Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Engineering Marvels
Posted on | December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
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.
Related posts:
- Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Rio Grande Shortfall Edition
- Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Albuquerque’s Sewage Reclamation
- Water in the Desert
- Desalination
- Water in the Desert
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Comments
One Response to “Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Engineering Marvels”
December 3rd, 2009 @ 7:20 am
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.