MANIC 5: The Building of the Daniel Johnson Dam

For those who have never heard of the Daniel Johnson Dam, it is the ""Pride of Quebec."" Undoubtedly. It is the world's ""highest multiple-arch concrete dam."" A totem to technology. But only a structural engineer could wade through this report. ""Manic's batch plant was a semiautomatic unit. The operator had a console which showed on a dial precisely what was going into each batch. For instance, to make a typical cubic yard, the dial reads zero; at the push of a button an air valve opens a gate and 3-6-inch aggregate falls into a hopper suspended so that a scale records the weight of its contents. When the scale dial reads 900 pounds, that gate closes and the gate under the 1(apple)- to 3-inch aggregate opens to dump 695 pounds of that size from the bin high overhead."" And so it goes. . . in a book that should only have been issued to those contemplating other dams in other places. We are just contemplating damns.