Wednesday, May 15, 2019 Glen Canyon Dam Tour, Page, AZ

Whenever we visit an engineering marvel like the Glen Canyon Dam and they have tours available, you know I'm in.

The view upriver from the dam just outside the Carl Hayden Visitors Center.

Our tour was led by Hannah who was majoring in psychology, but you would have never known she wasn't an engineer. She handled every question, and there were a lot of them, with assured knowledge that impressed me. I learned a few things myself.

That bucket, below, held 12 cubic yards of concrete (a typical concrete mixer truck on the road will hold about 8 cubic yards). Once they started with the concrete they emptied one bucket every five minutes, 24 hours a day for 3 years, 3 months without stopping, to complete the dam. That's a total of 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete. They like to tell you that's enough to build a four-lane highway from Phoenix to Chicago.

They built the bridge before the dam to connect workers on each side of the canyon. The city of Page was founded in 1957 as the largest trailer park in the world housing the construction crews.

The Maidenhair ferns growing along the canyon walls reminded explorer John Wesley Powell of the glens of Scotland. Being the first to explore the area, he gave it the name Glen Canyon.

An unusual feature of the Glen Canyon power plant is the 86,000 square foot Kentucky bluegrass lawn between the dam and hydroelectric plant. The steel penstocks feeding water to the power plant would have experienced severe vibration when in use. Engineers decided to bury them in soil to act as a buffer against the potentially damaging vibrations. The grass was later planted to prevent the dirt from getting blown away.

The view from below made us feel small and we still were not at the river level. That round thing sticking out of the cliff 50 stories above us was the visitor's center.

Finally, the powerhouse, where 8 huge generators were built to extract energy from the Colorado River. Actually, only 7 were currently operating. Number 1 experienced a ground fault in the stator windings that damaged the rotor. That's the big round red thing at the far end of the building. Replacement parts had to be custom built so repairs were ongoing and likely to take quite a while. At least we were able to see one of the units disassembled.

On December 1st, 2016, Glen Canyon Generator #1 failed (exploded) due to a ground fault in the stator windings. At the time of the failure, the generator had operated reliably for 32 years and was scheduled to be overhauled in January of 2017 (one month later).