I love the smell of brake shoes in the morning. It smells like...forgetfulness.

That was not true of cars designed by product people. In ancient times, the parking brake cable was located above exhaust pipe so that it would thaw. Today, that parking brake cable is often inside a protective sleeve to rear brakes.

I remember my early accountant designed cars. Apply a small blob of water resistance grease where that cable came out of the sleeve to avoid the cable freeze. But again, parking brake cable freeze would only be due to a human failure - such as someone who washed out that water resistant grease with WD-40.

Meanwhile, back to the Taum Sauk reservoir. If properly designed, an overflow channel redirects excessive water so that the dam would not be breached. When the Taum Sauk water pumps were upgraded, was that protective channel enlarged or sufficient so that overflow could not happen? Just another example of redundancy so that the dam never overflow and be breached.

Taum Sauk reservoir wasn’t a dam across a river with an inflow like we normally see. More like the tank on a toilet, or a sink, with the water coming in and out via pipes.
That makes me wonder if there even was an overflow channel? If so to where? Could they have been relying solely on technology, rather than the redundancy of an overflow channel? :confused:

Ahhh , Bruce that is the crux of the issue ,

HOW can technology Fail ????

According to the SOFTWARE engniers it can't , it is BULLET PROOF !!!!
Or so they think .
Back to the folks that just hit RESET if things go wrong .


You and I both know it is best to engeneer in a back up , a worst case serneio , oh FUCKING SHIT mechicanical back up .

Did some work once with a word processor company in MN called CPT. Software and hardware engineering were at war - each blaming the other for technical problems. Back then, it was only Z80s - very simplistic hardware. Good thing they were not operating large bodies of water atop a mountain. That might have been too complex.

There was no spillway or other overflow (like the little hole in the top of your sink) in Taum Sauk. It was a kidney-shaped reservoir with a big fucking hole in the bottom which was used to fill the reservoir and through which the water flowed back out through the same turbines used to pump it full.

There is another opening of some kind in the junction of the wall and bottom, but I have no idea what it is for.

Level was apparently completely controlled by an electronic sensing system (perhaps related to this thingamajig?

BTW - If you do a Google search for "Taum Sauk Lining", you'll come up with a bunch of pics that are apparently on the server of the company that did the project last year. However, the original pages come up 404, making me wonder if they didn't pull this project off of their "lookie what we did" page in pretty short order after the failure.

Oh...and, I forgot to add that managers suck. If this project would have built by real dam experts, like, say, beavers, this probably wouldn't have happened. Sorry, didn't want to derail the thread by leaving that out. :right:

Expertise begins with knowing where not to build a dam. One day, perhaps, we will catch up to the beavers in that department.

I'd guess that is a construction and maintenance tunnel for heavy equiptment to get in and out. When it's empty, of course.
They screw up sometimes, too. Usually it's not as big a threat to human's, though. :headshake