GrokSurf's San Diego

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Posts Tagged ‘Colorado River Aqueduct’

A tour of Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct system

Posted by George J Janczyn on May 20, 2013

This past weekend about 30 San Diego County inhabitants and I were guests of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) for an inspection trip to visit Hoover Dam and Colorado River Aqueduct facilities. Our tour guides were Vincent Mudd (SDCWA Director and representative to MWD’s board), Marty Hundley (MWD Inspection Trip Specialist), and Debbie Espe (SDCWA Senior Water Resources Specialist).

We assembled at SDCWA headquarters at 6:15am Friday where we were seated in the board room directors’ chairs for a brief presentation about the Water Authority, then filed onto a chartered bus to the airport, submitted to the usual TSA indignities and boarding area wait, and boarded our one-hour flight to Las Vegas. There, we rode another chartered bus to Boulder City where box lunches from The Dillinger Food and Drinkery were ready for us, and continued on to Hoover Dam. We ate our lunches in the visitor center auditorium during a speaker presentation and short film about the dam’s history. Then we began our tour.

(your smartphones won’t do these photos justice; you’ll get a much better sense of scale on a large desktop or tablet display and click the pictures for enlargements)

Hoover Dam Visitor Center, awaiting the elevator to the bottom.

Hoover Dam Visitor Center, awaiting the elevator to the bottom
Generators in the powerplant. There are nine on the Arizona wing, eight on the Nevada side.

Generators in the powerplant. There are nine on the Arizona wing, eight on the Nevada side.
Lake Mead's water level is low so reduced pressure means generators vibrate more and produce less power. A new generator design is being tested and if successful all will be replaced.

Lake Mead’s water level is low so reduced pressure means generators vibrate more and produce less power. Our guide told us a new generator designed to maintain efficiency with less water pressure is being tested and if successful, all will be replaced.
View at the bottom of the dam from the powerplant on the Arizona side.

View at the bottom of the dam from the powerplant on the Arizona side.
From the base of the dam, the power plants and the Mike O’Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge which allows traffic on U.S. 93 to cross directly into Arizona without having to drive over the dam.

From the base of the dam, the power plants and the new Mike O’Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge (Hoover Dam Bypass) which allows traffic on U.S. 93 to cross directly into Arizona without having to wait in a long line to drive over the dam.

 

Back on our bus, we backtracked a little to drive over the bypass bridge and continued southeast on U.S. 93 to Kingman, Arizona. There we turned toward the Colorado River on I-40, then SR 95, passing through Lake Havasu City (yes, we saw the London Bridge) and past Parker Dam.

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Posted in Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Water | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Colorado River Aqueduct and All American Canal inspection trip

Posted by George J Janczyn on May 4, 2010

I just finished a two-day Colorado River Aqueduct Facilities Inspection Tour hosted by the San Diego County Water Authority and sponsored by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (many thanks to SDCWA’s Scott Robinson for inviting me!). I went on this tour to get a closer look at the infrastructure that contributes a large amount of water that San Diego needs to import to stay alive.

San Diego imports about 90% of its water and a good deal of that comes from the Colorado River. It’s one thing to casually acknowledge our dependence on the river, but there’s nothing like getting a close look at some of the engineering that goes into maintaining this immense system.

Stops along the way included San Vicente Reservoir, Twin Oaks Valley Water Treatment Plant, Diamond Valley Lake, Copper Basin, the Whitsett Intake Pumping Plant, Parker Dam, the All-American Canal and Palo Verde Irrigation District farmlands.

On to the pictures (clickable for enlargements).

We began the tour at San Vicente Dam, where a project to raise the dam by 117 feet using a roller-compacted concrete technique is underway. When the dam raise is completed, the dam’s capacity will increase from 90,000 to 242,000 acre-feet.

I took this shot a few months ago, when they were water blasting the dam's face to prepare the surface

Surface is all clean now, ready for new concrete. The scraped rock on the right side shows how much higher the dam will be.

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Posted in Environment, Government, Technology, Water | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »