Hoover Dam

First we had to get out of Las Vegas, one night was more than enough, gong show. We came through Paris again, I must say, nice job they die with the Eifel Tower.

Not again! 104° F = 40° C!

Might be boring for some people but there was a pretty interesting arch bridge constructed over the Grand Canyon, this is part of the the construction. A lot of the following pictures are about engineering.

Quite the solid footing for temporary stuff.

The new arch bridge. To built the arch (not the road way, only the arch) a support structure was necessary. This was shown on the two previous pictures.

More of the arch.

Massive overflow channel, this had to be used only twice in history.

The Grand Canyon

Staumauer

Penstock, hopefully it doesn't blow up while we are in there.

The dam, the overflow channel, the penstock and the turbines.

That was one of the two times the water went into the overflow channel.

The guy was saying that that sign is old and it is not in use anymore since the cold war is over, I am not too sure about that. I agree that the cold war is over but if we don't need it anymore with all those bombs and the nuclear power plants everybody uses?

11 turbines, producing 130 Megawatt each. There are two of those rooms, on each side of the canyon one. I actually don't understand why they didn't put it all on one side.

That's how they build the dam, 150 m thick concrete wall at the base. Since the concrete got so hot from the chemical reaction they had to cool it with water hoses inside the concrete. They also could only pour one of those blocks at the time and not the 150 m in one shot.

A generator model and how it produces electricity.

If you didn't know. For comparison: A nuclear power plant produces up to 2 gigawatts, a coal power plant around 0.8 gigawatt and one wind turbine up to 7 (the old ones 3) kilowatt (0.007 gigawatt). So if you have 100 to 200 wind turbines you can replace a coal power plant, not bad I think. Well, as long as the wind is blowing ...

The hydro power plant on the left and the right.

That is that crane you could see on a couple of pics earlier.

We continued our drive but were confronted with a highway running against a wall.

We found our way through that wall and ended up on a nice campground where I played a bit with the camera and the tripod. The picture is taken around 10 pm.

Almost looks like daylight.

Sun or moon?

I think that is my favourite picture.

Good night.

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