This Thursday at a press conference EPM gave details of an unexpected discovery that is the subject of research in the project.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n The manager in charge of EPM, Jhon Maya Salazar, in the company of the mayor of Medell\u00edn, Federico Guti\u00e9rrez, the governor of Antioquia, Luis P\u00e9rez and the mayors of Ituango and Valdivia, explained that a scour was found.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n This finding according to Maya Salazar occurred during the drilling work that was being done to close the gates of the powerhouse.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n The manager indicated that two holes were made between the unloading tunnels 1 and 2 that connect to the machine house, “the first excavation was through rock and perfect, nothing was found.<\/span> Then in the second perforation, not vertically but diagonally, at 30 or 40 meters there is a vacuum, which tells us that there is a scour”<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n My interpretation is that these are the tunnels that represent the water inlets to the turbines, which are located in a huge cavern, shown below:-<\/p>\n The machine house at the the Hidroituango dam prior to the flood. Works are now under way to ascertain the level of damage. Image via: https:\/\/www.ituangoenergiadecolombia.com\/<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n .<\/p>\n Two of these tunnels are currently allowing water to flow uncontrolled through the machine house (the others are intentionally blocked). To ascertain the damage there is a need to close these two open tunnels.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the exploratory drilling has found this large void between them.\u00a0 At the time of writing it was not clear to me as to whether this is a void made by the flow of water since the problems started, or it had been present from the start.\u00a0 Either way, this appears to be deeply problematic for the project.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, works are underway now to start to ascertain the level of damage to the powerhouse<\/a>, induced when water flooded the tunnels in an uncontrolled manner last year.\u00a0 To this end, one of the two open gates (Gate 2) to the machine house will be closed today, with the second being closed in a few weeks time.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see what they find.\u00a0 Most of the dam has been evacuated, and warnings remain in place downstream.\u00a0 However, the operation is not considered by the authorities to be high risk.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new set of problems have emerged at the Hidroituango hydroelectric dam in Colombia, with drilling indicating the presence of a large void in the rock mass<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landslide-report"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"hidroituango\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2019\/01\/19_01-hidroituango-1-e1547611873642.jpg\")