I really like the way those videos were presented. Silently, looping, laid out one on top the other, each with a one line description. If that was one long video i would have kept jumping backwards to rewatch all the scenes. Final thought, drone footage continues to blow me away.
I feel like I learned more from watching these videos than I did on many of the numerous news articles written at the time. Granted, they were after the fact, but wow.
These images still didn't even show the dam itself, nor the water being released from the normal pathways in the dam, where they also had a few problems (which I can't describe in detail due to ignorance.. I believe it was related to backup of mud and debris from the spillway problems causing backwash that clogged up some of the main dam works). And yet I agree, this has been the best presentation of the event so far.
There is also the issue they are addressing now where debris has blocked water from exiting the power plant pool, preventing operation of the power plant.
If they can get the power plant running things will be much improved, as they will be able to continue to drain the reservoir without further erosion of the main spillway and also until it is below the level of the main spillway (which will stop the small amount of water that is currently leaking through the control gates).
Noted, though "normal" and "major" are somewhat semantic.
The main spillway is the mechanism by which, when needed on a normal basis, major discharges can be accomplished. That is: its design intent is to accommodate such flows, without failure of itself or incapacitating damage. To that extent, the spillway damage was a massive management failure.
The emergency spillway, as I've only learnt reading up on this story within the past day, was designed as a "use once" capability. It isn't designed for repeated usage, requires massive reconstruction after such uses, and (in conjunction with the parking lot), provides the basis for a "soft failure" of the dam as a whole, as opposed to the prospect of the entire dam face collapsing.
The Auburn Coffer Dam engineered failure has been mentioned (though not linked -- it's easy enough to find on YouTube) elsewhere in this thread. That was a 1986 event during an extreme rain event. The dam, also an earthen structure, was designed with an intentionally soft "plug", that could and would erode before the main dam face, but in a slow fashion, such that the dam would fail over the course of hours, rather than minutes.
The rate of occurrence of things matters, and a factor of 60 or so (as above) is tremendous. As a comparison, you're in a car moving at 100 kph, and are later moving at 0 kph. How do you feel?
If the interval is 20s, probably pretty good. If it's 0.02s, likely not so hot.
That's a rate difference of 1,000 fold. Something to keep in mind in the context of other stories, such as, say, the fact that climate is change at a rate of roughly 1,000,000x faster than normal, presently.
A point Tucker Carlson apparently cannot grasp, given a recent appearance of Bill Nye on his programme.
The normal way water flows out of the dam is entirely different from the major way in which water was flowing out of the dam during the specific event.
The normal way water flows out of that dam has nothing whatsoever to do with either the spillway, or the emergency spillway, and was not shown in the series of photos.
Semantic means "relating to meaning" and indeed different words have different meanings. Meanings actually matter, it turns out. In this case, the meanings are different enough that you would have to take a two minute or so walk to get from one water outlet (the normal one) to another (either of the two spillways).
The value of the montage here is editing down a large set of images and footage to the critical and suffient element.
As is writing, or audio, or anything else.
I see far too many people who think recording is synonymous with authoring or creating. As Stephen Colbert commented some time back (and many others before him), steganography isn't news.
I've been kicking around a lot of ideas concerning narrative, the thread that organises a story -- fictional, expository, explanatory, whatever. P.D. James' quote on what the heart of a novel is, bringing order to mystery, is apropriate as well.
I found myself watching some of the videos over and over, and skipping others with only a cursory glance. The text was easy to read.
When I watch videos with text I find myself pausing a lot. And nothing is more annoying than trying to rewind a long video to re-watch a 5 second clip: I'm always overshooting and wasting a ton of time.
Life Pro Tip: In youtube, you can use the hotkeys 'j', 'k', and 'l' to jump back 10 seconds, pause, and jump forward 10 seconds. It's very convenient. If you want to rewind a minute, hit 'j' 6 times quickly.
But news stories are not usually presented like this. That's really the thing being commented on is that the imgur style of presentation was an excellent match for this content, which usually is much more text.
I have used Imgur plenty especially r/diy but I don't remember seeing an album comprised solely of animated GIFs. It's typically albums with captioned static images.
I generally tend to think AR und VR are heavily overhyped and I don't believe they will become the next big thing. But I surely hope that we will be able to use VR to better convey the dimensions of things, their size, depth, steepness, and height, things that are almost impossible to convey on normal screens.
I disagree. I found the looping animations jarring and having 3 or 4 of them on screen at once is really distracting, and the image quality is very poor. The animation isn't even showing anything informative, just rushing water. The underlying damage isn't even visible.
Reuter's had a picture gallery just a couple days ago that shows the damage much better:
I disagree that that's a better collection, on a number of counts:
1. The presentation is a fixed-size image on the page, which cannot be maximised (or the controls for such maximisation are highly nonobvious). Which means that I'm seeing a roughly 1/4 size image with vastly less detail than in the Imgur collection.
2. Despite what is clearly access to an arial vehicle (probably a helicopter), the Reuters images present a much smaller set of viewpoints, perspectives, and scales. The flexibility of a drone to go virtually anywhere within the area of interest, the specific focus on both the main spillway and the emergency overflow, the massive erosion along the latter, and the ability to either move in (not just zoom in via lens), or back out for an overview, is highly apparent in the Imgur photosets.
3. By contrast, the drone images provide a range of perspectives, sightlines, an distances from the subject, giving a much better overview of the full scope of the incident.
4. The Reuters images are static, not animated. Whilst I'm among the first to agree that animations can be, and are, overused, their use to show dynamic changes or events is exceedingly useful, and used to exceedingly good effect in the Imgur set.
5. Several of the Imgur images (you have to expand to see the full set) do show the extreme extent of the damage, including the void carved out below the initial failure, the gully formed by the free-flowing water, and the damage downstream of the spillway collapse showing visible rebar at the spillway lip, erosion of that lip, damage to the water diverting teeth at the bottom of the spillway, and several sections of channel wall which have been destroyed upstream of the lip. Also shown are multiple shots with humans visible for scale (and a banana).
6. The captioning of the Imgur slides is far more descriptive than those of the Reuters shots. Passive voice is avoided in the Imgur captions. Because passively voicing your captions is not only dry as fuck but creates a massive tendency to eliminate virtually any informative value from those captions.
7. Finally, the Imgur collection can be contrasted with the imagery which typically accompanies news stories: close-in shots generally of either emergency workers, evacuees, or onlookers, with little or no contextualisation of the larger picture. If you're exceedingly lucky, a small line map with minimal detail may be provided, showing approximate locations, but virtually nothing of interest as to the situation or considerations of the scene or its larger surroundings. For broad-scale disasters (fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes), there's almost never a map showing extents, damage, or more critically, safe evacuation zones in the immediate vicinity of an event. This is where I've found Wikipedia to be almost without exception the single best source of information an overview of an ongoing event, in that it synthesises the overall understanding of an event to that point in time, rather than providing a drip of what is almost always very little news, that entirely uncontextualised, and in broadcast media, an absolutely insane amount of space-filling tap dancing and repetition.
My vote goes with the Imgur collection.
Incidentally, Imgur allows animations to be stopped, via most clients, by clicking the image or the animation controls themselves. You don't have to leave them running. I also find muliple simultaneous animations distracting.
