California Drought

[ultrarunner]

C. C. Myers - Wikipedia

Honoring CC Myers - YouTube

He is famous for cutting Red Tape and making it happen.

If his employee needed something he made it happen so they would not be distracted...

One of his foreman coached little league and told CC he couldn't work 7 days a week... the story is CC got a major league ball player as a stand in little league coach...

 

[California]

California has plans for emergency repairs. After the Northridge Earthquake major damage was done to several interstate bridges. Select contractors with excellent resumes, job experience, were selected to remove and replace these bridges - within 30 days with a large bonus for each day completed ahead of schedule and an equally huge penalty for each day late, including permits. Everyone works together and some were completed in 17 days. All were completed on time.

Tales from the front ... The day of the Northridge Earthquake, Caltrans' field construction managers were directed to call any contractor who had done satisfactory State projects and send them out to dig people out of the rubble Right Now. And we'll have the auditors come down from HQ later and figure out if they billed us appropriately. For the contractors with lots of experience on Caltrans jobs, no billing problems were found.

I spent several months in SoCal verifying that timecards, equipment rental, etc and CT field diaries for the earthquake emergency response supported the contractors claims. I didn't find variances from the experienced contractors.

One variance I'll never forget! I walked into a sub-contractors office and the receptionist was a stunningly gorgeous teenager. An hour later when they had given me junk records that didn't support their claimed costs, Ms Hottie came in alone, swung the door closed, sat on the desktop a little too close, and leaned in to point at various figures on the documents I was looking at. It was a too-obvious attempt to get my attention away from the records - hanging in the air unsaid was 'You can touch me if you like!' It was clear she was directed to do this and was having fun doing it. My first thought was this is the first step of an attempted bribe, my only instance in 20 years.

Ok, game over. I wrote up what I had seen so far and told them this was going to take another day onsite to complete. Next day the owner was upfront when I confronted him with the variance between claimed/supported costs. He said he had never done a State job before and thought he could bill whatever he could imagine and no one would notice. Sorry, no, preventing that is exactly why we do post-completion cost audits. You show us paychecks you paid but your bank statement shows they were never cashed? Sorry, that's fraud.

We took away $50k from the prime contractor who would have been obligated to pass payment through to this subcontractor and that was the end of it, no protest. The prime said he got that guy's name off one of our lists of persons interested in bidding State work, that's all he knew about him and he had no problem with refusing payment to the sub based on our finding.

Your Tax Dollars At Work.

 

[MossRoad]

Of course you know that a high percentage of homeless are former military that served in Afganistan and Iraq and are suffering from PTSD. I guess that you don't like the military either!

Its about 11% in this study.
https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2015-AHAR-Part-1.pdf

About 7% of the U.S. population is made up of veterans. So the percentage of veterans that are homeless closely corresponds to the percentage of veterans in the population. It is slightly higher, but not by much. Its still a tragedy, of course, that anyone in the U.S. is homeless.

 

[MossRoad]

Overview. Photo taken 3/1, as they began to remove the erosion debris out of the river channel.

It seems that area at the far left has been cleared to receive the material.

Source with more photos.

Wow. Great perspective in that shot. Thanks.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

LOL.

BTW I asserted earlier on that I did not see any reinforcement used in the spillway floor but others said it was there. With these new pics I still do not see any rebar or other reinforcement in that concrete. Which is why I contend that it failed and touched this whole fiasco off. I'm no civil engineer but I'd think reinforcing that spill way would be mandatory in order to prevent a failure just like this.

If you look at the pictures on the metabunk website, there were plenty of pics showing rebar.

 

[California]

C. C. Myers - Wikipedia
He is famous for cutting Red Tape and making it happen.

If his employee needed something he made it happen so they would not be distracted...

Probably Urban Legend but somebody told me for that LA reconstruction where Myers made the huge bonus, he double-teamed his crew. A second Equipment Operator riding shotgun in each cab, a second Ironworker standing there handing tools and swapping roles when the first guy looked tired.

 

[ultrarunner]

Yep... he does have the persona of a legendary figure in the industry...

 

[TomSeller]

Females made up 39.7% of the homeless population in 2015...

Source...
https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2015-AHAR-Part-1.pdf

Fake news. It is not 39.7% female where I live, no way.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Work begins to clear the Feather River of debris downstream from the power plant so it can resume operation.

I was thinking they should mine it too. They need about 200 more pieces of very large heavy equipment. And hurry!

 

[MossRoad]

Fake news. It is not 39.7% female where I live, no way.

Back it up with some facts, Tom. Those are national statistics.

 

[MossRoad]

I was thinking they should mine it too. They need about 200 more pieces of very large heavy equipment. And hurry!

Speaking of mining, I read a story somewhere and they were talking to a gold miners in CA. A lot was mentioned that all the recent rains and flooding have exposed quite a bit of fresh gold in California. Kind of a mini gold rush should be happening soon out there.

 

[California]

Fake news. It is not 39.7% female where I live, no way.

I don't find that incredible. In harvest season I take a couple of trailer loads of apples to a Downtown Food Closet that provides emergency free groceries but limited to one visit per month. The clientele there looks to me to be 90% abandoned wives, mostly in danger of not making the next rent payment.

 

[California]

Speaking of mining, I read a story somewhere and they were talking to a gold miners in CA. A lot was mentioned that all the recent rains and flooding have exposed quite a bit of fresh gold in California. Kind of a mini gold rush should be happening soon out there.

You'll see a lot of amateurs up in the canyons. But at this spillway site, forget it. Gold has a specific gravity of 19, common rock like these photos is around 3. With all the churning here the gold will all be on the bottom, it always is. A few nuggets might be found in those exposed crevices (if you can get permission to get in there) but it wouldn't be economically rational to process all that waste material to extract gold.

When gold first shot up to $300/oz (1980?) our mining claim got overrun with yahoos, who even stole all our hidden camping gear. I think many were recently released ex-cons who had heard the wild legends. At the end of summer those guys were still starving, none had made wages.

Each time there is a gullywasher winter a new crop of yahoos arrives, a few of them find gold, most just find a little color.

These nuggets were shown to me by someone we hadn't seen for years, the long-lost owner of a nearby claim who stumbled into our camp at dinnertime and subtly asked us 9 different ways where the upper boundary of our claim was. I'm pretty sure he found them within our claim and he didn't own the stretch of creek upstream from it where they might have been. He had extraordinary luck for a weekend's fooling around using a metal detector, I think on the gravel benches well above the creek level. I wish we could do this well.

I finally formally abandoned the claim when the BLM's annual fees went from under $50/year to over $500 and also Fish & Game outlawed use of an engine-powered suction dredge in the trout streams. That was the end of an era, I don't think any hobby mining is a reasonable thing to do now.

 

[MossRoad]

You'll see a lot of amateurs up in the canyons. But at this spillway site, forget it. Gold has a specific gravity of 19, common rock like these photos is around 3. With all the churning here the gold will all be on the bottom, it always is. A few nuggets might be found in those exposed crevices (if you can get permission to get in there) but it wouldn't be economically rational to process all that waste material to extract gold.

When gold first shot up to $300/oz (1980?) our mining claim got overrun with yahoos, who even stole all our hidden camping gear. I think many were recently released ex-cons who had heard the wild legends. At the end of summer those guys were still starving, none had made wages.

Each time there is a gullywasher winter a new crop of yahoos arrives, a few of them find gold, most just find a little color.

These nuggets were shown to me by someone we hadn't seen for years, the long-lost owner of a nearby claim who stumbled into our camp at dinnertime and subtly asked us 9 different ways where the upper boundary of our claim was. I'm pretty sure he found them within our claim and he didn't own the stretch of creek upstream from it where they might have been. He had extraordinary luck for a weekend's fooling around using a metal detector, I think on the gravel benches well above the creek level. I wish we could do this well.

I finally formally abandoned the claim when the BLM's annual fees went from under $50/year to over $500 and also Fish & Game outlawed use of an engine-powered suction dredge in the trout streams. That was the end of an era, I don't think any hobby mining is a reasonable thing to do now.

Around here, there's guys with teeth that look like that! :laughing:

It would be fun to just putter around looking for gold. When I was a kid, there was a drainage ditch in our neighborhood. After heavy rains my friends and I would go stomping through the creek bed seeing what we'd turn up. Torn up trees, erosion, sand, etc.... We'd find quite a bit of pyrite and pretend it was gold.

 

[Barry 1]

Around here, there's guys with teeth that look like that! :laughing:

It would be fun to just putter around looking for gold. When I was a kid, there was a drainage ditch in our neighborhood. After heavy rains my friends and I would go stomping through the creek bed seeing what we'd turn up. Torn up trees, erosion, sand, etc.... We'd find quite a bit of pyrite and pretend it was gold.

There is glacial GOLD all over Indiana and Ohio. You even have several clubs like Indiana Prospectors and The GPAA. Grab you a pan and go look.

 

[NoTrespassing]

"The snow is so deep here that scientists can't measure it"

The snow is so deep here that scientists can't measure it

Kevin

 

[EddieWalker]

Fake news. It is not 39.7% female where I live, no way.

I don't know what percentage is female where you live, or where I live, but I do believe that a lot of women become homeless when leaving an abusive relationship. Most of the time it's temporary and they get back on their feet in a few months or so, but they are still counted as homeless. Kind of how the government counts part time jobs the same as full time jobs to achieve a better statistic.

 

[TomSeller]

Back it up with some facts, Tom. Those are national statistics.

No, yours are government alternate facts put out by government workers who are self served by massaging the numbers. What makes you think because the government puts it out it is true? The numbers are all over the map, just goggle it. I seldom see any women. I am talking about homeless street people. Rarely ever women where I live.

 

[bigdeano]

I wonder how many men end up homeless in a divorce when the woman and kids get almost everything?

 

[houstonscott]

Riverbanks collapse after Oroville Dam spillway shut off