Geologists say that a 200 ft deep temporary lake is likely to grow upstream of the landslide over the coming days and weeks. Eventually the pressure behind the landslide will break the debris free, causing a 200 ft high wall of water to be sent downstream. (This is Biblical-level.)
Nature lovers are already gathering to observe this spectaclar event while townspeople are evacuating, and running for their lives.
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intercst
I’m in favor of lower fees…
DB2
Jesus, and I thought I did a good job spell checking that post.
intercst
What bugs me the most is when the autocorrect feature makes mistakes for you.
DB2
The video assumes that nothing will be done to alleviate the pressure before a catastrophic collapse. Is that reasonable?
One idea would be to cut a small channel through the debris, and allow the water behind the debris dam to escape more slowly. But this isn’t like a solidly compacted, purpose-built, engineered dam. There is going to be a lot of variability in the soil conditions the channel cutting crew would encounter. That makes it a dangerous task just as likely to hasten the catastrophic collapse of the dam as preventing it…
The safest path is to stand back and let nature take it’s course. The Canadian engineering team I saw on a news conference yesterday seemed to think that it’s going to fail by the water “overtopping the dam” which is the most catastrophic failure scenario.
intercst
An article in the Globe and Mail takes a more sanguine view of the landslide and the flooding that will come.
Officials monitoring the dam now believe the 10-kilometre-long lake that has formed behind the landslide, located about 280 kilometres north of Vancouver, will gradually flow over the dam rather than breach it suddenly.
“Depending on the distribution and nature of the overtopping flow, the impacts could still be significant,” said Bowinn Ma, B.C.’s Minister of Emergency Management.
Mr. Alphonse said the area’s shifting geography is embedded in the local language. In Tsilhqot’in, the area of the dam is called Nagwentled, which translates to “landslides across river.”
“It’s just something that has always happened and will always happen there,” he said. “Those river banks are silt and sand. You have the river cutting into the banks, along with natural spring water and forest fires destabilizing the soil.”
That’s great news if the overtopping flow doesn’t cause a sudden collapse.
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Chilcotin River now mostly “free flowing”, disaster averted, media uninterested.
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The media has the ex-hurricane to screech about “Millions impacted!!!”
Steve