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Sunday 7 September 2014

Dam

The earliest known dam was the Jawa Dam in Jordan, 62 miles northeast of the capital Amman. This gravity dam is dated to 3000 BC.

The Romans built a large amount of dams. In Spain alone they built 72, and many of their dams in Europe are still in use to this day. They were mostly used for irrigation, but one example shows they dried up water in order to find gold deposits.

Construction ended on January 15, 1910 on the Buffalo Bill Dam (see below) in Wyoming, United States, which was the tallest dam in the world at the time, at 325 feet. It was named after the famous Wild West figure William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, who founded the nearby town of Cody and owned much of the land now covered by the reservoir formed by its construction.


The Usoi Dam is a natural dam, created by a massive landslide in 1911. It is located in the Pamir Mountains in  eastern Tajikistan, and it is the tallest dam in the world, at 567 meters (1,860 feet) high. The dam blocks the Murghab River, and it has created a large lake called Lake Sarez.

The Usoi Dam is a very important part of the local ecosystem. It provides water for irrigation and drinking, and it also helps to regulate the flow of the Murghab River. The dam is also a popular tourist destination, and it offers stunning views of the Pamir Mountains.

In 2015, the Usoi Dam survived a 7.2 magnitude earthquake with no signs of deterioration. This is a testament to the strength of the dam, and it is also a relief to the people who depend on it.

The St. Francis Dam was a curved concrete gravity dam, built to create a large regulating and storage reservoir for the city of Los Angeles. Its collapse at 11:57 p.m. on March 12, 1928,  is considered one of the worst engineering disasters in US history. Its chief engineer took sole responsibility, testifying, "If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human." Over 400 people were killed when the dam failed in the middle of the night.

Construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River along the Arizona–Nevada border begun on July 7, 1930.  During the construction, it was the very first time employers required workers to wear hard hats

Over the next five years, a total of 21,000 men would work to produce what would be the largest dam of its time, as well as one of the largest man-made structures in the world. The Hoover Dam was dedicated on September 30, 1935.

Hoover Dam releasing water from the jet-flow gates in 1998

The Hoover Dam began sending electricity over lines spanning 266 miles of mountains and deserts to Los Angeles on October 9, 1936.

Hoover Dam’s structural volume surpasses the largest pyramid in Egypt, which took 20 years and 100,000 men to complete.

96 workers died while constructing the Hoover Dam.

Some of the concrete in the Hoover Dam has still not dried after over 80 years.

There are more than 57,000 large dams worldwide, which are more than 15 metres (49 ft) high, or taller than a four-storey building.

The tallest dams in China are some of the tallest dams in the world. Nearly 22,000 dams over 49 ft in height – about half the world's total – have been constructed in China since the 1950s.

171,000 people perished in 1975 China due to the collapse of the Banqiao Dam, an event hidden from the world until 2005. The chief engineer predicted it beforehand, and was removed from the project.

The three gorges dam in China holds back so much water it slows the rotation of the earth slightly.

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