Case Study: The Fontana Dam

Fontana Dam The Fontana Dam is located in Swain and Graham County in North Carolina. It stands 480 feet tall and it 2,662 feet wide. It has 2,813,000 cubic yards of concrete in it. That is approximately 300,000 modern concrete truck loads. The cost of the Fontana Dam was 70 million dollars. The Appalachian Trail runs along the top of the dam.

The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) was the first company to suggest a dam to be built in the Fontana area. They had built previous dams including the Cheoah and Calderwood dams. Alcoa planned the dam to be 200 feet tall, but it didn’t turn out that way. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) negotiated with Alcoa to be in charge of the dam. Since Alcoa was an aluminum company instead of an electrical

It housed over 2,500 people. The village included a community building with a movie theater/ auditorium, class rooms, library, commissary, fire department, and post office. It also had a shopping center. Housing included 25 permanent houses, 62 temporary, 93 duplex temporary, 100 demountable houses, and 104 trailers. These were for the families. There were 11 large dormitories for the single men and 3 for the single women. In the village, there were 6,000 meals served per day and 2,000 sack lunches made per day for the dam workers. In one month the staff of the cafeteria prepared 21,533 pounds of meat, 10,951 pounds of poultry, 6,800 pounds of fish, 20,190 dozen eggs, 42,800 pounds of potatoes, and assorted other ingredients. In total there was 128 tons of food procured, processed, and prepared.

There was a community building that was used by off duty dam workers. The building held a movie theater/ auditorium, a library, a commissary, class rooms, a fire department, and a post office. There were also softball fields, a pool hall, and horseshoe pits. These facilities were able to be used 24 hours a day, seven days a week by workers of any shift. The building was set on fire by a drunken fireman on a VJ Day celebration (victory in Japan). There were also big square dances held at

The supplies were mixed to make concrete. The ingredients in concrete were: cement, water, gravel, and sand. The cement came by train and was unloaded on the upstream side of the dam. After the cement was unloaded, it was blown through pipes with compressed air to the silos at the mixing plant. The water they used was pumped from the river into the mixing plant. The gravel and the sand were made at the site of the dam. There was a large rock quarry built downstream and on the swain county side of the dam. To get the rock, blasting holes were drilled into the rock face of the mountain and then were loaded with Nitramon-A, an explosive. This was detonated to bring down large quantities of rock. The largest blast used 104 tons of Nitramon and 600,000 tons of rock was brought down. The quarry blasts were so big that they could be felt and heard in the village.

There were a lot of steps to building the dam. First they had to reroute the river. To do this, there were two diversion tunnels built. Then, there was a 37 foot holed through 90 days later. Thirdly, on September 6th of 1942, the coffer dams on either side of the dam had been completed and the river was being rerouted through the diversion tunnels. Once that was done, they could build the top of the