I remember seeing footage of those giant buckets pouring concrete into the forms at Hoover Dam on the History Channel.
IIRC, there was some discussion about ice being put into the concrete to hold down the temperature.
IIRC, there was some discussion about ice being put into the concrete to hold down the temperature.
Nope. Each cell of poured concrete had hundreds of feet of
cooling pipe that pumped chilled water to cool the exothermic
heat given off from the curing concrete. Each cell was interconnected until the concrete was exothermically stable.
I forget the actual number, but I think around several hundred
miles of cooling pipe are still embedded in the dam.