Word: damming
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...roustabouts, cat jockeys, bulldozers, greasers, welders, dynamiters, mixers, drillers, riggers, still pressed for time, worked on, unmindful of little ceremonies and speeches before movie cameras. With the precise delicacy of spider legs, the slender, giant cranes moved steadily on, lifting twelve-ton buckets of concrete to pour on the dam's western heights. "Dinky" skinners drove trains of concrete buckets over the sky-high trestle; tin-helmeted shove runners and gear-jammers, tools in their belts, plowed on with their job: to move 1,000,000 feet of dirt out of a slide area...
...endured for seven years and seven months. The work had not stopped night or day except on Christmas, Labor Day, the Fourth of July. Seventy-two of them had been killed. Their monument was in concrete, in the biggest thing men had ever made on earth. Grand Coulee Dam towered 550 feet from the ancient bed of the Columbia River, spanned three-quarters of a mile from bank to bank; behind it the waters had piled up in the beginnings of a lake that one day will stretch 151 miles to the Canadian border...
...west vista, overlooking the giant dam, a little clump of 10,000 people stood to hear Washington's balding young Governor Arthur Langlie declare that the Grand Coulee was now in service. Down in the concrete labyrinths of the powerhouse, below the main generator pits, bigwigs gathered on Level 991† around microphones; there stolid Indian bucks and squaws from Colville Reservation watched Chief Jim James pay tribute to the men who had drowned the hunting ground of his ancestors in a new American dream...
Only two generators, large by ordinary standards, puny by those of Coulee's future, went into operation. The two supply 10,000 kilowatts. When the huge Westinghouse generators start pumping juice into the Northwest, these two will serve only to supply light and power to the dam itself. The first Big Bertha -whose parts, weighing 2,367,000 pounds, took 38 freight cars to carry them - will start in midsummer, will produce 108,000 kilowatts. When it and others like it are all turning, they will be able to pour into transmission lines 2,700,000 h.p. - about...
...Grand Coulee galleries and installations are located by reference to their altitude above sea level; top of the dam is Level...