September 9, 2009

The Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station disaster

A major disaster happened in Russia and it has not gotten much press here. A reader emailed me a power point presentation of an analysis of the disaster (basically water hammer lifting the turbines up out of their housing) but the Boston Globe's Big Picture beat me to it with their always excellent photographs. Check out The Sayano-Shushenskaya dam accident Here are three images: Generator hall -- before and after:
ss_dam_disaster_genhall.jpg

ss_dam_disaster_genhall_after.jpg
A closeup of one of the turbines -- these things are about 40 feet in diameter. Imagine the forces that can toss it around like a dry leaf in a storm...
ss_dam_disaster_generator.jpg
At least 74 confirmed deaths. Posted by DaveH at September 9, 2009 9:55 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I've been following this one on an engineer forum. It's quite a mess. Many different failure paths have been offered, but we may never know what the real cause was.

It's a special kind of engineer sad...

MC

Posted by: mostly cajun at September 11, 2009 3:57 PM