Rainfall over-tops Lake Hodges Dam

Chris Dodkin

Chris Dodkin

West Coast Correspondent
After the recent winter rains, the reservoirs are finally filling-up after years of drought in southern California.

In fact, the water level at Lake Hodges is now causing the dam to overflow!

Took this shot today - Canon 5D2, 28-70 f2.8L - ISO100 - f8 - Circular Polarizer

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Couple more angles:

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Love the pics chris, I am intruged tho as i have never seen such an abrupt spillway chute design before with the breakers running parallel to the flow, and diffusing into the bank, very strange design!! And very dramatic!!! More fun for you I suppose!!
 
Great shot on no.3 chris, definitely shows the scale and strength of man made stuctures. polariser has worked a treat on them shots.

Tom, you'd of loved this venue I'd photographed, called coltsford mill, in oxted south London, they've got a bell mouthed spillage system in the lake/pond at the back of the venue, got a few shots as they are extremely fascinating in action, and you can get reasonably close to it..... Creepy
 
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like these chris......... very different from dams we get over here.........does Same job no doubt........ i like the different angle of view in image 3 so this is my favourite of the set.
 
Spillway p0rn - who knew! ;)
 
hahaha!!

check out the 8th pic down a set from Monticello dam
just to give you an idea of scale..

The spillway is 72 feet wide at the lip, narrowing to 27 feet, and drops some 200 feet straight down. It is capable of spilling 362,000 gallons of water per second past Monticello dam at full flow, and is the largest spillway of it's kind in the world.

In 1997, Emily Schwalen died after being sucked down the spillway. Witnesses reported her hanging on to the edge of the spillway for 20 minutes before being pulled down. It took 3 hours to find her body. There are no other confirmed reports of death by spillway.
 
Darren Turner said:
like these chris......... very different from dams we get over here.........does Same job no doubt........ i like the different angle of view in image 3 so this is my favourite of the set.
Click to expand...

Thanks Darren :)

#1 was the shot I set out to get - based on planning, before getting to location.

When I got to spot #2, I liked the fact that I could see more of the lake, and that the bank on the left of frame now echoed the line of the spillway and cleaned up the foreground a lot.

#3 was a short hike to get more of a top down view, but I liked the composition with the mountain as the backdrop, so switched out to my 17-35 lens to get it all in, with a bit of foreground interest included.

I would have liked to walk down to the base of the spillway and shot from there - but there were large 'we will prosecute' signs to discourage people from getting anywhere near there :(
 
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