Re:The World’s Aging Dams
by remote_phone on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @03:15PM
(#26081934)
My friend does some auxiliary work for Site C. He said everything is over budget and a mess. The initial contractor underbid because they thought they could get migrant workers in. But now they are dealing with union workers so the contractors messed it up badly.
Somewhat relatedly; I have PEng friends who worked on the budgeting for Transmountain before the Grits bought it.
The true cost will be somewhere around 3x the expected, in the long run. They lied through their teeth to offload the lemon onto the feds.
All of BC's dams were built in an earthquake zone. That's sort-of a given.
Huge portions of the Comox Valley and Coquitlam are precarious; a strong shake will send a wave of water that will wipe out thousands of homes.
We're not just talking about natural earthquake risk. The fracking that's happening near the dam is actively making the earthquakes worse.
https://thenarwhal.ca/fracking-induced-earthquakes-buffer-zo...
Why on earth are the NDP allowing fracking that close to those dams? Holy hell.
Not sure if this is a good example of "know how to build dams". It's a dam foolish design, built on an earthquake fault zone that's been made unstable by the excavation that's being done to build the dam. The design has been changed to include this ridiculous earthfill section (https://www.sitecproject.com/about-site-c/site-c-project-com...) to compensate for the weirdness of the geography there. It's probably going to fail catastrophically at some point and destroy a lot of homes downstream from it, and the controversy over the project basically caused the downfall of BC's last government.