Lots of Numbers

I was laying in bed this morning unable to go back to sleep because of a lot of numbers running through my old head. First, in Cooper's email he states that he wants to lower the elevation of the upper reservoir by one foot. "Moving the current operating level from 1596 to 1595 wouldn't be popular. I'm not sure what that would mean in $$ of generation." Well I don't know either, but one foot would be about 18 million gallons and that would run the generators for about six minutes. In hindsight I'm sure that is not a lot of retail electricity.

Second, the pumps send three million gallons of water up to the upper reservoir each minute. So to fill that last foot before it over flowed would have taken six minutes if both pumps were working. But Pump #2 stopped 33 minuets before Pump #1 stopped, so in the last half hour 1.5 million gallons per minuet were going up. No one knows yet how long the dam was being over topped before the wall gave way, but for some time 1.5 million gallons each minute were going over the top. Once the wall gave way it took 12 minuets to drain the reservoir, that is one hundred million gallons per minute that were going down that hill.

Well I'm going to go have breakfast. Since today is not a state holiday I'm sure there will be additional information about the action that may be taken against Ameren.