Toccoa Falls Dam Failure Anniversary

Just after midnight 32 years ago today on November 6, 1977, the Kelly Barnes Dam failed, releasing 176 million gallons of water just above Toccoa Falls College campus in northern Georgia. Thirty-nine people lost their lives.

I wrote a series of blog posts about this incident a couple years ago.

• Part I - Unseen Danger
• Part II - A Wall of Water, Get Out!
• Part III - After the Flood

Here is a video I also made with the series.

The Single Most Important Day to Learn About Water

I think we have topped ourselves from last year. Although I am a bit biased, we have lined up some impressive speakers this year. This one-day water resource workshop will be held in Columbia, SC on December 2, 2009.

Registration is now open. You can register here. Take a look the flyer below (I had fun creating it!).

South Carolina Water Resource Workshop

The Miracle Behind the World's Biggest Cruise Ship

Hook, line, and sinker. I am a sucker for the big-isms when explaining something that is the world's biggest. I was hooked when I read last week about Royal Caribean's newest cruise ship.

Let me uncork these -isms so I can share the cool construction pictures:

• Right off the bat, this ship is longer, taller, and wider than any other passenger ship ever built.
• The smokestack had to be retracted this weekend just so it could squeeze under a bridge in Denmark and make it to the Atlantic and on to its home port, Port Everglades in Florida. Amazingly it had less than a 2-foot gap between the bridge and smokestack.
• The ship features 16 passenger decks and 2,704 staterooms.
• The total power output of the ship's engines is 97,000 kW and the cruise speed is 22.6 knots.
• Ship includes an open-air park with trees and hanging gardens, a pool that changes into a stage, an ice rink, and a small golf course.
• It reuses its waste water and consumes 25 percent less power than similar, but smaller, cruise liners.
• This ship cost $1.5 billion dollars to construct.

Huge cranes and a gigantic dry dock helped to build this ship, but the true miracle for these new breed of ships is modular construction. Components of the ship were fabricated and assembled separately. Each of the 181 sections of the ship were then lowered into the dry dock and welded to the previous sections.

Thanks to this miracle of modular assembly, a $1.5 billion dollar ship took less than two years to construct.

7 Engaging Videos about Hurricane Hugo : 20 Years Later

I was a freshman at Clemson when twenty years ago this Category 5 hurricane struck Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Puerto Rico, St. Croix, South Carolina and North Carolina in September of 1989, killing 82 people.

Some quick facts:

• Hugo's toll in dollars was greater than the total insured losses of the 10 most costly hurricanes prior to it.
• In South Carolina, there was one insurance claim for every four households.
• Duke Energy (then Duke Power) used or replaced 8,800 poles, 700 miles of cable and wire, 6,300 transformers, 165,000 automatic splices, 37,500 meter sockets, 17,000 electric meters, 600 chainsaws and 5,500 rain suits.

Here are some engaging videos I found on YouTube. These brought back some memories, especially the last one which has the last great governor Carroll Campbell narrating video over Myrtle Beach.

Abandoned Nuclear Power Plant from The Abyss

James Cameron had a problem. The script was done, but he had no location to shoot his movie called "The Abyss". Do you remember this movie from 1989? Civilian divers encounter aliens while trying to rescue a stricken nuclear submarine. Most of the action was underwater. He could shoot the movie at sea, but he would be at the mercy of waves, weather, and way out of this world insurance premiums.

Not far from the peach fields of Gaffney, SC, a perfect location was found in an abandoned nuclear power plant. In the 1970s Duke Power began construction on a new nuclear plant. After spending over a billion dollars in today's dollars and with only one of three reactors partially completed, work was halted and the project was abandoned.

Soon after, a local businessman bought the site and converted the complex into a movie studio. The ultimate green movie set? Cameron soon came came calling and determined he could fill the containment vessel with 7.5 million gallons of water and turn it into the largest underwater set ever. After the production went above budget, the set was never dismantled. Check out the pictures.

Pictures From HistoricDecay.com

You can't visit this place anymore. The old nuclear power plant and the set was demolished in 2007 to make way for a new $11 billion two-unit nuclear power plant at the site. I need to blog about this new project in the future.