The Dam That Ended the Salmon Runs and Helped Build the Bomb

⚡ In 1933, with a quarter of the country out of work, the United States began pouring the largest concrete structure that had ever existed, in a canyon in eastern Washington, to water a dry plateau. By 1942 it was making the electricity for aluminium smelters and Boeing factories. By 1943 it was powering plutonium production at Hanford for the Manhattan Project. Nobody planned that. It is what happens when you build something that large and the world changes around it. In this film: the twenty-six year argument between the ditchers and the pumpers, the excavation that kept sliding back into the hole until they drove pipes into the ground and froze it solid, the two thousand miles of pipe buried inside the concrete to carry the curing heat away, and the bid submitted by the actress Mae West consisting of a poem and a promise to divert the river. And the other side of it. Filling the reservoir moved more than three thousand people off land that went under, many of them from the Colville and Spokane reservations. The dam was built with no fish passage at all, and it closed more than eleven hundred miles of salmon spawning grounds permanently. Seventy-seven men died building it. 📷 Every picture in this film is a real archive photograph. Nothing is recreated. Two things the short version left out. They were authorised to build a dam of two hundred and ninety feet and started building one of five hundred and fifty, then got Roosevelt to stand in the hole in August 1934 and bless it. And in June 1940, with the water coming, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation held a three-day gathering at Kettle Falls called the Ceremony of Tears, to mark the end of fishing at a place people had fished for thousands of years. Within a year it was under the reservoir. It still is. 🗂️ All images are public domain, from the US National Archives, the Bureau of Reclamation and Wikimedia Commons. #grandcoulee #history #engineering #archivefootage #columbiariver