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Hoover Dam

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Hoover Dam The Hoover Dam is one of America¡¦s greatest civil engineering marvels (Hernan 22) and ¡§has become a magnet to those fascinated by human ingenuity at its best¡¨ (Haussler 30). With its enormous size and construction during the Great Depression, it was an interesting topic to me. I would like to major in civil engineering and, at first, I was researching this topic. I was looking for salary and job descriptions. Then, I discovered the name John L. Savage, the engineer who supervised the design of the Hoover Dam and many other dams in the United States. Savage worked on the Minidoka irrigation project in Idaho after joining the United States Reclamation Service in 1903. His future of building dams first began "When I first …show more content…

There were three factors making this impossible: a lot of concrete, the massive size of the dam and the heat of the concrete. The dam demanded a huge amount of concrete that no one company could have met. As a result, a few concrete companies were built near by just for the construction of the dam. Barrels were used along with railroad cars to transport the concrete to the dam site (Hernan 23). The barrels were then picked up by invented cable system made specifically for the damn and dumped eight cubic yards at a time (¡§1936: Hoover¡¨). This cable system allowed for the barrels of concrete to be hauled down into the canyon in which the dam was being built. Because of its humongous size, this is also how the workers and other materials were transported down to the bottom of the canyon. According to Cecilia Wassner, Hoover dam is seven-hundred and twenty-six feet tall and six-hundred and sixty feet wide at its base and only forty-five feet wide at the top (99). The dam is also twelve-thousand, two-hundred and forty-four feet long. A form could not have been built to house the dam while the concrete set for it to be poured in one continuous run. Instead, the dam was built twenty-five by five foot blocks at a time. In order to make the dam be one big unified structure grout was placed in between the cracks of these segments (Sevastiades 17). The smaller segments were built mostly for the cooling of the concrete. If not

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