The site of Hoover Dam is visited by millions of people annually and will continue to provide energy to many cities. In 1922, a commission was formed between Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The federal representative of the commission was Herbert Hoover. The group wanted to find a way to use the Colorado River’s water for each state’s use. The commission wrote and signed the Colorado River Compact on November 24, 1922.
The name “Boulder Dam” came from President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Coolidge signed an act authorizing the boulder Canyon Project. It was named this because the study originally was at the Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River. July 3, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the first appropriation bill for the dam. During dedication ceremonies on September 17, 1930, Secretary Ray L. Wilbur announced that the name of the enormous structure was to be Hoover Dam.
Hydroelectric energy was to satisfy the requirements of millions and millions of people in adjacent regions. Some Statistics About the dimensions of the dam: Hoover Dam is 726 feet tall and 1,244 feet long. At its base, Hoover Dam is 660 feet thick which is 60 feet longer than two football fields laid end-to-end. Combined with its top thickness of 45 feet, there is enough concrete (4.5 million cubic yards) in Hoover Dam to build a two-lane highway from Seattle Washington to Miami Florida. Or imagine a four-foot wide sidewalk around Earth at its equator.
Shea Company of Portland, MacDonald & Kahn Ltd, Pacific Bridge Company of Portland, Henry J. Kaiser, Bechtel Company of San Francisco were awarded the winning bid for the dam at forty eight million eight hundred ninety thousand nine hundred fifty five dollars. The construction management team had a Herculean task in building this behemoth and faced many problems in its construction. A few of the major issues posed to the team were diverting the Colorado River, provisioning the men and material to get the job done, and the actual construction of the Hoover Dam. The heights involved with project led to many safety obstacles that had to be overcame. Diverting the powerful Colorado River had to be ... ... middle of paper ... ...ementation of diverting the Colorado River, provisioning the men and material to get the job done, and constructing the dam are great examples of how an effective construction management team can get things done no matter the scale or complexity of work.
The dam was a massive fete in engineering due to its colossal size and new techniques required to complete its construction in a timely manner. The structure was also build in the worst economic state the country had ever been in. This was pride full because even in the United States lowest point they were still able to accomplish huge engineering fetes. Hoover Dam (Water and Power 1936) Conclusion: The Hoover Dam is significant to the civil engineering because it helped the United States during The Great Depression, it required new engineering techniques to be established to have it built, and at the time of its construction it was the tallest concrete dam in the United States. The dam helped develop engineering techniques that would be applied to larger dams and structures down the road.
Additional dams, siphons and canals were constructed that turned the coulee into a vast supply network that allowed the desert to bloom. Today it is still the largest concrete dam in North America, as well as being the largest concrete structure in the United States with 11,975,521 cubic yards of concrete. The Dam is built on a massive granite foundation and stands at 550 ft tall which is about twice as tall as the statue of liberty, The reservoir has a capacity of 421 billion cubic feet of water, the dam releases about 110,000 cubic feet
The dam is expected to be the largest hydroelectric project in the world, being 185 metres (606 feet) high and 1,983 metres (6500 feet) broad, with a reservoir that will fill a level of 175 metres above sea level. [1] The 17-year construction of the dam is estimated to use 10.8 million tons of cement, 1.9 million tons of rolled steel, and 1.6 tons of timber, costing a total of approximately $900 billion yuan. [2] Since then, construction has been undertaken for the Three Gorges dam. But many issues have been raised concerning the many aspects of the project. As a Chinese journalist, Dai Qing, calls it, "the Three G... ... middle of paper ... ... scenery instead of staying in this everlasting controversy.
John R. Hall explains that the Hoover dam was built ¡§to harness the awesome power of the Colorado River¡¨ (22). The Department of Reclamation had a huge task on their hands when supervising the construction of the Hoover Dam (Hall 22), previously known as Boulder Dam and changed to Hoover Dam for President Herbert Hoovers strong support of a Dam on the Colorado River (Wassner 97). First, before even breaking ground, there had to be away to easily access the dam site and house the six-thousand workers who will build the great dam. Boulder City was created to house the Government and contractor ... ... middle of paper ... ...¡§Dam One Of¡¨). With Hoover¡¦s seventeen generators and extremely large water supply, cities were able to grow very rapidly.
In December 1936 the United States Department of the Interior authorized the Lower Colorado River Authority to construct a low dam at the site of an old crossing on the river known as Marshall Ford. Marshall Ford Dam was completed in 1941 through the collaboration of the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) of Texas. The original purpose of the dam was to prevent floods from devastating Austin, TX. The capital city had substandard heavy damage from previous floods since its establishment in 1846. Soon bureaucrats came together to create the Colorado River Project, wanting to create a series of dams along the Colorado River to create hydroelectric power and serve to control floods and droughts.
The global cement industry is responsible for around 7 per cent of all CO2 emissions and around 4 per cent of global warming (Ecocem, 2001). Each year, approximately one ton of concrete is placed for every man, women and child (West, 2013). To date, approximately 7.2 Billion people inhabit the planet, with a projected population of around 9 Billion for 2040 (CSO, 2013). Therefore, global placement of concrete is around 7.2 Billion tons with a projected usage of 9 Billion tons. Such vast amounts of concrete require vast amounts of natural resources for aggregate and cement production.