Hoover Dam: Project Risk and Reward

The PMBOK Guide 4th ed. defines a endure as project n. proj-ekt, -ikt v. pruh-jekt- a temporary endeavor pioneern to create a unique product, service, or result. The pull of the vacuum-clean jam is an example of a project. It is considered a project beca economic consumption it was a temporary endeavor and it had to go done the louvre stages of a project. There was an initiation descriptor. This anatomy defines the admits and of the project. The clean Dam reflection project was initiated due to the flooding of the salt mines in the area. By gag ruleming the Colorado River, flooding could be reduced while having electri city produced.There are m both tools that can be employ in this phase. Among those tools, the enigma definition tool, the paradox tree tool, and the IS-IS NOT tool are only examples that may have been used during this phase, because they help define what the project need is. Then the planning phase was conceptualized. This phase is responsible for est ablishing the scope of the project, specify objectives and the course of action. It took plate during 1920s to pacify the Colorado River because of the constant flooding of the imperial beard V on the wholeey. The planning phase took over 15 years.Tools that may have been used in this phase might include the information gathering plan, the organizational structure tool, and the information matrix tool. These tools provide information such as team member responsibilities, quality control tests, and other information that is polar to the success of the project. (Office Design Concepts, n. d. ) The third phase of the project is the execution phase. In this phase, the processes that were agreed upon in the planning phase are performed. The processes of building boulder City up to the completion of the butch were included in this phase.Tools that would be useful in this phase would be the ghant chart tool, the project confabulation plan, and the project contract. These are all u seful tools because they help lay surface period lines, communication expectations, and stakeholder expectations. The monitoring phase is the fourth phase of the project. This phase tracks, and reviews the progress of the project, to help regulate the beats of quality. This phase was actually done passim the execution phase, by inspection of the circumscribe outting cover and the monitoring of tunneling standard of the period. One of the tools that would be useful in this project is the Pareto tool.The Pareto tool lists all the defects that occurred by frequency from n other(a) frequent to least frequent. This helps to identify where the superlative problem areas occurred. The lowest phase of the project is the closing phase. This phase takes specify after all the other phases are completed. The phase is usually identify with change management, and the signing off by the stakeholders of the project. The tool that would be most useful in this phase is the stakeholder commu nication plan. This is useful because it allows the project team to get feed back end from the stakeholders.The feedback can be used for future use as a lessons learned tool, and can also help decide whether to undertake a similar project in the future. Overview Even with todays standards, the construction of the Hoover Dam is considered a mega project. When the dam was completed, it was the worlds largest project do with concrete. The construction project is also the largest public fashions project in US history. To this day it is still a great engineering feat. afterward fifteen years of planning, the project broke ground during the middle of the bully Depression in 1931. This made it easy to find to workers.The construction took five years to complete. The average crew had about 3500 men that worked daily. 21,000 individuals that worked on the dam worked over this period. The first job was to divert the river. (Hoover Dam Info, n. d. ) It was done in both stages. The first p art was done by building two cofferdams to prevent flooding. The second part was to divert the water around the construction identify (Hydraulic Ram Pumps Textbook, n. d. ) using diversion tunnels. While the diversion phase started, a nonher phase to prepare the canyon walls to hold the new dam began by removing loose rocks with dynamite and bulldozers.The rocks that were removed were then used in the building of the cofferdams. The dam is a vast 725 feet high, and produces over 2000 megawatts of power. Besides macrocosm a dam that creates electrical power, it also provides a great amateur area for outdoorsmen, Lake Mead. The lake is titled after the dams project manager, Elwood Mead who became a monster in the engineering industry for removeing this historic feat. The Problems As with any project, there are a number of issues that occurred during the construction.Things like having a construction site near the desert, concrete issues, and having little housing, food, or goods available for site workers. Before construction could get started certain occupys had to be met. The first concern was the housing shortage. The area was deserted, rough and hot, with an average temperature reaching 119 degrees in the spend and the thermometer dropping below freezing in the winter. With the Great Depression not showing an end in sight, every type of worker imaginable rushed to the dam project. It was then Boulder City was erected. The city tuition housed both government and contract employees.When Boulder City was completed in 1932 it had large dorms for single men to reside, and 1-3 room buildings for men with families. Once the city was completed, a highway was built from the city to the construction site. Along with the highway, a railroad that reached from Las Vegas, Nevada to Boulder City was created. The thick concrete has its own set of problems. As the dam height increased, a new mixing limit need to be constructed. Instead of pouring a single block of concrete, the dam was built in characters of individual columns. It resembled a trapezoidal in shape, and the columns were built in five foot sections.One of the problems that this created is that to produce the level of bearing the concrete required, dry mixed concrete needed to be used. employ this type of concrete was difficult because it left very little conviction for it to be moved from the mixing plant to the dam. This meant that if took too much time for the concrete to reach where it needed to be poured the concrete would initially set still in dump buckets, and would have to be removed by chipping it out by hand. The construction solved this problem by paying the crane operators higher wages and having them lead teams of seven, to make authoritative the buckets made it to the right place.The buckets would be lifted and lowered into place by overhead cranes. There were a total of nine cranes used to place the concrete. As each bucket reached its destination, it was the n dumped, while seven puddles would use shovels and rubber-booted feet to distribute the concrete (Bureau of Reclamation, n. d. ). The forms were also fitted with pneumatic vibrator to make sure the concrete had no voids. Another problem with using the dry mix is that he curing process created heat. This made it difficult for the large sections of concrete to heal evenly. If concrete is not cured its strength will become toffy and start cracking.The uneven curing issue also led to the problem of staying on schedule. If the concrete did not set fast enough, the next section would not be able to be started. To address these problems the concrete sections were engraft with cooling pipes, to run water through the concrete. This helped to cool the concrete evenly and quickly. There was more than 580 miles of one inch pipe that was embedded throughout the dam. When the concrete was first poured it was initially cooled with river water. Then the chilled water circulated through the pipes to finish the cooling.Once each block cooled, the pipes would be cut off and pressure grouted. The final problem I will discuss is the rugged working conditions. The work was dangerous and hot. There were no official number about how legion(predicate) lives were lost from site accident, but it ranged for about 96 to 112 lives lost from accidents such as, heat stroke and heart failure, falling rocks, and blasting accidents. In the early phases of the construction there was a workers go down travail that failed because of so many people willing to work during the depression, however the strike did bring attention to keeping workers hydrated more regularly.The Outcome At its completion, the Hoover Dam was the tallest dam in the world. It is a national state mark, and considered a modern marvel. The Hoover Dam stands at a massive 725 feet high, 1244 feet wide, and measuring 660 feet thick at the base while tapering to 45 feet at the top (Wilson, n. d. ). The dam had a total cost of $ one hundred sixty-five million to build and was completed two years ahead of schedule. The name of the dam has changed several times. The original name of the dam was Boulder Dam, because it was constructed at the base of Boulder Canyon. It later became known as Hoover Dam when Secretary of the upcountry Ray L.Wilbur named it that during a strike diving ceremony, in honor of President Herbert Hoover. Then, in 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelts Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, changed it back to Boulder Dam. Fourteen years later, Congress changed the name back to Hoover Dam. References A Hoover Dam History Aerospace Engineering Courses page. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http//aeweb. tamu. edu/ scrap/Classes/214_WEB/C_7_heatTransfer/A%20Hoover%20Dam%20History%20-%20Concrete. htm Barber, P. (09/28/2010). Hoover Dam Construction. Online Nevada Encyclopedia.