Sacramento Municipal Utility District owns and operates the electric generation and distribution system in Sacramento and part of Placer Counties.  What does an electric utility have to do with civil engineering?  Some 15% of the electricity delivered to Sacramento homes and businesses comes from SMUD’s hydropower plants in the mountains 50 miles upstream from Folsom Lake.  In fact SMUD owns eleven hydropower dams, each of which has strict instream flow requirements.  Current environmental standards require releasing more water in streams below the hydropower dams than when the dams were designed, necessitating larger flow measurement facilities.  This presentation explains the design and construction of two river-spanning flow measurement weirs place across streams tributary to Rubicon River and South Fork American River.  The concrete weirs feature specially designed low-flow sections which give precise measurements in the 10 cfs range. Construction challenges include siphoning water around one construction site and moving concrete a half mile from the nearest road to the other site.  SMUD’s hydropower project uses hydrologic and hydraulic modeling and usually has a number of ongoing civil construction projects involving concrete and embankment dams, mountain roads, penstocks, power plant infrastructure, its gas pipeline, and electrical switchyards..

About the Speaker: 

Dudley McFadden has been a Principal Civil Engineer with Sacramento Municipal Utility District for over a decade.  He is responsible for dam safety for four embankment dams and eight concrete dams, and also manages hydrography and water rights compliance.  Prior to his work for SMUD, McFadden spent some 15 years working in the aerospace industry, state government, and private consulting, all supporting engineering design and analysis: commercial aircraft components, urban and wilderness stormwater runoff, flood forecasting for systems of rivers in California and Texas, calculation and graphing software, public information websites, and flood warning systems for communities.  McFadden was an intern at the Hydrologic Engineering Center while completing his MS degree from UC Davis.  He is a diplomate of the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers..

Sponsorship Opportunity

The ASCE Capital Branch is pleased to announce an opportunity for the Civil Engineering Firms, Contractors and Vendors to sponsor ASCE’s monthly Luncheons. The sponsoring company will have the opportunity to make a brief presentation that is 3 to 5 minutes long and is supported by a few slides in PowerPoint format.  This opportunity will provide the sponsoring company a great marketing opportunity to the local engineering community.  For further information, please contact Jai Singh at (916) 580-9725.