Building a dam is actually pretty easy, but it becomes increasingly more difficult the larger it gets. While a small dam which isn’t built to hold large bodies of water back or to generate electricity can be effective for small scale operations, when you’re building a dam which needs to be able to supply water and electricity to millions of people, the project becomes expensive and complex, and maintaining the dam after it’s been built also becomes expensive and complex. Large dams usually aren’t built…

So, as was discussed, building a dam can be useful for lots of situations. Besides understanding the uses of a dam, you also need to understand how complex the construction process is, and how expensive it can be. The size of a dam, and how much water it is trying to retain in the reservoir, are the two most important factors in the cost of a dam construction. A small dam created by a farmer to increase the amount of water they’ve got on their…

When somebody brings up dams, most people probably conjure up an image of a dam like the Hoover dam, which is one of the largest in the world, and provides the majority of the energy which powers Las Vegas. While gigantic constructions like this or the Three Gorges dam in China are exciting, and quite frankly extraordinary, dams are actually quite wide-spread, and they make up an important part of modern life. Before we get into how you build a dam, you should understand their…