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Now the world holds seven wonders that the travelers always tell,
--from The Grand Coulee Dam by Woody Guthrie
Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well.
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam's fair land,
It's the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam. (...)
Grand Coulee Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Along with the Hoover Dam it is among the most famous dams in the United States. The reservoir it backs up is called Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake, named after the United States president who presided over the conception and completion of the dam.
The scope and size of the dam are hard to comprehend. The dam is over a mile long and is taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza. In fact, all the pyramids at Giza could fit within the base of the Grand Coulee Dam. It is more than twice as tall as Niagara falls. When one first sees the dam the mind plays tricks of perspective; a truck at the base looks like a toy, rather than revealing the dam's true size.
The dam was built as part of the Columbia Basin Project for irrigation of desert areas of the Pacific NorthwestThe northwestern part of the United States is known as the Pacific Northwest . Its boundaries are imprecise: the Pacific coast states of Washington and Oregon are always included, with Idaho a common addition. Extreme western Montana, near Missoula, is al and not, in fact, for the production of electricityElectricity is a property of certain subatomic particles, such as electrons and protons, that gives rise to attractive and repulsive forces between them. It is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and is a conserved property of matter that can be. Construction began during the 1930s as a public works projectThe Public Works Administration of 1933 was a New Deal agency that made contracts with private firms for construction of public works. It was headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. The Public Works Administration (PWA) was created by the National I and finished toward the beginning of WWII. The initial construction plan was for a shorter dam with an option for later raising. During construction, the design was changed to the higher specification. Its height was determined by the point at which the reservoir started backing up into CanadaCanada historically the Dominion of Canada is the second-largest, and northernmost, country in the world. It is a decentralized federation of 10 provinces and 3 territories, governed as a constitutional monarchy, and formed in 1867 through an act of Confe.
When the dam was completed in 1941 it was the largest dam in the world. The primary goal of irrigation was forgotten as the war time need for electricity increased. AluminiumAluminium (or aluminum in North American English) is the chemical element in the periodic table with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. A silvery and ductile member of the poor metal group of elements, aluminium is found primarily as the ore bauxite and smelting was vital to the war effort. The electricity was also used to produce uraniumUranium is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol U and atomic number 92. A heavy, silvery-white, toxic, metallic , and naturally- radioactive element, uranium belongs to the actinide series and its isotope uranium-235 is used as the at the Hanford SiteThe Hanford Site occupies 1,518 square kilometers (586 square miles) in Benton County, south-central Washington. It was established in 1943 during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to provide the plutonium necessary for the development of nucl as part of the top secret Manhattan Project. The dam was instrumental in the industrial development of the Pacific Northwest.
The original goal of irrigation resumed after the war. A distribution network for water was built using the Grand Coulee, an ancient river bed about 600 feet above the height of the Columbia river. Additional dams, siphons and canals were constructed that turned the coulee into a vast supply network that allowed a desert to bloom. Irrigation began in 1951