This article from the Times of India illustrates clearly the somersaults of governments and media do to avoid talking directly about the huge elephant in the room. No larger an elephant than in the Indian Himalaya.
The article does what media all over the world and devotes a lot of space to the proximate causes of the tragedy but almost as an afterthought say "there is no doubt that global warming has resulted in a warming of the region"
This is the extent of it all. This is the voice of an Indian bureaucrat (and they don't come any more bureaucratic than in India)
But in talking of this they feel obligated to pray before a shrine and intone a mantra
It is all part of a general trend where global warming is talked about. in general but avoided in particular. Why do they not talk about HOW the region has warmed and what the consequences have been.
But that is for specialist articles that no one will see.
Just looking at footage I can see at a glimpse how the climate and the environment has changed since I was last in India in 1993. I don't need any graphs or scholarly articles that leave out of the picture more than they reveal.
***
They do a little better in this article
Despite the article focusing on climate change the closest you get to specifics is this;
And then this:
Leaving aside mantras about reducing CO2 emissions measuring and monitoring the unfolding catastrophe is about all they can do with lots of hand-rubbing and head-scratching along the way
Dozens of people are missing and feared dead after a Himalayan glacier crashed into a dam and triggered a huge flood in northern India.
As the dam broke open, a deluge of water poured through a valley in the state of Uttarakhand.
Villages have been evacuated, but officials warned more than 125 people may have been caught in the torrent.
Video showed the floodwater barrelling through the area, leaving destruction in its wake.
"It came very fast, there was no time to alert anyone," Sanjay Singh Rana, who lives near to the Dhauli Ganga river, told the Reuters news agency.
"I felt that even we would be swept away"
Uttarakhand police said the avalanche struck at about 11:00 local time (05:30 GMT), destroying a dam known as the Rishiganga Hydroelectric Project.
Police said the impact catapulted water along the Dhauli Ganga river, damaging another power project downstream in the Tapovan area.
One witness compared the flash flood to "a scene from a Bollywood film".
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said 125 people were confirmed missing so far, but that number could rise.
"Seven bodies have been recovered from the site and rescue operations are going on," Mr Singh Rawat told reporters at a briefing on Sunday.
Most of those missing were workers at the two power projects swept away by the deluge.
More than 50 people working at the Rishiganga Hydroelectric Project were feared dead, Uttarakhand police chief Ashok Kumar said.
But he said some workers had been rescued from the site.
Emergency crew managed to rescue 16 workers who had been trapped inside a tunnel that had been filled with debris.
Indian media said around 30 others were trapped in a second tunnel, with emergency crews prepared to work through the night to rescue them.
Mr Singh Rawat said teams from the police and the army were "doing their best to save the lives of the workers".
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was monitoring the situation. "The nation prays for everyone's safety there," he wrote on Twitter shortly after speaking with the state minister.
Emergency workers evacuated dozens of villages, but authorities later said the main flood danger had passed.
Hundreds of troops along with military helicopters and other aircraft have been sent to the region.
The neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh has put some riverside areas on high alert for flooding.
Experts are investigating the incident.
What caused the glacial burst?
Navin Singh Khadka, BBC World Service environment correspondent
The remoteness of where this happened means no-one has a definitive answer, so far.
Experts say one possibility is that massive ice blocks broke off the glacier due to a temperature rise, releasing a huge amount of water.
And that could have caused avalanches bringing down rocks and mud.
"This is a strong possibility because there was a huge amount of sediment flowing down," said DP Dobhal, a senior glaciologist formerly with the government's Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology.
Experts say an avalanche could also have hit a glacial lake that then burst.
Another possibility is that an avalanche or landslide may have dammed the river for some time, causing it to burst out after the water level rose.
Uttarakhand, in the western Himalayas, is prone to flash floods and landslides.
(ATF) A flood alert has been raised near China’s famous Three Gorges Dam after the country suffered its heaviest rainfall in 70-80 years. Torrential rain has been causing chaos throughout China’s southwest this month, with many rivers overflowing and mass evacuations.
Heavy rains over the past three weeks have led to disasters being declared in 24 provinces and municipalities, especially near the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and the Three Gorges Dam.
This is reportedly the largest flooding since 1949 and has caused serious challenges to the world's largest dam.
In Chongqing, authorities dredged 100,000 tonnes of silt overnight as levels rose.
Three Gorges is located in Sandouping Town, near Yichang City in Hubei Province in central China. It is 38 kilometres from the downstream Gezhouba Water Conservancy Project at the eastern end of the Three Gorges Reservoir.
Qijiang Online, the media outlet in the area, quoted Zhao Yunfa, deputy chief engineer of the overflow dispatch communications centre at the Three Gorges Project, who said: "The flood storage capacity of the Three Gorges is limited. Do not pin your hopes on the Three Gorges Dam."
Zhang Shuguang, director of the Three Gorges Corporation Hub Management Bureau, also said that flood control measures for the entire Yangtze River Basin could not rely on a Three Gorges Dam to dominate the flood.
Construction on the dam began in 1994 and ended in 2006 after total investment of about 95.5 billion yuan (US$13.5 billion). The dam itself is 2,335 metres long and has an elevation of 185 metres. The second part of the scheme was a water diversion project. The dam has 32 turbine generator units and power generated by its hydropower station exceeded 100 billion kilowatt hours in 2018, a world record for a single facility.
The dam caused considerable controversy as it displaced over a million people and submerged large areas of the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges for about 600km – creating a deep reservoir that ocean-going freighters can navigate for 2,250km inland from Shanghai on the East China Sea to the inland city of Chongqing.
The heavy seasonal rain this month has swamped 24 provinces and municipalities in southern and central China, affecting more than 85 million people and causing damage put at 20.7 billion yuan so far.
Zhang warned that the largest flood since 1949 may occur this year, as rainfall in the dam's catchment area – it has a reservoir up to 600km long – upstream of the dam poses a serious challenge.
Many plateaus in southwestern Sichuan Province have experienced heavy rain for 24 hours since June 16, and this was expected to continue in some parts of Sichuan until the 23rd (today).
Heavy rain in the upper reaches of the Qinhuai River in Jiangsu Province over the past few days totalled about 280 millimetres, which is equivalent to about 280 litres per square metre (or 11 inches on the old scale). This prompted authorities to issue strong rainfall warnings.
The State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, which is in charge of national flood control and drought relief work, said that from the 15th, floods had struck 852 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, and Chongqing, causing 7,300 houses to collapse.
The Ministry of Water Resources said that 148 rivers had exceeded warning levels. For the first time in history the Chongqing section of the Qijiang River Basin issued a red warning, signifying a flood of more than 10 meters.
An estimated 400 million people live downstream of the Three Gorges Dam.
Is the Three Gorges Dam a Ticking Time Bomb?
Damming the Three Gorges (2008): Are the 400 million people living in the Yangtze basin paying the price for living beside the world's largest hydroelectric dam? Scientists fear it could spark a geological disaster.
The dam was built to ease flooding and power China's industrial heartland but its facing major problems. "Ever since the water level went up... cracks began to appear in the walls," says one villager. Yet some say the benefits of lowering pollution far outweighs the negatives. "The electricity generated by the dam is equivalent to the power generated by 50 million tonnes of coal."
The Corruption Behind China's Three Gorges Dam Exposed (1999)
....Xing was one among many who feared the country was building too fast and too recklessly. When he designed the Suya Lake Reservoir in 1958 — at the time the largest reservoir in Asia — he was admonished for trying to add more sluice gates. Labeled a “right-wing opportunist,” he was eventually fired for being a vocal critic.
According to an account of the Banqiao Dam by a Chinese journalist writing under the pseudonym Yi Si, on Aug. 8, as workers stared curiously at the retreating water level of the reservoir, a voice in the dark called out: “The River Dragon has come!” And suddenly the dam ruptured, unleashing 600 billion liters of water and destroying an entire village. By Aug. 17, reports Si, 1.1 million people remained trapped by flooding with 50 to 60 percent of food air-dropped into the area floating in the murky waters. It would take weeks for the waters to drain, revealing bloated corpses dotting the landscape in the late summer sun.
The government kept news of the disaster from being broadcast nationally, and there hadn’t been any international observers present. But when China’s Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power released a study in July 1989, it reported that the dam breach caused more than 85,000 people to die instantly. Two years earlier, “On Macro-Decision Making in the Three Gorges Project,” a study conducted by eight Chinese water science experts who probably had access to censored government reports, estimated the number of total dead — from flooding and the resulting epidemics and famine — at 230,000.
Although the disaster is thought to be the deadliest of its kind anywhere in the world, it’s not common knowledge even inside China. When the dam broke, the Communist Party’s control of the media was near absolute, explains David Bandurski of the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project. “Generally speaking, disasters of all forms, whether primarily natural in cause or human in cause, have been viewed by China’s leaders as highly sensitive,” he says, with the government loathe to concede culpability.....
Margo has done a very informative video on earthquakes around the world.
In it she discussed her concerns about a 2.5 quake that was reported by USGS as a 2.5 quake caused by a chemical explosion that was minus 0.2 km (in other words 200 m above ground, say on or under a hill.
Readers
may recall it was this particular dam which almost collapsed during torrential rains in California several years ago, with its main
spillway literally torn out of the ground by raging overflow waters.
Now,
an explosion has taken place very near the dam but NO DETAILS
WHATSOEVER are being released about it!
Instead of spreading FEAR
and MISINFORMATION try doing a little RESEARCH. The chemical
explosions on the USGS map are from planned blasting just above the
new spillway to backfill the new spillwy walls. Here's the link "
BUTTE
COUNTY, Calif. - Blasting work on the Oroville Dam Spillway is
expected to cause traffic delays on Oro Dam Boulevard Friday.
The
blasting will be used to break up rock above the spillway and is used
to improve hillside safety. According to the Department of Water
Resources, the blasting occurring on Friday will be similar to
blasting done in the past several weeks, so they don't expect any
loud noise levels.
The
work will begin on Friday, Dec. 21, and will cause a closure of a
portion of Oro Dam Boulevard from 3:45-4:05 p.m.
Traffic
heading east on Oroville Dam Boulevard East will be stopped at Glen
Drive and traffic heading west will be stopped at Oroville Powerhouse
Road at the Hyatt entrance toward the bottom of the hill.
Drivers
may also experience delays at the Canyon Drive, Royal Oaks Drive and
Oro Dam Boulevard East intersection.
Friday
afternoon and drivers in that area will be at a complete standstill
during the 20 minute time frame.
To
avoid the delay, drivers can take the following routes:
Canyon
to Olive Highway
Glen
Drive to Oro-Quincy Highway to Olive Highway
Turns out "Blancolirio",
is a reporter for the Union from Grass Valley, CA. His name is
Juan Brown.
Here he is asking questions to the dam people about the
progress of the dam. This is him flying his plane, doing updates,
etc
A second source
It turns out that the only place on the internet where this is reported outside of Margo and myself is Hal Turner who came to his conclusions quite independently.
A
massive explosion has taken place near the Oroville Dam in
California. The explosion was so powerful, it registered on
seismographs with the US Geological Survey as a Magnitude 2.5
Earthquake!
Readers
may recall it was this particular Dam which almost collapsed during
torrential rains in California several years ago, with its main
spillway literally torn out of the ground by raging overflow waters.
Now,
an explosion has taken place very near the dam but NO DETAILS
WHATSOEVER are being released about it!
Authorities
are absolutely "mum" on the topic.
Were
it not for the USGS reporting it as a Magnitude 2.5 Explosion, there
would be a total blackout of information about this.
To
put this event in perspective for you, during the attacks of
September 11, when the World Trade Center Towers collapsed, those
collapses only registered as a Magnitdue 2.0 -- while today's
explosion registered as 2.5
That
gives you an idea about how powerful this explosion at Oroville was!
Yet no one is saying a word about it.
Was
this a Terrorist Attack; perhaps some attempt to collapse the Dam and
kill thousands with instant flooding? No one is saying.
We
are endeavoring to determine what took place and expect to update
this story later Saturday.
Discussion
I am posting this update because responses like the above one by a presstitute who is enamoured with a piece of engineering irritates me beyond measure.
I have no reliable information to tell me whether the notice quoted by the individual is the end of the story. However, I suspect there MAY be more than meets the eye and certainly there are questions to be answered.
What caused his interest in a You Tube story from someone living 90 miles away? Why the aggression?
The first point is that the story was derived from the US Geological Service (USGS).
It was the USGS (not Margo) who labelled it as a "chemical explosion". So why is Mr.Brown attacking Margo for disinformation and fake news and not the USGS?
The first point that needs to be made is that the quake occurred at minus 0.2 km and Margo has found that the coordinates of the quake correspond to a small hill adjacent to the dam spillway.
The notice says:
"The
blasting will be used to break up rock above the spillway and is used
to improve hillside safety"
A 2.1 quake associated with either planned work with explosions or with a "chemical explosion" (whatever that means), according to USGS cannot be caused by explosions:
Can
we use a lot of explosives to cause small earthquakes in order to
prevent having large ones?
No.
Even huge amounts of explosive almost never cause even small
earthquakes, and it would take hundreds and thousands of small
earthquakes to equal a large one, even if it could be done. In
addition, we wouldn't have any control over the size of the
earthquake being created if it worked, since small and large
earthquakes all start out in exactly the same way. It's just not
physically possible.
I
think that there are still questions to be answered and Margo has
followed all rules of objectivity in her reporting which, I suspect
Mr. Juan Brown has not (but as a presstitute he is always 'right',
even if he is not speaking the truth).
From
the information Margo could find, they had finished the
reconstruction of the spillway by Nov. 1, so to see that explosion on
USGS was alarming to her..
In the meantime, here is a video from an "incident" some months ago.
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