USGS Experimental Debris Flow Flume

From July 6-8, I worked at the USGS Debris Flow Flume in Blue River, Oregon with my supervisor Joe and two other CVO employees, Matt (another hydrologist) and Kelly (the electronics/equipment guy). The flume is basically a big cement slide built into a hill, with a steel holding tank at the top and a runout pad at the bottom, so that debris flows of sand, rocks, and dirt can be generated and studied. There are lots of places for sensors and video cameras, so that just about everything can be measured and recorded. It's an amazing place! I was really excited about this trip, because it was the only opportunity for field work related to the projects I'm actually working on at CVO, and the only chance to get into the field with Joe (otherwise all the trips have been helping out other groups). The goal of the project is to better understand how (and how fast) water flows after it breaks through a natural dam. Dams can be built when debris flows, avalanches, or glaciers block a drainage and water begins to accumulate behind it. This can become a major threat, because if the blockage fails, lots of water and debris can be released really fast. Joe and Matt are investigating the way water behaves when a dam is broken, or breached.

The actual experimental procedure is going to take place in mid-August, which was really disappointing because I thought I was going to miss it all. But it turned out that Matt wanted to do a trial run so they would know the best way to set up the equipment for the real deal. So I got to help after all! And this was probably a little more fun, because we didn't have to constantly worry about all of the equipment- we only had a little bit set up, so we could focus more on what was actually happening, rather than worrying about all of the electronics and sensors.

How do you come to understand what happens when a dam is breached, you ask? Why, you build a dam and then breach it, of course! Our goal was to build a dam made of compacted sand, dump a whole bunch of water behind it, then break the top of the dam and film the water pouring over and eroding away the sand. I'll explain the whole process through pictures:

This is the flume. It's 90 meters long, and there are 264 stairs along the left side to the top. Trust me... I did them. Twice.

This is my boss, Joe. He is preparing some water level sensors, which we used to measure how fast the water was flowing out of our "lake" through the dam.

We wanted to use the flattest part of the flume, so we had to extend the walls onto the runout pad. This was the trickiest part of the whole setup- it's hard to get cement blocks in just the right place with a backhoe! It took us a day and a half to set up all 18 wall extensions, with their support blocks behind them. Here I'm trying to direct the block into the right place as Kelly carries it with the bucket of the backhoe.

Finally, all 18 wall extensions are in place! We tested the dam-building frame, then removed it and lined the whole flume with rubber so it wouldn't leak.

Then we built the frame for the dam. The black pipes on the ground are a drain, so that too much water wouldn't accumulate inside the dam and cause it to fail from the inside-out.

To build the dam, we added tongue and groove boards to the frame, one at a time, filling it with sand and compacting it after each addition. The orange box there is the "Hulk Electro," and awesome compactor that works like a push lawn mower... it definitely helped the construction go much faster. (Kelly is in the foreground in the white t-shirt, Joe is in the back in green)

It still took several hours to build the dam!

Finally finished! It looks pretty good, doesn't it? Too bad we're going to destroy it...

Time to fill it with water! The white tubes have water level sensors inside them, and the cords coming out of the left side of the dam are attached to pressure sensors, so we can (ideally) tell how much water is seeping inside the dam. Our pressure sensors didn't work, but the water level sensors worked great!

Overhead shot of the setup. Joe and I are sitting under the green and white umbrella, setting up the computer program I wrote to log the data from all of the sensors. I was so nervous we would get everything set up and then my program would fail, but it worked just fine. Whew!

We wanted to be the ones to break the dam, but the water appeared to have its own ideas... we knew it was time to get rolling when water appeared at the base of the dry side of the dam.

A little scoop with the shovel, and poof! The dam was gone! It took a total of about four minutes for the whole thing to be swept away. I got to throw confetti into the water, so the cameras could track the motion of the flow. We got some good video footage, and I think they're already working hard to plan the setup for the official run next month.

(Many thanks to Matt, who shared the USGS photos from the trip with me so I could show my friends and family what's going on)

Update- back to MSH!

As long as the weather cooperates, I will be back up on Mt. St. Helens tomorrow (Tuesday), and possibly Wednesday. I'm going up with the geodesy team again, and we are installing a new tiltmeter on the old dome (where we dug through all the snow before!). We will see how the day goes tomorrow to decide if I'm staying with them for Wednesday. If so, I'll be camping out in the gravel yard (our helicopter landing site) with their group, and going back up onto the mountain first thing Wednesday morning. If not, I'll be riding back to Vancouver tomorrow night. Fingers crossed that they'll need extra help on Wednesday too, so I can stay in the field!

Trek Down the Coast

Two weeks ago, my housemates and I decided to take a camping trip along the Oregon coast. It really is a gorgeous area and the weather was supposed to be beautiful, so we thought it would be a good time to check it out. On Saturday, we crossed the river into Portland, then headed west and drove straight down the coast. It was a lot of fun! We took our time driving south, stopping at any lookout points or fishing towns along the way that sounded fun. We got to our campground at Beverly Beach State Park that evening, then cooked some dinner over the fire. On Sunday, we stopped for a while in Newport, a popular fishing/port town, then drove into Corvallis (where Oregon State University is), so my roommate Jamie could look at an apartment with her future roommate (she's going to OSU in the fall). It was a great weekend, and I really enjoyed the chance to explore the coast and relax along the ocean! Here are a few of the pictures from the trip:

My first ever view of the Pacific Ocean, right at the end of this street!

Beautiful.

I love the water (but it was soooo cold!)!

My roommates enjoying the beach: Jamie, Kaleb, and Bissett (left to right).

Relaxing.

Neat little beach access.

The Sea Hag, a restaurant in Depoe Bay, where we ate lunch on Saturday. Delicious clam chowder!

It's amazing to me that you can be 100 yards from the ocean, and driving through a thick forest!

This is exactly how I'd pictured the Oregon coast would look.

I really enjoyed the water. :)

Cape Foulweather, the first point named by Captain Cook on his expedition. Apparently during stormy times, the winds reach 100 mph here... and that's how it got its name!

Devil's Punchbowl.

Beverly Beach. Our campground is behind me, about half a mile off the water.

Our delicious dinner!

Yaquina Head lighthouse, from a distance.

Yaquina Head lighthouse, from Yaquina Head!

It's a pretty lighthouse.

Harbor seals hanging out on a rock.

I actually met a couple from Chicago on this beach at Yaquina Head... but they were White Sox fans!

The Adventure of a Lifetime!

This has taken me forever to finally post because there are so many things I want to share, and our internet connection has not been cooperating! Last Tuesday was an incredible day. The weather was gorgeous and the views were amazing. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work on Mt. St. Helens... and it sounds like there might be another chance to go back up! We'll see how the rest of the summer pans out. For the rest of this post, though, I'm just going to upload pictures, and I'll include the stories in the captions. You can click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

We had a little bit of time to kill when we reached our landing site, so the other interns and I went to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, where there's an overlook. It was really foggy early in the morning, but our first view of the mountain was amazing!

The summit of St. Helens emerging from the fog. From Johnston Ridge Observatory (JRO).

The only way to travel!

The view of Mt. St. Helens from our landing site at the gravel yard.

Scientists waiting for their turn to fly. Ben is sitting on the tailgate with the handheld GPS unit. Mike is standing with his back to the camera- he's the one I worked with up on the mountain. Mt. St. Helens is in the background.

NAGT interns getting ready to fly! Katie, Kaleb, Jamie.

My first view of the volcanic landscape from the air. It's amazing how gray so much of the land still is, 30 years later.

Getting closer! The mountain sure is beautiful.

So much destruction, and so much ash.

First view of Spirit Lake!

The North Fork of the Toutle River was dammed by the debris and pyroclastic flows of the 1980 eruption, which caused the water level of Spirit Lake to rise about 200 feet! The volcanic gases and debris nearly destroyed the lake, but today there are signs of life again, including fish (introduced by fishermen), birds, and plants. There are still trees floating in the water that were thrown there by the blast.

One of my favorite pictures. Mount St. Helens over Spirit Lake.

This is what the crater looks like as you prepare to fly into it...

And this is what YOU look like as you prepare to fly into it!

The glacier and snow melt and run down the mountain in streams and waterfalls.

Now we're getting there... we're in the crater now! The big bulges in the middle are lava domes. This is how lava is produced at volcanoes like St. Helens. It's hard to see here, but there are two separate domes. One was built after the big eruption in 1980 (from '80-'86, it's the smaller one in front), and the other (bigger) one was built in the most recent eruption, from 2004-2008.

The optical illusion as you fly into the crater is so strange! Everything is SO HUGE, it looks so close! But then you keep flying up, and up, and up... and nothing gets any closer! It just gets bigger.

For scale, here's tiny little Mike standing on part of the 1980-86 lava dome. Can you see him? He's the tiny little speck at the top of the mound of rocks just left of center.

There's still magma deep beneath the surface of the volcano, and it's hot enough that the groundwater boils! At the surface of the domes, the steam is released through the rocks as fumaroles (steam vents). It's so strange to be standing in the middle of a snow field in a t-shirt, sweating because the ground is steaming!

The rocks of the crater walls tell scientists a lot about the history of the volcano (how it was built over time). They are full of streaks and carvings where huge rockfalls tumble down the slopes. It's a little eerie, because as you work on the domes, you hear rocks falling all around you. But the crater is so big, you have nothing to worry about!

There's Mike, looking for tools on the lava dome. You can see my footprints through the snow to my worksite.

Here's part of my project: dig through these feet of snow to find an 8-inch round PVC cap, which covers some measurement equipment! For scale, I hit my head on that horizontal bar while shoveling.

Looking up from my shoveling site to the new (2004-08) dome, which is also steaming. It's much bigger than the old dome!

Making progress! (luckily the reserves came in later, and we got it done in record time)

Here's the amazing view looking north, out of the crater. Spirit Lake is over my right shoulder, and Mt. Rainier is in the distance. I'm holding a tiltmeter, an instrument that measures the shifting (tilting) of the ground. I was digging for one of these in all that snow!

BIG boulders and LOTS of snow... I'm standing down at the bottom right!

This is how Mount St. Helens erupts lava... as rocks!

The snow is melting from the ground up because of the steam!

"KG was here, 6/22/10"

St. Helens dome in the foreground, Mt. Rainier in the back.

My other favorite picture. I never got tired of the view from the crater! Mt. Rainier over Spirit Lake.

Here you can see the two domes a bit better. The lower mound (left) is '80-'86, the higher one is '04-'08. We're back in the helicopter and getting ready to fly back down.

This ridge was the first part of the dome built in 2004. It came up just like that (as a "whaleback"), and cut the glacier growing in the crater right in half!

This made me feel even luckier to get to work where I do.

And a picture like a tourist to finish off the day!

What an incredible experience. I am really, really lucky to get to do such cool things. If you're still reading this, thanks for making it through a long one!