What the ever loving fuck do those two things have to do with one another?
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Well, man, Jerry died, so after that, are they still the Dead?
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They say it like its a bad thing.
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Who were one hundred percent correct. The set of things on which the Sierra Club and I agree is not empty.
I have no idea how California prioritizes it’s spending. The dam is owned by the California Department of Water Resources. I understand that this issue was noticed as far back as 2006, but ignored. Someone has got some 'splaining to do.
Hey, if California had only built more bullet trains sooner, they could have gotten all those people out of Oroville in minutes.
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It was the same story after Katrina. Everyone said, “Why didn’t we fix this before it was a problem, like everyone said we should?”
Because something about the political and social culture of America makes it undesirable to fix problems before they happen. Maybe it’s that when governments look to “cut waste” they look for spending that has no observable result. Maybe we need to study other countries that are better at prevention and maintenance and try to understand why people value that (I say we because Canada isn’t any better than the US at this nonsense. I can think of a few bridges that are probably going to fall down one day).
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With the exception of perhaps Switzerland, doesn’t that apply to the human race in general?
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It might, but that might be one of those things where Americans (and Canadians) mistake how Americans behave for “human nature.” I wouldn’t know much about the topic (except how bad Americans are on the subject).
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I suggest we all contact our representatives and tell them that we need infrastructure upgrades more than we need Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers or whatever.
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A number of the dams in the CA water system are in a bad state and they’ve been systematically trying to replace them.
Currently the Calvaras Lake Dam is being repaired because it was the worst of the lot. I’m pretty sure Oroville was on the list and just jumped to the top. Emptying a reservoir and holding water for a community someplace else, farther upstream is difficult to manage. When that reservoir is Oroville and one of the largest upstream storage locations, emptying it and holding enough downstream to let the pressure off and work be done can be very rough. In the drought they couldn’t really make many mistakes.
There is an incredible amount of water falling from the sky in a place that has seen very little water for years. The ground can’t take it, the plants don’t exist to absorb it or hold the topsoil down. Also, the cement and steel we use for these has been expanding and contracting in the sun for years. People expected problems, no one expected this.
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Why not both?
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I guess we are going to have to expand our expectations for ranges of weather. Old timers tended to be a lot more conservative about these things. People regularly build on places that have regularly been subject to flooding or other disasters. They are not risk-adverse enough. And I think the same mindset applies for infrastructure spending.
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Dam has been there for 50 years. Had they maintained it, it’d have been OK. Deferred maintenance is a thing the state is gonna have to take a look at. It is killing people.
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I don’t grant your premise.
And just like Katrina, if the local people were in charge of the infrastructure that affects them directly, this stuff would get fixed. In pursuing efficiencies and spreading the costs we lose accountability.
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Yet you don’t hesitate to mock the state for having the gall to make a long-term investment in a perfectly reasonable piece of transportation infrastructure that many other first-world countries have had for decades.
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Right now, I’m working at a large nonprofit which just spent $40 million on a shiny new building, much of which went for eye candy, while two of its other buildings are still standing only because the termites are holding hands. So it’s not unique to governments.
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Here’s what I said on another BB thread a couple of years ago.
- it’s clear that there is not enough money to build high performance trains in the USA absent the hiring of a magic dwarf who can spin straw into gold.
The announcement of such a project would attract a sky-darkening swarm of featherbedding consultants, bureaucrats looking for another two decades of locked-in “work”, cost-plus contractors, and NIMBY protest groups with their attorneys, all well equipped with wallets full of political grease and ready to settle in for the long term like lampreys hooking into a fat sea trout.
Five years in, not a mile of track will have been laid, the cost estimates will have quadrupled, and taxpayers will be screaming to be let off the hook.
Everyone knows this. And this is why you can’t have nice trains.
Not quite sure about the five year time frame, but I am confident that this is exactly what will happen to California’s high speed train project.
How exactly would any of those things be different than if California had taken the alternative option of dealing with projected travel demands by spending a couple of decades widening freeways across the state?
We’d still have multibillion-dollar cost overruns and NIMBY complaints and accusations of corruption, but we wouldn’t have any of the advantages like faster travel time or reduced dependency on fossil fuels.
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