List Of The Tallest Dams In The United States
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List Of The Tallest Dams In The United States
This is a list of the tallest dams in the United States. The main list includes all U.S. dams over tall, and a second list gives the tallest dams in each state. Dimensions given are for foundation height, not hydraulic height or head. Structures such as levees, dikes and tailings dams are not included in the lists. Decommissioned or failed dams, such as Teton Dam in Idaho, are included. Both lists are works in progress and will be updated periodically with new information. There are currently 75 entries on the main list. Most of the U.S.'s taller dams are located in the west because of the steeper and more rugged topography. The tallest is Oroville Dam in northern California, a embankment dam completed in 1968. Five of the ten tallest dams in the U.S. are located in California. The Colorado, Columbia and Sacramento– San Joaquin river systems contain the greatest number of tall dams. In the eastern U.S., tall dams are less common because of the lesser vertical relief. The ta ...
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United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ...
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Foot (unit)
The foot ( feet), standard symbol: ft, is a unit of length in the British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement. The prime symbol, , is a customarily used alternative symbol. Since the International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959, one foot is defined as 0.3048 meters exactly. In both customary and imperial units, one foot comprises 12  inches and one yard comprises three feet. Historically the "foot" was a part of many local systems of units, including the Greek, Roman, Chinese, French, and English systems. It varied in length from country to country, from city to city, and sometimes from trade to trade. Its length was usually between 250 mm and 335 mm and was generally, but not always, subdivided into 12 inches or 16  digits. The United States is the only industrialized nation that uses the international foot and the survey foot (a customary unit of length) in preference to the meter in its commercial, engin ...
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Tuolumne River
The Tuolumne River ( Yokutsan: ''Tawalimnu'') flows for through Central California, from the high Sierra Nevada to join the San Joaquin River in the Central Valley. Originating at over above sea level in Yosemite National Park, the Tuolumne drains a rugged watershed of , carving a series of canyons through the western slope of the Sierra. While the upper Tuolumne is a fast-flowing mountain stream, the lower river crosses a broad, fertile and extensively cultivated alluvial plain. Like most other central California rivers, the Tuolumne is dammed multiple times for irrigation and the generation of hydroelectricity. Humans have inhabited the Tuolumne River area for up to 10,000 years. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the river canyon provided an important summer hunting ground and a trade route between Native Americans in the Central Valley to the west and the Great Basin to the east. First named in 1806 by a Spanish explorer after a nearby indigenous village, the Tuolumne ...
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New Don Pedro Dam
New Don Pedro Dam, often known simply as Don Pedro Dam, is an earthen embankment dam across the Tuolumne River, about northeast of La Grange, in Tuolumne County, California. The dam was completed in 1971, after four years of construction, to replace the 1924 concrete-arch Don Pedro Dam. The dam serves mainly for irrigation water storage, flood control and hydroelectricity production, and impounds Don Pedro Reservoir in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The New Don Pedro Dam is owned and operated by the Modesto Irrigation District (MID) and Turlock Irrigation District (TID). At tall, the dam is the tenth highest in the U.S. and its reservoir is the sixth largest artificial lake in California. The original dam was named for the old mining town of Don Pedros Bar on the Tuolumne River, which in turn takes its name from prospector Pierre "Don Pedro" Sainsevain. Background Shortly after their formation in 1887, the MID and TID acquired water rights to the Tuolumne River t ...
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Shasta Dam
Shasta Dam (called Kennett Dam before its construction) is a concrete arch-gravity dam across the Sacramento River in Northern California in the United States. At high, it is the eighth-tallest dam in the United States. Located at the north end of the Sacramento Valley, Shasta Dam creates Shasta Lake for long-term water storage, flood control, hydroelectricity and protection against the intrusion of saline water. The largest reservoir in the state, Shasta Lake can hold about . Envisioned as early as 1919 as an effort to conserve, control, store, and distribute water to the Central Valley, California's main agricultural region, Shasta was first authorized in the 1930s as a state undertaking. However, bonds did not sell due to the onset of the Great Depression and Shasta was transferred to the federal Bureau of Reclamation as a public works project. Construction started in earnest in 1937 under the supervision of Chief Engineer Frank Crowe. During its building, the dam provi ...
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Cowlitz River
The Cowlitz River is a river in the state of Washington in the United States, a tributary of the Columbia River. Its tributaries drain a large region including the slopes of Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens. The Cowlitz has a drainage basin, located between the Cascade Range in eastern Lewis County, Washington and the cities of Kelso and Longview. The river is roughly long, not counting tributaries. Major tributaries of the Cowlitz River include the Cispus River and the Toutle River, which was overtaken by volcanic mudflows ( lahars) during the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. When the smelt spawn in the Cowlitz River, the gulls go into a feeding frenzy that lasts for weeks. Kelso, Washington is known as the "Smelt Capital of the World". Dams The Cowlitz River has three major hydroelectric dams, with several small-scale hydropower and sediment retention structures within the Cowlitz Basin. The Cowlitz Falls Project is a 70 megawatt hydroelectric ...
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Mossyrock Dam
Mossyrock Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Cowlitz River near Mossyrock in Lewis County, Washington. The reservoir created by the dam is called Riffe Lake and the primary purpose of the dam is hydroelectric production while flood control is secondary.Mossyrock Dam
, NPDP Dam Directory
The dam is the tallest in Washington State and its power station supplies 40% of 's electricity.


History

Planning for the Mossyrock Dam began in the 1940s but opposition from local fis ...
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Stanislaus River
The Stanislaus River is a tributary of the San Joaquin River in north-central California in the United States. The main stem of the river is long, and measured to its furthest headwaters it is about long. Originating as three forks in the high Sierra Nevada, the river flows generally southwest through the agricultural San Joaquin Valley to join the San Joaquin south of Manteca, draining parts of five California counties. The Stanislaus is known for its swift rapids and scenic canyons in the upper reaches, and is heavily used for irrigation, hydroelectricity and domestic water supply. Originally inhabited by the Miwok group of Native Americans, the Stanislaus River was explored in the early 1800s by the Spanish, who conscripted indigenous people to work in the colonial mission and presidio systems. The river is named for Estanislao, who led a native uprising in Mexican-controlled California in 1828, but was ultimately defeated on the Stanislaus River (then known as the ''Rí ...
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New Melones Dam
New Melones Dam is an earth and rock filled embankment dam on the Stanislaus River, about west of Jamestown, California, United States, on the border of Calaveras County and Tuolumne County. The water impounded by the dam forms New Melones Lake, California's fourth-largest reservoir, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada east of the San Joaquin Valley. The dam serves mainly for irrigation water supply, and also provides hydropower generation, flood control, and recreation benefits. The dam was authorized in 1944 as a unit of the federal Central Valley Project, a system designed to provide irrigation water to the fertile agricultural region of the Central Valley. It would be built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), and transferred to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) upon completion. In 1966, work began to clear the foundations for a high dam that would replace an earlier, much smaller structure built by two irrigation districts. Construction of the ma ...
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North Yuba River
The North Yuba River (also called the North Fork Yuba River) is the main tributary of the Yuba River in northern California in the United States. The river is about longU.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed March 10, 2011 and drains from the Sierra Nevada westwards towards the foothills between the mountains and the Sacramento Valley. It rises on the Sierra Crest about northwest of Sierraville. The river flows west through meadows, then south into a gorge, turning west again, followed by California State Route 49. The river's four major tributaries, the Downie River, Goodyears Creek, Canyon Creek and Slate Creek, enter from the right before the river abruptly turns south at the New Bullards Bar Reservoir, formed by the New Bullards Bar Dam New Bullards Bar Dam is a variable radius concrete arch dam constructed in the early 1960s in California on the North Yuba River. Located near the town of Dobbins in Yu ...
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New Bullards Bar Dam
New Bullards Bar Dam is a variable radius concrete arch dam constructed in the early 1960s in California on the North Yuba River. Located near the town of Dobbins in Yuba County, the dam forms the New Bullards Bar Reservoir, which can hold about of water. The dam serves for irrigation, drinking water and hydroelectric power generation. History New Bullards Bar Dam was constructed by the Yuba County Water Agency. The agency was created through an act of the state legislature in 1959 specifically to construct a flood control reservoir in response to a flooding event in 1955. The bulk of the financing for the dam came from the issuance of revenue bonds. The dam was completed in 1969. The dam is the fourth constructed on the Bullards Bar site, succeeding diversion dams built in 1899 and 1900 as well as a concrete arch dam built by the Yuba River Power Company and transferred to Pacific Gas and Electric Company in 1922. The dam generated power from 1924 until its inundation by t ...
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Glen Canyon Dam
Glen Canyon Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Colorado River in northern Arizona, United States, near the town of Page, Arizona, Page. The high dam was built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) from 1956 to 1966 and forms Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the U.S. with a capacity of more than . The dam is named for Glen Canyon, a series of deep sandstone canyon, gorges now flooded by the reservoir; Lake Powell is named for John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 led the first expedition to traverse the Colorado River's Grand Canyon by boat. A dam in Glen Canyon was studied as early as 1924, but these plans were initially dropped in favor of the Hoover Dam (completed in 1936) which was located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado, Black Canyon. By the 1950s, due to rapid population growth in the seven U.S. and two Mexico, Mexican states comprising the Colorado River Basin, the Bureau of Reclamation deemed the construction of additional reservoirs necessar ...
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