Concrete in Hoover Dam

An alluvial lens just over six miles upstream on the Arizona side of the river was chosen as the source Rather than a single block of concrete, the dam was built as a series of individual columns. Trapezoidal in shape, Five foot lifts. The reason that the dam was built in this fashion was to allow the tremendous heat produced by the curing concrete to dissipate. If the dam were built in a single continuous pour, the concrete would have gotten so hot that it would have taken 125 years for the concrete to cool to ambient temperatures. The resulting stresses would have caused the dam to crack and crumble away.
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Concrete in Hoover Dam

It was not enough to place small quantities of concrete in individual columns. Each form also contained cooling coils of 1" thin-walled steel pipe. When the concrete was first poured, river water was circulated through these pipes. Once the concrete had received a first initial cooling, chilled water from a refrigeration plant on the lower cofferdam was circulated through the coils to finish the cooling. As each block was cooled, the pipes of the cooling coils were cut off and pressure grouted at 300 pounds per square inch by pneumatic grout guns.

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/concrete.html

Concrete in Hoover Dam

To prevent the hairline fissures between the blocks from weakening the dam, the upstream and downstream faces of each block were formed with vertical interlocking grooves; the faces turned toward the canyon walls with horizontal and vertical grooves. When the concrete had cooled, grout was forced into these joints, bonding the entire structure into a monolithic whole.

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/concrete.html

Concrete in Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam was the first man-made structure to exceed the masonry mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The dam contains enough concrete to pave a strip 16 feet wide and 8 inches thick from San Francisco to New York City. More than 5 million barrels of Portland cement and 4.5 million cubic yards of aggregate went into the dam. If all of the materials used in the dam were loaded onto a single train, as the engine entered the switch yards in Boulder City, the caboose would just be leaving Kansas City, MO. If the heat produced by the curing concrete could have been concentrated in a baking oven, it would have been sufficient to bake 500,000 loaves of bread per day for three years.

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/concrete.html