When the weather was normal in California, the water would tend to be low enough that no one had to ever really worry about flooding into the spillway. This seemed to be a trend for roughly a decade, due to a record-breaking drought. This, of course, caused the water levels to be much lower than normal.
The stone “bell-mouth”, which was the entrance to the funnel in the dam, was now able to be used by skateboarders to practice. But out of nowhere, something major happened, and it’s the mysterious thing Evan had discovered.
A Bizarre Spillway
When it rained, the water would rise and could cause a lot of flooding. Something needed to be done to avoid that. The architects made sure that the lake had a spillway in the design of the lake. The spillway was built so that it was set into the walls of the dam, however, this one was very different than any other spillway.
Lake Berryessa is a very narrow lake, so it would have been hard, if not impossible, to build a traditional dam wall with a spillway. It would have cost way too much money to bore into the sides of the mountain surrounding the lake, so the engineers came up with another odd, yet smart solution.
Creating Berryessa
Lake Berryessa is essentially like a living creature. However, it breathes in water instead of air. The engineers who built the lake needed to ensure that the water didn’t flood and also make sure that the dam continued to run into the Putah Creek. The functioning of the local infrastructure depended on it.
The engineers needed to somehow work around the waterways. They needed to somehow create a funnel between Lake Berryessa and Putah Creek which was a difficult task. People didn’t always understand what it was exactly, and for good reason.
Rainy Days
Before everyone’s eyes, the drought suddenly came to a screeching halt when California started to experience a ton of rain. There were some things that benefited from all this rain, and the wine-producing Napa region that surrounded Lake Berryessa was one of them.
The vineyards took a pretty nasty hit during the drought, and they weren’t producing hardly at all. However, things at Lake Berryessa were a little different. There had been so much rain filling the lake that it reached its’ maximum capacity. This caused something amazing to happen, which caught the attention of locals and tourists alike.
A Giant Drain
When the water of Lake Berryessa becomes 440 feet over sea level, the water floods the spillway funnel and suddenly disappears, coming out on the other side of the dam. On a smaller scale, it’s like what happens when you pull the drain out of your kitchen sink after washing dishes.
A giant hole appears out of nowhere in the lake. This hole measures 28 feet at the base and 75 feet across. That is pretty big! When the water passes through, it drops down more than 200 feet out of the lake. This raised a lot of questions, one of the most important being, how dangerous could this hole be to those who got close to it when it opened up?