Caldor Fire Emergency Repairs

ABSTRACT ONLY - Are you ready for a natural disaster? Flood, Earthquake, Tornado? What happens when a fire devastates your assets?
The El Dorado Irrigation District provides drinking water to El Dorado County and operates their 20MW Hydropower Generation plant in Pollock Pines, CA through a network of concrete/wooden flumes, canals, tunnels and dams. EID's main conveyance canal is located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range just West of Lake Tahoe. The system takes water from the upper reservoirs through the intake at the American River along a remote stretch of steep slopes downstream to the lower reservoirs.
In August 2021, the Caldor Fire, which devastated a great deal of the local community outside of Placerville, CA, burned down and took out three of the District's wooden flumes along the 22 miles of their water conveyance system. Not only could the district not refill their reservoirs following consecutive drought years, but they were also losing $20k per day in power generation associate with this water transfer system. What would normally require years of planning, design, and construction, is now a fast-paced three-month emergency design and construction project to get water flowing again for the District's downstream water users and hydropower generation plant.
During this emergency, working collaboratively with the owner, contractor and design engineers works in everyone's favor to quickly design a constructable approach that not only restores water and hydro generation, but improves the assets reliability for years to come.