From yesterday’s newspaper, a slightly sheepish ode to my fascination with really, really big water engineering projects (sub/ad req.):
From the time I first toured Hoover Dam as a kid — “enough concrete to pave a strip 16 feet wide and 8 inches thick from San Francisco to New York,” as the Bureau of Reclamation likes to point out — I have been a sucker for society’s big plumbing projects.
In New Mexico, the plumbing doesn’t get any bigger than the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s new San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project. With a price tag of $390 million, the project is arguably the largest public works project in New Mexico history.
Go to Hulu. Subscribe to “Modern Marvels”. Get your fix of really big engineering. There is a boat that can carry around a destroyer on its back. There are big dams and big electricity transmission lines. There is a shovel that digs 24 tons in a couple of minutes and fills up endless trucks. Then there is the clever machine to shell, sort and bag pistachios.
Many of the big engineering successes occurred in the Southwest.