American River

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This is the American River north of Sacramento California.  

It was first crossed by Jedediah Strong Smith, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedediah… mountain man of renown, who has made appearances in my write-ups before.  It was the primary culprit for making Leland Stanford’s inauguration day as Governor a total miserable disaster.  The 1862 flood put most of California under water for a year.  (hilariously enough, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights)  Sacramento was 22 feet under as the American River overtopped its banks and the levees and Stanford had to take a canoe out of his second floor window to get to his swearing-in ceremony. uschs.org/explore/historical-a… This was the point when they decided to move the capital to San Francisco for a while.  

But California weather is famously unstable, and it all dried out for a century or so.  In the 1950’s the state decided to add a dam to the American River at Auburn to help with the Sacramento water supply. The site was chosen and prepared and a 265 foot high cofferdam was built across the river.  Completed, it would have been the tallest dam in California at 680 feet high.  However, old man river had other plans.  In February 1986, www.kcra.com/article/revisitin… (see, any date with an ’86’ and bad stuff happens to the weather) Sacramento got 10 inches or rain in 10 days, not a lot, right?  

It melted the entire Sierra snowpack and millions upon millions of acre-feet of water came pouring into the American river, it filled up the reservoir behind the cofferdam almost immediately, and then overtopped the dam, which the project managers said ‘failed faster than expected’.   When the 300 foot tall earthen coffer dam swept downstream, along with ice water pouring through at 250,000 cubic feet a second, it overtopped levees, nearly collapsed Folsom Dam, and forced 50,000 people out of their homes .  Death toll: 13, 96 injured.  The Auburn Dam project was put on indefinite hold after this, mostly because they hadn’t designed the dam to withstand a high enough earthquake tolerance.

So usually I send you happily straight over to Xander, but this week, it's definitely 'proceed with caution'.  Xander is realizing that he's got more of an uphill battle than he imagined.

   
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