I’m wondering how gravity dams are built and how the process has changed over the past 100-150 years. And I’m talking about the actual construction, not diverting the water source.
Also, what are the jobs laborers do during construction? Every resource I found on this skips over that.
In: Engineering
Not sure if you’re talking about the design changes, or if the actual construction process has changed. But, in general, dams would be constructed like any other large concrete structure. Areas for the foundation would be dug (it has to go deeper than the river it’s blocking). Rebar would be constructed, and concrete would be poured. Molds would be made to form the concrete. Laborers would be doing all of those things. There are tons of videos about the construction of the Hoover dam. The details of design, materials, exact construction process have certainly changed since then, but the basics are the same.
At Hoover, they had to dig four tunnels (total length 3 miles, diameter 50 feet) through mountains just to divert the Colorado River through. It took almost five years to build the dam, and you can’t really plug the last gap easily when a river flows through it.
One of the problems is that having the concrete set is a chemical reaction that produces heat, and they thought it might take up to 125 years to set. The dam structure is actually built round a load of pipework containing water, to cool down the concrete.
Good Wikipedia article about how the design and build was done by 20,000 workers (more than a hundred of them died in accidents and from the desert heat). They started out by building Boulder City to live in.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam)
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