As you might know, there is a lot of flooding going on along the Missouri River. On Sunday, they were releasing 145,000 cubic feet of water per second (for reference, Niagra Falls clocks in at about 110,000 cubic feet per second on average). They have never opened the floodgates this far. That rate of flow would totally drain the lake in about 24 hours, except that all the damns upstream are releasing water at the same rate.
Of course, I got pictures.
And I got a short video with my digital camera.
They upped the flow rate slightly on Tuesday to 150,000 cubic feet per second. They expect to keep up this flow rate through sometime in August.
I spent lots of weekends there while growing up and never saw anything like this. It was common to see none of the floodgates open at all (there is a hydroelectric plant there and frequently the only water they would release would be that needed to generate electricity).
I was worried about getting caught in lots of traffic. Fortunately, that part of South Dakota is not heavily populated and the park rangers were doing a bang up job of traffic control (and I was there early Sunday afternoon when traffic should have been pretty heavy).
Here's hoping all the levees hold downstream as this deluge moves south.
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5 comments:
Speaking of water. Did you hear some town in Oregon drained an entire water reservoir because security cameras caught some guy peeing in it?
Never mind it's also probably loaded with fish, duck, and geese shit. And do bears REALLY shit and pee in the woods? And throw in dead decaying fish. A bit of over reaction maybe?
Hale, the video captures some of the power being released there. Very impressive. It's hard to conceive of the amounts involved.
logjam, lol. Maybe they thought the guy had radioactive pee, or was peeing biological/chemical toxins.
That IS a lot of water...and I thought Yellowstone Falls was impressive.
I saw this on the news... amazingly powerful.
On a recent trip out to the Mississippi they had all the gates open at the locks and dams. I've never seen that before. There were no barges on the river... the water was moving way too fast!
The noise it generates in amazing.
Ma Nature sure can be a bitch when she wants too!
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