June 23, 2024
They held a community day at the construction site of the new Chimney Hollow Reservoir ( https://www.northernwater.org/CHRP ) and since the south dam is almost in our front yard, we got invited. They don’t allow photos of the dam itself, but the equipment being used to build it is pretty dramatic!
Here’s the South Dam from our rooftop camera this morning. Martin is actually building the web page on June 30, 2024, like the timestamp says.
This was actually taken on the last community day, August 13, 2023. These are the existing penstocks that take the water from the end of the aqueduct across the Continental Divide down to the Flatirons powerplant. This is part of the Big Thompson project. The first surveys for the project were done in 1884 ( https://www.northernwater.org/about-us/history ). The new penstock is completely underground, to the left of these two. The project had always been planned to have Carter Lake and Chimney Hollow reservoirs, but they ran out of money. So, over a century later, the reservoir is being constructed. Did we mention that civil engineers have to be very patient?!!
This is a Caterpillar 992G front end loader ( https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/wheel-loaders/large-wheel-loaders/108700.html ). That is 230,000 pounds of machine. When you are building a dam that will have 12 million cubic yards of rock in it, you need truly large machines! It’s working in hard rock, so they put chains on the front tires to keep them from being chewed up too fast.
Martin looked at the photo to the left and understood how George Lucas felt when he was hoping to save money on the 1st Star Wars film by using a bucket wheel central tower excavator ( https://www.machinasphere.com/bagger-288-the-giant-excavator/ )as the sand people’s machine. He said, “I can’t use this, nobody will believe it!”.
So, I had Bill stand by the monster so you can believe it 😉!!
Here’s what the 15 yard bucket looks like. Yep the teeth are as big as the kids!
This is what it loads, the Caterpillar 777F ( https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/off-highway-trucks/off-highway-trucks/115560.html )100 ton dump truck. This is “only” a 100 ton dump, because the site is too tight. Here’s the largest dump at the moment, the Cat 798 AC https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/off-highway-trucks/mining-trucks/15970073.html