact.
Even the most rainy countries in the world barely have about 3,000 millimeters of rainfall per YEAR. That's like 10 feet max.
So in case the exits are clogged AND you know that a heavy rainstorm is coming, you'd only need the water level to be 10 feet below the max capacity and you'd be good for an entire year to fix the clogging even in the most rainy country in the world. And that's if we exclude the possibility of simply using emergency drainage systems like they have in dams.
Most rain falls infront off mountains, because of the fall of temperature by every meter of hight and vapor pressure. And like others already wrote: it can be calculated by weather forcast.
my thoughts exactly.
Design for a bad day and it may never happen.
This is why they have those overflows holes in bathroom sinks.
They could have grab the "depth meter" from a toilet instead of that nonsense sensor system as well.
How do you explain the glory hole in the stall
@@jjlpinct Where else would you get your sushi?
@@brothertaddeus C'mon, we know those holes are for men to share hotdogs away from their wives.
It also helps with drainage as it allows air to enter ;)
Howdy - I wanted to let you know, your videos, especially those on energy production and dams, inspired me to return to college this Fall. My college career so far has been pretty messy, but watching your content reminded me of how much I enjoyed my electrical engineering course in high school. I'm now attending Texas State University, hoping to one day work at a hydroelectric facility, or in other renewable energy fields.
Keep up the wonderful work! I'm sure I'm not the only one to be inspired by your love for infrastructure. Thank you :)
Best of luck, get that degree!
I always wanted to work the control panel spinning up some big turbines and switching it live into the grid after synching.
Congrats on the decision to go back to college. Now go get yourself one of those Ground News subscriptions that Grady advertises. As a college student, you will be subjected to a lot of one-sided indoctrination. Ground News can help you find a balance of news sources. Good luck in school!
@@rtqii Something as critical as that will never be left to a meat computer.
I live a few miles from Tom Sauk. I have flown my airplane over it several times. The entire hillside is still completely stripped. There are huge boulders scattered in the fields below it. It's wild looking.
I can't see the spillway in drone video. Where is it relative to the breach site? Thanks!
@@luciustarquiniuspriscus1408 West side
I live about 85 miles north of Taum Sauk. I remeber the failure. I have not seen a better explanation of the event. Well done. The camping at Johnson Shut-ins and water activities are great. The failure did a lot of damage, but the restorations to the park went well.
Visited it as a kid in the 70's. Shame it did damage to Johnson Shutins which was an awesome state park in that era. Seems like it was poorly designed from the start. Add poor maintenance and you have a recipe for disaster.
It’s been a while since I was there; didn’t they relocate the campground so that if this were to happen again it wouldn’t sweep away the campers?
@@martincox9691 l do not know. I remember the natural waterslide of the shutins and diving off of the cliffs around the corner from the shutins. I jumped from about thirty feet but people were jumping from what looked like 60 feet. I was so taken with the river that l recall nothing about the campground except we camped in it.
1:06 - There's no need to swear, Grady.
"Feel free to ask any of your dam questions at the end of the dam tour."
he really didn't need to say it so often; he's enjoying it
Did it in middle school 30 years ago...Still funny. I wonder if the dam store where I used to buy my dam bolts is still open?
@@prefect742-Dam if I know
😂😂😂
I used to live right near here, this was the BEST technical description of what happened that I've ever seen! Thanks
Me too. Had the taum sauk reservoir broken open on just the right side, it very well could’ve took out my home. I lived there when it broke open too.
Wow. Never heard of this dam nor this event. Great story and lessons-learned.
The lessons were learned long time ago. The constructors decided to ignore them.
@@noinfo5630 Yeah, crazy that there was no spill-way. That's like giving the universe the finger. Never works out well.
From the name, I thought it was in Cambodia, ha-ha! Can't believe this occurred in the U.S.
Thanks for the shot of the dam with the truck up top. Really helps get the ridiculous scale we're looking at.
I operate a Pumped Storage Dam and we have training about this incident! We have automated sensors AND a live camera to physically verify the Upper Reservoir level. We also have a spillway as a last resort lol
All the holes in the Swiss cheese lined up, truly fortunate that it occurred off season.
A true understatement, I think most people watching this have no idea how bad that would have been. The main attraction of the park is basically a meat grinder, the lucky ones would be swept away
Things I love about this video: (1) the intensity with which you deliver the words "and what the investigations found would change a lot about the field of dam safety", (2) the fact that I am immediately 100% hooked and want to learn all about dam safety and how the field changed as a result of these investigations
When I heard that I was like “dam”!
You ain't being safe unless you're being dam safe.
dam right
Take my upvote sir
This was a great dam video!
take my god dam like.
Whoever said engineering isn’t a comic nursery?
I bought a project truck in the area about 10 months ago. On my way home is when I first noticed the structure. I had no idea what it was, but it looked absolutely magnificent and monstrous. I had to find a spot to pull over and look on satellite imagery to find out what it was and was totally amazed! I had no idea such a reservoir existed. This is the first time even hearing about the failure. Thanks for the info!
I'm glad the algorithm recommended this video. I enjoyed it and subscribed.
I visited this site right after the collapse; still one of the most terrifying sights I have ever seen. An entire forest swept away in moments.
Grady.... I'm in my late 60's; but I want to share something - admittedly "..again" - but it certainly bears repeating: "The WORLD ought to see your videos".. I sincerely believe that. To that end, I have purchased your book, etc ... all in the service of doing what I can to further your channel. Just not enough words to express how highly I think of your efforts.
Wow, I use to camp at that beautiful state park and its river in the 90's and remember being disturbed that we couldn't go any longer due to this incident. Being a kid at the time, I never really grasped what had happened and never saw any photos of the area. Thanks for this deep dive into a disaster? and its aftermath.
Ameren? I feel like I've heard that name in a US CSB safety video before...
_Piano starts playing_
Trust in Jesus Christ, not antichrist.
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I hope and pray that folks change their view and invite the Lord Jesus Christ into their life to rule and reign.
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(Proverbs 16:18 > Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.)
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Satan is referred to as the prince of the power of the air for good reason, he owns the airwaves on planet earth and is the god (little g) of this world. It is my hope and prayer that you choose the God (Big G) of heaven who controls the destiny of your eternal soul.
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(Matthew 10:28 > And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.)
(Proverbs 9:10 > The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.)
(2 Corinthians 4:3-4 > [3]-But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:
[4]-In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.)
(Romans 10:9-10 > [9]-That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
[10]-For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.)
(Romans 10:13 > For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.)
(Ephesians 2:8-9 > [8]-For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
[9]-Not of works, lest any man should boast.)
(Revelation 3:20 > Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me.)
Is Jesus knocking at the door of your heart? Is this your opportunity for eternal salvation? If it is, I hope and pray that you open the door and invite Him in to your heart and life, in Jesus' name. Amen!
All glory be to God. Amen!!
For others reading this: please don't upvote this user. They are a bot promoting adult content on their page.
@@person880 their comment is about a relevant video by the chemical safety board, who cares if they do only fans lol room temp IQ over here
@@AquaAdventuresTTV Buddy, they are a porn bot. They are spamming UA-cam. These users are all over the place. Did you think this was a discussion about careers? Snowstorm temp IQ over here
I did a small research project on this for one of my college classes. The change in landscape at the state park is still very evident. Great video!
I was about to say "Sounds like a Normal Accidents scenario", then Grady chimes in! Excellent book, definitely a must read for anyone who wants to study failures in any system, especially complex ones
Nothing normal about this accident. There were several avoidable errors that allowed this to happen.
@@andrewjames4786 The "Swiss Cheese Model" seems more on point: a bunch of (relatively) minor errors and failures that, combined in just the right way under just the right set of (normal) circumstances, permits the entire system to fail.
You do wonder how anybody could see water over-topping the dam, without running with hair on fire to the engineer in charge. While it's true that it has to over-top _somewhere_ along the upper edge, not being curious enough to discover that the dry side is a full two feet higher indicates a "tell the boss and let him worry about it" mentality. (The boss failing to actually worry about it is the most egregious of the many errors.)
Almost seems more like a classic straw-back scenario
what in god damns name makes this a Normal Accidents scenario. This was complete incompetence at every "minor" issue. ONE TEST would have showed the redundant systems did not work. If this is considered a Normal Accidents scenario then we are forgiving the idiots that made those errors has if it was easy to make. You have to be completely brain-dead to implement these systems and not do it right or just test the thing.
Small oversights 10:00 reminds me of the Challenger incident. The combined probabilities added to one big problem.
What a great video. The causes of failure were no surprise. Your ability to explain everything is top notch! Thanks for sharing!
Grady, here in Chattanooga, we have one of the only pump storage facilities that are both on top of the mountain AND mostly a “natural” reservoir. Raccoon Mountain Pump Storage operated by the TVA utilized a retired quarry in addition to a wall created to close up the U-shaped reservoir. Check it out!
I've started working on Energy Security in Britain very recently and your videos have been very insightful in getting some basic understanding over the technicalities of such projects and the challenges they may face. Really appreciate the knowledge you share with us!
0:43 I think this is actually the first time in my life I've heard "undermine" used in a completely literal sense 😛
As someone that spent a few years inspecting foundations and designing upgrades, mostly related to fixing settlement, I saw a lot of undermined foundations and footings.
EDIT: It's always due to water as well. During a large rain storm see where all the water is running off your roof, or your concrete patio, etc, and make sure it isn't going by your house or garage or anything supporting a lot of weight.
It was the way of attacking castles and other fortifications. Hence the verb.
@@hughoxford8735 makes sense. For some reason I always conceptualized the "mining" part of it as a much bigger sort of...well, mine-sized hole! Always seemed like a horribly inconvenient way to try to get at somebody, but your explanation makes more sense 😝
I work at Mt St Helens. We have 4 earthen dams up here. 3 created by the eruption and landslide, and one man made to hold back sediment. An early retention dam failed in the 80’s. The army corps of engineers constructed spillways on 2 of the natural dams, and Spirit Lake, the most well known one, had a tunnel constructed to act much like the hole in a bathtub.
To this day the tunnel has issues (turns out in a. Volcanic landscape, there are faults… and the retention dam had to be built bigger recently. Nearly 45 years later and still dealing with it!
Best dam engineering video, period.
I backpacked the Taum Sauk trail a couple years ago that runs around this, with no prior knowledge of it existing. Atop one of the adjacent peaks you get a great view, but man was it quite the sight to come upon... Almost gave you an uneasy feeling, but no doubt an engineering achievement.
Oh man, I remember when this happened. Pretty big black eye for Ameren at the time, but we learned a lot from the whole ordeal overall.
I remember Ameren's efforts to get its customers to pay for this by raising our rates. I hate Ameren with the white-hot heat of a billion suns.
Being involved in a rural water system with a reservoir, I've seen the filling telemetry fail many times and an operator is not always present. While there is an overtopping mechanism, I'm not really sure the hillside below could withstand sustained flow. I think I'll open this question again. Thanks!
You ought to cover Ellicott City, Maryland and how they've coped in the aftermath of back-to-back "historic" floods. I had friends watch their cars float away on the torrent from the second story of a bar they couldn't leave due to the floodwaters. An enormous mitigation project is in the works to try to "floodproof" the historic downtown. One issue that's been brought up is now rampant development on the hills above the town has decreased the amount of land available to absorb rainfall, leading to streets becoming waterfalls and rivers in heavy rains.
A similar project was built between 1969 - 1972 at Turlough Hill in Wicklow Ireland. One of the 1st plants of this type in Europe. My Uncle died in the building of the plant. He was one of seven people who died during the project. It’s still integral and critical to Ireland’s Electricity supply, because it allows the regulation of supply at peak demand.
Absolutely one of your best videos. I watch them all and I am subscribed but this one just flowed (no pun intended) so effortlessly!
Wow, that really Sauks.
*soaks
It does, but could also have been a dam site worse
Taum it
*socks
I really enjoy watching your videos about engineering and even though I'm not an engineer at all I still like listening about places
like the Taum Sauk Dam in the Ozarks and it's eventual failure
have a great week and thank you.👋☕🖖🇺🇲
When I was a kid in Boy Scouts we would camp in the group camping area at the far northeast side of the old campground setup along the creek… it would have been a deal if we were there when the water came.
Great video, thank you.
I am a process controls engineer, and I just want to say that very complex projects that are many orders of magnitude greater than this failure run every day all over the world. I understand what Grady is saying about complex systems being more vulnerable to issues, but if they are constructed right, checked by the right process, and the correct risks are managed they are just as effective as relatively simpler processees. There's a reason complex pharmaceuticals and boilers both run every day; one might be more complicated but both can be done safely and reliably.
I love this channel and look forward to every video!!!
Looking forward to watching another Dam related video!
9:38 I am not an engineer, but seems a simple camera feed to the operator room could have solved this issue....
Only if the operator checked the monitor. Being human he probably would not have done so after the first month or so on the job. It still needed a spillway, and a very simple safety cutout.
On a chemical plant I worked on we had a tank overflow. It had a high alarm but the operator missed the alarm, didn’t switch off the inlet pump and the tank overflowed. So a pump cut out was added if the level exceeded the alarm by a few percent. Sometime later there was another overflow. Turns out the operators had started relying on the pump auto cut off to do the job, ignoring the alarm and not intervening manually. Wish I could remember the next step (was probably 30 years ago!). The moral is if you going to add auto cutoffs you’d better make sure of its reliability and its demand rate and design the cutoff system appropriately with the required reliability.
I was going to suggest overflow sensors, but it sounds like they thought of those.
*sigh*
A failsafe feature doesn't matter if it doesn't stop a disaster when the anticipated failures occur.
I love learning about infrastructure like this. Keep it up!
Loved the video! I was actually at Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park recently, and you can still make out where the spill happened as all of the trees are much smaller/newer than the surrounding forest.
Great video as always! I am just curious how nobody noticed that their dam is filling up over designed capacity.
Also having no emergency spillway looks like cost cutting measure. At least now they have spillway channel deforested for them...
Certainly for cost cutting though not necessarily because 'they were being cheap' but more because they essentially had complete control of water input to the reservoir it wasn't really necessary and so was an unjustified expense.
There are only two ways for water to get into the reservoir. Pumping it, and natural rain that has a catchment area equal to the area of the reservoir (and so 1 inch of rain is equal to roughly 1 inch of rise in water level)
The pump can be turned off and has failsafes to do this (and 40 years of demonstrated experience that it worked when installed correctly - it was a redesign that introduced an installation flaw)
The rain can't be turned off but even the most torrential of downpours possible in the region can be drained from the reservoir faster than the rain can fill it up. With 2ft of freeboard planned, that's equal to about half the average annual rainfall of that location and so even if you had it filled to the top of its 2ft limit the natural cycling of every 1-3 days of drawdown for power generation would put it back under the 2ft limit.
@@dorvinion Agreed, they did not see it as necessary, as usual in private business with little regulation or oversight.
Nevertheless, substandard composition of the dam core is another clear proof of cutting corners where possible. So its like "Oh, we dont have to build this spillway, we have complete control over this overtopping phenomenon", while putting aside everything that you need to do to be in that complete control.
Like measuring soil settlement over time, dam profile and such. Also the absence of CCTV is mindlowing, cost of operation of such device is very cheap compared to damage it can prevent.
In my country alarms and red flags would be raised much earlier - just because you cannot have leaking embankment dam. Thats a huge NO-NO, prompting complete study about the dam condition.
@@openttd-cztr191Listen, your country might be great, but I bet the reason they have not had a failure this big is because they don’t have anything this big. Engineering is hard for everyone.
@@openttd-cztr191Sure, alarms would be raised TODAY. How would your country respond to leaks in the 1970s, though?
@@CptJistuce In pretty same way as today. Leaks are measured in terms of volume, location and pressure. If anything goes over set limits, you evacuate the water, conduct survey and fix the problem. Its engineering.
Its not that it did not happen in my country. Heck we have memorial for dam burst from 1916, which swept whole villages, and it was because leak in the dam was ignored and downplayed. In time when CCTV and modern measurements were not available.
Thanks to that and other experience we have pretty strict regulations. For example safety inspections are done by separate and independent body from the owner - even when some dams are owned by the state and the regulatory body is also responsible to the state (ergo people).
Dams are awesome, but if neglected or mismanadged very dangerous - water kills and destroys pretty much as fire if unleashed.
This is going to be a good one! Johnson Shut-In's is a state and national treasure! It's a shame what happened, however I think the state made some upgrades to the camp sites after the power company settlement. They now have cabins, which I don't recall any being there when I was there as a kid. Anyway, there was a lot of arrogance on the part of the power company on the original dam. That being said, we need more pumped hydro in this country, and I hope this is a learning lesson.
Batteries perform the same task as these dams, and are far easier to deploy. There’s very little pumped storage being built.
@@benoithudson7235 Batteries work fine but they don't have the capacity like pumped hydro. The main drawback to pumped hydro is the amount of head pressure needed in order for it to work. Usually cities don't have the amount of fall needed in order to make it effective.
Great Missouri outdoors!
@@adammuncy8475 : A single battery cell has a lot more storage capacity than a raindrop. Doesn't matter, because the grid doesn't rely on a single one of either, it relies on huge numbers.
Utilities and related companies have clearly decided that batteries is where it's at, because over the past few years, they dramatically increased the amount of storage they're buying and it's almost all batteries.
The fact that Taum Sauk was never visited by Tom Scott feels like a missed opportunity
I think he did go to Dinorwig, a pumped storage in Wales.
@@otterylexa4499 I do believe you missed the joke
Imagine what a great opportunity it would be for Haliey Welch to visit it. Hawk Tuah Taum Sauk. /s
@@otterylexa4499 dinorwig doesn't really sound like Tom Scott.
His last name is Scott, not Sock.
Hi Mr. Grady, I want to say that I think your videos are better (In my opinion) than the old "How it's made" series because you have a good content per unit time with no fluff, and I appreciate that.
The quality of your documentations are really outstanding. You deserve every last follower!
Swiss cheese model in full effect here. Many small problems slowly slipping through the holes in the safety net
Yes, but there were numerous systemic issues here too. I don't think it's right to characterise it as a series of small oversights or breaches.
I go to Johnsons Shut-Ins with my kids all the time, and have hiked that scour. I have been waiting for someone to make a good video on what happened there in 2005, thank you Grady!
I'm (morbidly) interested to see what the results of a battery fire in one of these grid scale storage facilities will be like. Doubly interested for the results of said fire when the facility is inevitably built near something that really shouldn't be exposed to all that heat.
I assume without evidence that they will space out the batteries in a grid-by-grid pattern to isolate any such fires from spreading. Seems the obvious cheap solution.
The cheapest chemistries are LFP and sodium ion. Both need very high temperatures for thermal runaway, preventing battery fires from spreading from one cell to another.
Battery development clearly trends towards even less energy density, meaning future developments will be even more resilient. Batteries have truly become amazing in the last 10 years.
I remember hearing about a grid battery fire in Australia. EEV Blog did a video on it.
Another excellent video by Grady. I have just one nit: At time 3:50, he says, "... but, there are no valleys at the tops of mountains". The Bath County pumped storage project took advantage of a valley at the top of a mountain for its upper reservoir. 🙂
There are plenty of pump storage facilities in the alps which span heights of more than 1.000m. Like Lac des Dix. But even if you could say they are on top of a mountain, they are still valleys, but quite far up a mountain.
I love that the reservoir did exactly what it was told to... Garbage in, garbage out. I have _been_ that reservoir. One of the perks of being a machine is, nobody will blame you for doing exactly what you were told to do!
Me too!! Part of my job is literally to figure out what I should be doing instead of what I was asked to do. So annoying!
There's no replacement for a nice, big E-STOP button ... also, paying attention to what's going on! Trusting PLCs to run your gear for you is fine ... only if you're aware of and *ready for* the consequences when they fail.
This wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been so cheap. If they had installed a water level sensor every so often around the entire reservoir the settling wouldn't have mattered, the pumps would've shut off properly, and it wouldn't have overtopped. If your interval is every 100', even if one or 2 neighboring sensors fail you should still have plenty of them working to avoid overtopping.
@BobBobson failure mode cound be at the plc not the sensor. Mechanical fail safe seems safer, spill way for not if but when. Also the settling of the wall, 2 feet, wasn't detected by those sensors.
How do you push a button when you're not there?
@@BobBobson Grady is on the money that this was a Normal failure. Anyone looking at the design and management would predict there could easily be a failure, just like how if you look at the reporting on Boeing management it's no surprise their planes are breaking.
16:24 I strongly encourage everyone to read the "Ageing Water Storage Infrastructure: An Emerging Global Risk" report from 2021 - it is eye opening to realize how many such structures were built and that they need to last decades if not centuries. Also, about storage: what happened to hydrogen? I remember it to be a hot topic on energy storage at some point, but I'm not quite sure what happened later as I wasn't following the news.
Explosive
@@John_Smith_86 just like batteries - basically almost everything that is energy dense is dangerous.
@@proosee True. Worse problem with hydrogen though. It is innately explosive in our atomsphere.
Batteries at least rely on their chemistry to remain stable. A little hydrogen leak would be a big problem.
Hydrogen is just not a great energy storage medium; the issue is that electrolysis and back-conversion (either thermal or fuel cell) to electricity is quite inefficient so you end up losing something like 80% of the energy you put in. Batteries or pumped hydro are, generally speaking, better solutions.
Hydrogen is very difficult to manage. It's extremely low energy density at atmospheric pressure, so you either have to compress it to pressure levels that no pressure vessel can tolerate, or cool it to -253°C so it liquifies and keep it there.
There's ways to lock hydrogen in material matrices, but then the challenge is getting it out when you need it.
@benjaminchung991 Your numbers are a bit off. Water electrolysis is about 70-80% efficient and hydrogen fuel cells are around 40-60% efficient, so at worst you are 28% efficient over the whole cycle. But yeah that's not great, the full cycle needs to be a lot better to be viable as energy storage.
I can’t wait for your video on the dam failures in Tennessee and North Carolina
They’re probably a couple years off.
15:35 missed the opportunity to say, Chief of the dam safety engineer.
The lead for this video should have explicitly stated where the heck this was! As a Northwesterner, I had never heard of the dam nor the disaster. And it was 20 years ago!
It looks there are many lessons to be learned! Have all of them been taken to heart? Do we have any dams at the top of hills anywhere that are not supervised now? Do all dams now have designated *safe* spillways now?
One twist in this tale was how it was designed for 100 fill/refill but was enhanced to 300 refills Has that subtle kind of overloading been applied to anywhere else where it should be reconsidered?
Not the tom sauk!!!! I loved that reservoir 😢
Edit: lmao should’ve started the video first, I thought this had happened this year, turns out it was like 20 years ago
would it be worth putting solar pannels on top of the Dam to help cover the power cost of pumping the water?
Nope. But you can float them on the water, with the added upside of reducing evaporation. Not sure how much this would intefere with the pumps when extracting energy though. Probably not worth it.
It's a good thought, just wrong resource. This is used for peak time when it is daylight. Most pumping occurs overnight. So wind would be the better renewable energy to use.
Well dam that really sauks 😢
All large system designs need to include a document entitled "How could this go wrong?"
Please make more engineering disaster CSB-style videos! Looking forward to seeing you at BuildersSTAGE! Thank you, and I like your shirt ✌️
17:49 - "There's no such thing as a purely natural disaster when it comes to flooding"...very interesting. Never really thought about it. Wish you would have elaborated on that some.
That also gave me a little pause, like... really? But yeah, all rivers have flood plains, that's just the natural coarse of the river. We build on those flood plains and try and control flood water, but that is a purely human endeavor. Similar concept for tides and storm surges, we choose to build there, the water is just doing what it always was. I would argue, tho, that now with climate change and larger and more frequent hurricanes, some places that might otherwise have rarely or never seen a storm surge, will now be destroyed, so in that respect, that is human-caused flooding.
I could have fixed their issue with some $5 float switches I've used for ~20 years on aquaponics lmfao
Only if you installed them in the correct place.
I like how they "blame" the embankment material. The embankment material was never intended to resist rushing water over the side of the dam. Even if it was "clean crushed rock" it would have failed in a similar manner. The settlement would have been greater with the addition of soil in the mixture. However, I've seen several projects similar to this where the rock fill is simply dumped with no compaction. The geotechnical designers are mistaken in allowing construction in this manner in most cases. These materials will re-arrange over a short amount of time as the fills are completed. So putting SOME compaction into the materials, limiting the lift thicknesses, and quality control of particle size is warranted.
The current thought process is to protect the downslopes of dams with some type of armoring to prevent this undercutting during an unexpected overtopping. They didn't even plan for that here....
It feels like maybe you missed the part where the issue with the embankment material was that it had a higher concentration of soil than expected leading to exaggerated settling resulting in low points in the wall, which was one of the primary causes of the failure. Nothing was said about any expectation of the embankment to resist rushing water over the side of the dam, you are correct in that it was never intended to withstand that.
@@TheQuicksilver115 Perhaps it could seem like that. I was merely pointing out the finer points of material selection AND proper monitoring in the field. Armchair engineering here, but I think the soil in the embankment fill was a contributing factor, but not the primary cause. My bet is that this condition was prevalent throughout the dam embankment, and that other contributing factors such as compression or movement of underlying strata had more to do with the settlement that occurred. That all being said, a project such as this being put into service without any type of post construction monitoring of elevations and subsurface movement was a mistake.
@@daveharness70 Just want to note that I said "a" primary factor not "the" primary factor; it was certainly a confluence of issues. That said, Grady did mention that some of the sensors installed to detect overfilling happened to be on a section of the wall that was higher than the low point anyway, thus indicating that the low points of the wall were definitely a big part of the problem.
I hadn't considered settlement of the underlying earth, that's a good point. And clearly, in hindsight absolutely correct on your last point there! Unfortunately, hindsight tends to be a good deal better than foresight 😅
I guess the point that I was making is that the erosion of the embankment was how the dam failed but not necessarily why the dam failed, and I didn't hear Grady placing the blame on that specifically.
Thank you for doing this video. The story of the MDC employee in the Johnson Shut-ins is absolutely incredible. Thanks for including the miracle story.
Engineering is so cool. Thanks for another great video.
Best information I’ve lived by since a child. “If it’s going to fail, it will fail”
I’ve always “over engineered” everything I do. 2 straps good? Why not throw another on it.
Always over do it, over plan and you’ll never need to.
My favorite type of storage is flywheels. They're insane
until you learn about inevitable consequences of mixing gyroscopic precession with conservation of angular momentum.
@@totojejedinecnynick that's not really a problem with modern flywheel storage
Yeah, they're insanely low energy density. They're useful for instant power so you can stabilize an electrical network with them, they act as capacitors of sorts, but you're not storing any significant amounts of energy with them. Not until we have materials that can withstand unspeakable forces.
Also, if you want to store energy for a long time in a flywheel, you actually have to reduce friction as much as possible and have to actually take the rotation of the earth into account and mount the most frictionless bearing you can have on a gimbal while having the most weight possible with the highest speed possible with the largest wheelspan possible. It's a nigh impossible engineering challenge.
They're getting pretty good with flywheels now.
Basically you dig a hole and you put the flywheel down in it sideways and the flywheel can flatten the duck curve by storing access energy during the day and then releasing it for the first hour after dark as solar dies down and energy demand increases.
@12:50 "Unfortunately, when you rely on complicated systems for safety, the likelihood for things to go wrong goes way up." Now, about those "self-driving" cars, and the fact that each such auto is a complicated system trying to navigate in the presence of a multitude of other, independent, complicated systems...
That's a great point
Add to that the fact that they'll be subjected to malicious attacks.
Not defending self-driving vehicles - they still have a long way to go before true autonomy is realized. From a process control perspective they are a much more controllable "known" than human drivers. They don't get distracted, drunk, mad at other drivers, care about the music, etc. Their downside is that they still don't handle well in adverse conditions such as rain, snow, etc. And because of that, human drivers that need to take over are now less experienced because they don't drive regularly. The next 10 years or so will be interesting to see play out.
Humans are terrible, complicated drivers though. In a lot of ways, a computer is MUCH simpler. There are still lots of bugs to be worked out, but I genuinely believe once it is figured out, it will save countless lives. My main concern is how little transparency there is with the production and testing processes
Great video Grady!
I think the utter most important thing to take away from this is that the more complex things are, especially human made complexity, the more things can and ultimately will fail.. Scary stuff.. Especially a huge water mass on top a mountain...
In fairness, the failing here was because things weren't complex enough.
I love how all these disasters always have an affect to cause other facilities to up their safety measures. I have heard it said once before at a seminar, "Nothing else gets management excited for a disaster recovery plan like a fire across the street."
It's a dam shame
Dam strait
@@bintjbeil7892 A double pun? I just lost my footing under that pressure.
God dam it, guys! Stop! :D
It Sauks
So a $20 float switch and some relays could've prevented this???🤔🤔
As he said they had switched with similar function, but they where on parts of the wall that had settled less so they never triggered. A float switch would have had the same problem unless placed in a lucky (lower) spot.
@@scania9786 I'm not even close to being any kind of engineer, but I am a licensed electrician of almost 40 years. This may sound like stone-aged tech, but the first thing I thought of when mentioning the float switch - and keeping in mind the issues they had with penetrating the liner and anchoring - was to just build a light-weight steel structure that's just sitting on the bottom and extends to the top. The switch can be attached to that at any level you want. If the water ever lifted the float up, down go the pumps. That's just my one minute thought of a fix based on my experience.
@snakeinthegrass7443 I think you mean a "stilling well."
As someone living in Missouri referring to our hills as "mountains" is a bit generous. The tallest point in Missouri is easily wheelchair accessible.
My family is from Dent county and I grew up in Alaska. You ain't wrong man.
This British Columbia resident chuckled over that too.
Depends on your definition of mountain, small mountain or big hill ?. A middling definition would be nice. But it's far too late for that.
Then you really should've done your research on the St. Francois Mountains because you would've come to learn that your state is home to the oldest mountain range in north america. (pre-dates the appalachians by around a billon years & the 8th oldest on the planet) the rockies are supposed to be completely eroded away in around 375 million years just to give you an idea of how tall they once were
Superb exposition of a very complex situation! Thanks!
They had NO contingency for one of the pumps not shutting off?!!! Seems like a plausible scenario that would be easy to detect and also to mitigate.
sauk tuah dam
Was looking for this
We shouldn't underestimate the risk of large scale battery storage. Fire is a huge one, and very toxic fires too. There's a tendency to underestimate the risk of new technology, just because it hasn't been around long enough for there to have been many accidents yet.
Batteries also wear out in a way that they can't be easily repaired to extend their lifespan they have to be disposed of and replaced. Unlike water infrastructure that can be much more easily retrofitted or updated.
Taum Sauk? I would've guessed Vietnam.
I thought Phillipines
Shrimp Taum Yauk?
13:02 it's 13 min in and there is no garage model with the clear plastic and sand.... where's the garage model!? It's taught so much!!!
we'll see it again, don't worry
This is Great! I live out that way and I hike the ozark trail section nearby, between Taum Sauk State Park, and Johnson Shut Ins when I can. You can easily see the reservoir from a couple spots along the trail. Awesome to see a video about its history!