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
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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