(
Satellite)
Powerhouse: (
Satellite)
The dam is so big that one can't view the whole thing. This is just the spillway that is on the eastern side of the dam.
And this is the powerhouse and outlets that are on the western side of the dam.
And this is the Intake Structure that controls the water into the five 24' penstocks that feed the turbines in the powerhouse.
I'm glad to hear that it is a rolled earth dam. Some of the western dams were built with sluiced material, and they have safety issues.
The power plant "is 522 ft long, 163 ft tall, and 134 ft wide." [
ndtourism]
The five units have a combined nameplate capacity of 583.3mw. [
minnkota]
The annual production is 2.6 million mega-watt hours that produces "in excess of $39 million in revenue." [
USACE]
The only photo I found with the outlet active. (The source inaccurately called this the spillway.)
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| ndstudies, Photo by Sgt. Brett Miller, North Dakota National Guard Visual Information |
The is the post that motivated these notes.
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TheDickinsonPress, Contributed / Delanie Stafford, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
$1.8B Garrison Dam spillway project to be largest in US Army Corps’ historyThe project is slated to begin in 2030 and should improve water flows, especially during extreme flood years, branch chief says.
Clark Simpfenderfer shared
Eric Chrysler: And we can’t get 500k to fix our station service generator. |
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TheDickinsonPress, Contributed / Delanie Stafford, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The Garrison Dam spillway can fit the Denver Broncos' Empower Field, the University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium and the Fargodome, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. |
For the first time since the dam started operating, the Corps opened Garrison’s spillway gates on June 1, 2011, letting out an additional 30,000 cubic feet of water per second....Opening the dam dislodged manhole covers and damaged the subdrain system under the spillway’s concrete slab, Barry said. As the Corps investigated the damage, engineers discovered floods more extreme than in 2011 could put the spillway at risk of failure, he said. The Corps did a safety modification study in 2023 and determined several steps to improve the spillway, he said....The original design was set up to let out up to 827,000 cubic feet per second, Barry said. After the updates are finished, the spillway will allow up to 1.15 million cubic feet per second, he said." [
TheDickinsonPress]
A spillway that was supposed to handle 827kcfs getting damaged by a mere 30kcfs flow does not instill confidence in the USACE.
I wonder if they started with a model of the current configuration. If the model doesn't fail in the same way as the real thing failed, then how can you trust other model results?
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| Same Reel |
USACE, Omaha District posted six photos with the comment:
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