Dam Glad of It ~ By, John Howsden

I can’t be trusted. I hedge on the truth. But I do it for good reasons. In this case I wanted to see how they make electricity at the Lake Tulloch dam, but I was too embarrassed to admit to Susan Larson, the coordinator for Tri-Dam Project, that I was just a kid in a man’s body. So I arranged to meet her at the dam site under the guise of doing an article on who controls Lake Tulloch reservoir.

On a cool Wednesday morning I jumped on my Harley and made a bee line for the dam. On top of a hill overlooking the dam, I met Susan, who in turned introduced me to Ron Berry, the Interim Operation Manager. I didn’t know what an operation manager did, however, it sounded like someone who could get me inside the dam so; I took a shine to him right away.

Meanwhile Susan dutifully starting listing many of the government agencies involved in controlling the water resources and explaining how each one interacted with the other. Ron chipped in occasionally until government acronyms were flying around faster than a pack of cigarettes at an AA meeting. I kept my mouth shut, my ears open and just kept thinking, “When do I get inside the dam? When do I get inside the dam?”

Being a guy, and not having a poker face, Susan recognized the look men get when they’re around heavy machinery. Throwing in the towel, she asked if I was ready for Ron to give me a tour of the dam. I mumbled something, jumped into the cab of Ron’s truck and patiently waited for him to get behind the steering wheel. We headed down an old paved road that was more gravel than tar until we pulled up next to what looked like a giant snail shell lying on its side. What’s that I asked? “It’s the new spiral. It directs water to the turbine. Better take a good look at it. In a few weeks it will be incased in tons of concrete at the base of the dam, never to be seen again.”

We climbed out of his truck and into the eight foot opening of the swirl. The further we walked into the swirl the smaller it got until we were squatting at the end where the turbine began. Timing is everything, and I couldn’t help but thinking that in a few weeks, if I was in this same spot, I would last about as long as a bug in a blender.  

Back in Ron’s truck, we drove across the twelve foot wide roadway atop the dam and stopped where water was tumbling over the spillway. When I stepped out of the truck, the roar of 1,700 cubic feet of water crashing on the rocks 120 feet below spoke of power and largeness. But how large is large? I don’t know what a cubic foot of water is let alone 1,700 of them. The only time I’d dealt with a large volume of water was when I filled up my 30,000 gallon swimming pool. It took five garden hoses and 30 hours to do that. When Ron told me a cubic foot of water equaled 7.6 gallons, I did the math. In other words enough water was flowing over the dam at that moment to fill up my pool in two and a half seconds.

Duly impressed, we headed for the powerhouse where the turbines turn acres of water into megawatts of electricity.  Immediately, upon stepping into the cavernous power house, I knew I had found a place for my Virgo alter ego. The walls were painted glossy green, the floors were swept clean and the entire room was unfilled as if someone had stuck a massive vacuum hose through the door and sucked it clean. In the center of the room were the two rotors spinning at 240 revolutions per minute.

Now we were in the belly of the beast. A constant humming filled the air. I turned to Ron and said, “These rotors must be well balanced. I don’t feel any vibrations. “You’re right” Ron said, “the shaft leading down to the turbine is milled to within 400,000 of an inch. However the humming you’re hearing has nothing to do with the balance of the rotor. It’s caused by the two electromagnet fields created by the rotors.” He started to explain, but then he saw that look on my face and suggested we move on to the control room.

Inside the control room was a panel the size of a two car garage door adorned with dials, gauges and flashing lights. Six feet away leaning back in a swivel chair sat Bill Wearin, an Emergency Relief Operator.  Atop the control was a blacked faced Harley Davidson clock. Thinking I had stumbled across a kindred spirit in the bowels of Tulloch dam, I asked, “Is that clock yours?” Bill, wearing a greasy camouflaged cap and a grizzled beard, grinned and said, “Nah, somebody before me left it.” 

Normally an operator monitors the dam operations remotely by a computer, but since two of the seven spill gates for the dam were open today, policy required an operator on site. Although every precaution is taken and all systems have back-up, bad things still can happen in this business. In August of 2009 an explosion occurred in the turbine room of Russia’s largest hydroelectric project, flooding it instantly. At last count seventy-six workers were drown, crushed or washed into oblivion. Yeah, Bill was friendly and talked with me, but I noticed he never lost sight of the control panel.

After the control room we continued to the bottom of the dam, passing through a machine shop straight out of the 50’s—machines, tools and walls all painted battleship gray. Next to the lathe machine was an automatic hacksaw tailor made for Paul Bunyan. It looked just like a hacksaw, but it was five times bigger. It had an oscillating arm hooked to one end so you could start it, walk away and return an hour later after it had sawed through a six inch solid metal bar.

We left the machine shop and were working our way back up when I spotted sixteen red acetylene type bottles hooked to a common hose. When I asked about them, Ron explained, “Those are full of CO2. If a fire starts anywhere in this power house, we have thirty seconds to get to the top of the dam before the CO2 replaces all of the oxygen in the building.” “Oh really,” I said. “Normally when I give a tour with forty kids, I unhook the bottles because I can’t imagine getting a bunch of kids out of the dam in thirty seconds. But with you, I didn’t think there would be a problem.”  I’m still not exactly sure what he meant by that.

Once we were back out in the sunshine, with no danger of being squashed by a renegade rotor or snuffed out by a blast of Co2, we piled into Ron’s pickup. He flipped a couple of pages on his clipboard and said, “Well, with both turbines running today we made 423,000 kilowatts.  That’s 17.6 mega watts per hour. I nodded judiciously and asked, “How many houses will that light up?” He replied, “I don’t know.” He didn’t know because there is no way of knowing; too many variables.

As it turned out, I didn’t find out much about all the councils, boards, special districts and advisory committees, run by city, county, state and federal agencies that make Lake Tulloch possible. Instead I met people like Sue, Ron and Bill—honest, dedicated folks who safely accomplish their primary mission: delivering water to the farmers in the valley, a valley that once grew two thirds of the world’s table crops. The fact that the Tri-Dam Project’s reservoirs also provide other benefits such as water sports, flooding protection and electricity, to name a few, is a bonus we all can enjoy.

 For more information on the Tri-Dam Project go to http://www.tridamproject.com/.

 Pictures by John Howsden.