Work on the dam began in 1937. (Construction started in 1938) Many of the people that helped build Hoover Dam moved to help build this dam. Since many of those people then went off to help fight WWII, women helped finish the dam by 1945. [nps-history] So many of the 4,700 men [nps-shasta] were actually women. People need to learn to use the term "workers" or "employees" instead of "men."
The dam is on the Sacramento River, but it is built just below the Pit River confluence so that it creates a big reservoir in both rivers. It is an arch-gravity hybrid design that is 602' high. The nameplate capacity appears to be 676 MW (2*125+3*142), but it generates electricity only when water is needed downstream. (Update: 710 MW [WaterEducation] and 663 MW [usbr-details]) After meeting the electrical needs for water supply such as pumping, it earns $50m annually for the federal government. [usbr-plan] It uses Francis turbines and has a plant factor of 33.1%. [usbr-details] I assume the plant factor is the percentage of what it would generate if it operated at full capacity all of the time.
The Bureau of Reclamation wants to raise the dam 18.5' to add about 14% more capacity. I assumed the one advantage of doing this is that it would provide more water for the State Water Project. But this report indicates it would be less! It also discovered that the bureau didn't bother to mention the earthquake risks in its 2015 Environmental Impact Statement. People have listed many disadvantages of raising the dam. One would be cost. In addition to the obvious cost of adding more concrete to the dam, there would be the cost of again raising the roads and railroads and their bridges. The bureau's 2015 estimate was $1.4b. And we know that figure is only going to go up. Many want the project officially terminated because, as the threat of the expansion continues, the value of the properties around the lake is reduced.
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| usbr.gov-projects The water stored in the reservoir is about 41% of the storage for the Central Valley Project. [Overview] The net generation is 1.8 billion kwh. At 1065' reservoir elevation, the spillway capacity is 186 kcfs and the outlet works can pass 81.8 kcfs. The maximum lake level is 1076.2'. [Details] |
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| Bureau of Reclamation posted |
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| usbr.gov-ncao |
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| usbr-access |
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| WaterEducation It holds about 4.5 million acre-feet. In a typical year, it supplies 7 million acre-feet of water, which is about 20% of the states developed water. |
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| Shasta Lake posted Here's a drone shot of the great Shasta Dam. By. Tony Hord Fhotography https://www.facebook.com/TonyHordPhotography/ [This is from three years ago, before the drought.] Paul Jevert shared |
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| Slide 3 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders [They do say 4,700 "people" and "employees" instead of 4,700 "men."] |
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| nps-shasta Lake Shasta has a 365-mile shoreline. [Google Maps labels it Shasta Lake, but this article called it Lake Shasta. No wonder I'm confused about the name. Most sources use Shasta Lake, the same name as the nearby town.] |
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| nps-shasta It was built with 5' lifts in 50' x 50' blocks. A 9.6-mile conveyor was built from from a quarry to supply the aggregate needed to feed the concrete batch mixing plant that was built at the base of this cable headtower. "Shasta Dam is 883 feet thick at its base, 30 feet thick at its crest, and contains 6.5 million cubic yards of concrete weighing 15 million tons. At 487 feet long, its spillway was the largest manmade waterfall in the world, though it is eclipsed today by those at other dams, including Three Gorges Dam in China and Itaipu in Brazil." |
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| Slide 13 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders The concrete buckets held 8 cubic yards. [Slide 15] To put that in perspective, the ready-mix concrete trucks with the chute at the back that we see today hold 9 cubic yards. (The ones with the chute at the front hold 11 cu. yd.) |
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| LC-USF34- 072994-D Lowering a sump into bottom of the dam |
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| Underestimated Arsenal posted "It was a half-million dollars cheaper than any scheme anybody else thought of," Frank Crowe said of the steel tower that built Shasta Dam in California, Time magazine reported in 1944. Crowe already knew how to pour a giant dam. He had pioneered cables strung across river canyons to carry the concrete from the mixer to the dam. Without them, Time wrote, Hoover Dam would have been almost impossible to build. But on the Sacramento River, north of Redding, that trick would not work. The banks were too low to use his cables across the canyon. So Crowe built the height himself. The contractor, Pacific Constructors, Inc., led by the Los Angeles firm of L. E. Dixon, with Crowe as general superintendent, raised one central steel head tower, four hundred sixty feet tall. A photograph dated December 17, 1939 shows its steel going up. At its foot stood the batch plant, where the concrete was mixed. From the tower, cables ran out to seven smaller towers, spread in a semicircle around the damsite. On those cables hung the buckets. Each carried eight cubic yards of fresh concrete and weighed sixteen tons when full. A bucket was filled at the foot of the tower and carried out along a cable to the crew waiting below. With seven cableways running from one tower, concrete could be placed anywhere along a crest 3,460 feet long. The tower cost $600,000. The first concrete went in on July 8, 1940. After that it did not stop, day or night, for four and a half years. The crews poured the dam in blocks, each fifty feet square and five feet deep, and vibrated the wet concrete so that no voids or air spaces were left inside. By the end they had built 16,900 blocks and placed fifteen million tons of concrete. The last bucket went in on January 2, 1945. This photograph was taken on September 10, 1947. The dam itself is finished, 602 feet high, with Mount Shasta on the skyline. Behind the crest, standing in the lake, is the steel tower that every one of those buckets hung from. Time expected Crowe's speech at Shasta's dedication to be the same two sentences he had given at Hoover and at Parker: "If you gentlemen want to see the fellow who really built this dam, go over to the mess hall. He wears a tin hat, his average age is thirty-one and he can do things." Underestimated Arsenal: "Steel for the third of eleven panels is being set." That is the caption written on a photograph of the head tower going up, taken by R. A. Midthun on December 17, 1939. The first concrete did not go into the dam until July 8, 1940. The photograph above was taken nearly eight years later, on September 10, 1947, by Leland J. Prater of the United States Forest Service. His typed label is still on the mount: "Shasta Dam and Lake (work still going on), with Mount Shasta in the background." The print is in the National Archives, identifier 7109519, among the Forest Service's photographs of the national forests. The National Park Service's history of the dam says the project was complete when Shasta's five-generator power plant came online in 1950. Now the honest part. Prater's label does not name the tower. It is identified here by its shape, a square steel lattice narrowing to a platform at the top, which matches the 1942 Library of Congress photographs titled "Central tower from which cable buckets carry materials used in the construction of Shasta dam". It also stands where an aerial photograph received from Chico Army Air Field on June 5, 1945, shows the same tower, just behind the crest, and Reclamation says the head tower stood behind the dam. Reclamation also says that at the end of construction it was partly taken down and removed. On the numbers. The long caption gives the tower as four hundred sixty feet, the height on Midthun's 1939 caption ("Four hundred sixty foot cableway head tower") and in the American Society of Civil Engineers' biography of Crowe. Reclamation today gives 465 feet "from its foundation and 700 feet above the river", and Time in 1944 also said 465. Both can be right, depending on where the tower is measured from. The seven smaller towers come from two sources: Reclamation's illustrated history, Shasta Dam: A Tour Through Time, and the ASCE biography, which says the head tower "was connected to seven cableways and enabled the placement of concrete anywhere in the dam". That is the thinnest claim in the long caption, because both sources are modern and no account from the time of building found for this post gives the count. Time also called it the world's tallest headtower; no second source says so, so the post does not. The bucket figures come from two places as well: eight cubic yards from Reclamation, and sixteen tons when full from Time. The $600,000 and Crowe's words about the cost are Time's. Credit is shared. The project was the Bureau of Reclamation's, which opened the bids in 1938. Pacific Constructors, Inc. built it, with Frank Crowe as general superintendent. Photographers on the job, among them R. A. Midthun and B. D. Glaha, recorded it as it rose. And the crews in the tin hats placed every one of those sixteen thousand nine hundred blocks. Jim Rogers: They cut off the tower where they thought it would never be visible. The water was low enough during the 1978 drought that it came out of the water. They cut it off again and it still came out of the water again during the drought in the 1990’s. They finally gave up on cutting it off any more. |
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| Andy Wallner commented on the above post |
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| Pat LaPointe commented on the above post 1977 |
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| Andy Wallner commented on the above post |
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| City of Shasta Lake posted Today’s Flashback Friday takes a look back at this early color photo of the initial construction of the Cable Head Tower at Shasta Dam. As most locals know, the tower was cut down below the water line and becomes exposed as the lake goes down beyond a certain level. The head tower at completion was 460 feet high. The cables which operated from the head tower to several tail towers carried cable cars and buckets which supplied materials (primarily mixed concrete) to the construction areas of the dam. In the lower left of the photo one can see the early grading for the five the power plant penstocks that would ultimately supply water to the power turbines. Paul Jevert shared Building Shasta Dam |
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| Facebook Reel |
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| Bureau of Reclamation posted At Shasta Dam, building one of the nation’s largest concrete structures required innovation on a massive scale. During construction, crews used a towering cableway system to move 8-cubic-yard buckets of freshly mixed concrete across the site. A main head tower, connected to seven smaller towers, carried the buckets by cable, delivering concrete from the batch plant directly to workers placing each 50-by-50-foot block. This high-capacity system kept concrete flowing around the clock and played a key role in completing the dam’s 16,900 structural blocks. Crews worked around the clock for 4½ years, from July 1940 to December 1944, pouring 6.5 million cubic yards of concrete to complete the dam. |
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| Slide 21 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders |
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| BoR posted The #CentralValleyProject has 11 hydroelectric powerplants which generate up to 2,100 megawatts when all reservoirs are at their fullest. In an average water year, 4.5 million MW-hours of energy is produced. |
This old topo map shows that the Southern Pacific used to closely follow the Sacramento River north of Redding, CA.
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| 1901 Redding Quadrangle @ 1:125,000 |
One of the first things they built was a tunnel through the west side of the valley by the dam site so that they could move the railroad out of the dam site to start digging the dam's abutments. While the dam's abutments were being built, the permanent relocation of the railroad out of the river valley was built. The relocated line headed north from Redding, CA, and joined the old route south of today's Pollock, CA. The old route downstream of the dam became a spur to supply the dam construction. It is now abandoned.
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| Slide 10 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders |
In 1958 the downstream part of the original route and the new route both existed. And we see that today's I-5 was built as US-99.
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| 1958 Redding Quadrangle @ 1:250,000 |
When the new railroad route became available, they built a division dam that sent the river's water through what had been the railroad tunnel. This made the entire dam site dry.
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| Slide 18 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders |
Getting the river out of the valley allowed them to work on the center of the dam.
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| Slide 18 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders |
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| Jim Olson, Mar 2019 |
Even California was wet in 2019. Note that the reservoir is still full after the Summer dry season.
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| Eric Sopher, Sep 2019 |
It was wet in 2017 as well. That was the year that Northern California had so much rain and snow melt that the Oroville Dam's spillway broke.
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| Jeremy Meier, Feb 2017 |
But just a few months later, there is a lot of brown around the lake. That is, the lake level is down.
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| josh scott, Jul 2017 |
And 2018 must have been wet because the reservoir is still full near the end of the dry season. The reservoir is supposed to be at its lowest level in December to provide flood control.
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| Kenneth Wallen, Oct 2018 |
In the photo below they are pulling water from the lowest outlet level in the reservoir. I assume they are doing this to get cooler water to meet downstream water temperature requirements. "Downstream water temperature requirements required bypasses of outflows around the powerplant and resulted in around 2,000,000 megawatt-hours of lost generation." [usbr-plan] They release warmer water from the upper layers to maintain river flows and save the colder water for the winter-run Chinook salmon migration and spawning. [WaterEd-release] The Bureau of Reclamation runs fish hatcherie killed 75% of the eggs and fry in 2014 and 2015 because they didn't release enough cold water. [WaterEd-kill]
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| Truly 360, Dec 2019 |
Is the statement about wasting 2,000,000 Mwh of generation capacity still true after they built this structure in 1997? And what went wrong in 2014-15 that caused so many of the endangered salmon to be killed?
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| Slide 23 of a 24-slide virtual tour via TrainOrders |
This photo explains why I could not find any street views from the top of the dam. I presume that Homeland Security had declared a high alert level. Normally, the road is supposed to be open during the day.
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| Street View |
The Bureau of Reclamation wants to raise the dam 18.5' to add about 14% more capacity. I assumed the one advantage of doing this is that it would provide more water for the State Water Project. But this report indicates it would be less! It also discovered that the bureau didn't bother to mention the earthquake risks in its 2015 Environmental Impact Statement. People have listed many disadvantages of raising the dam. One would be cost. In addition to the obvious cost of adding more concrete to the dam, there would be the cost of again raising the roads and railroads and their bridges. The bureau's 2015 estimate was $1.4b. And we know that figure is only going to go up. Many want the project officially terminated because, as the threat of the expansion continues, the value of the properties around the lake is reduced.
In some areas, rather than raise I-5 or the UP railroad, they would build dikes around them.
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| usbr-2018, p8 [These viewgraphs are "Public Outreach Material" and the bureau is still not admitting that there are any cons to the one pro of supposedly more water. (I still don't understand how the State Water Project would end up with less water with a larger dam. And hiding earthquake risk seems particularly bad.)] |
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| Active NorCal posted, Aug 21, 2021 Shasta Lake is so low, you can kayak through a historic train tunnel. (via @lovemykayak/IG) Steven Wiser: Put in at Sugarloaf and go down to Beehive on the Sacramento arm. Matt Fisher: Forrest Hopson that's the old southern pacific railroad line before they relocated it to higher ground. Barbara Barrett-Jerpe: This is tunnel #5. Near Lakehead. Debra Moore-Stenger: Takes 1 gallon of water to grow 1 almond. Where the water go? Flooded orchards!!! [I knew almonds were a water consumption issue. It is nice to have some information about them.] [I didn't even notice the panda until I read some comments. I looked at just 50 of the 741 comments.] Mark Frazier shared Drought revels lost train tunnel. [I tried to find tunnel #5 and the bridge on a topo map. But the oldest available is 1945, and it shows the new SP alignment.] |
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| Lisa Chadwick commented on NorCal's post |
Jim Long posted three photos with the comment: "Only seen when the water is low in Lake Shasta........."
Benjamin Harp: The fact that the old tunnels are so well preserved, for spending 90% of their time underwater, shows that the engineers knew what they were doing when they built through the Shasta Trinity and up the Sac River.
Jason Moore: Benjamin Harp ironic they’d put a lot into improving the tunnels & bridges ~10 years before the dam building started.
Nicholas Mangum: Benjamin Harp Only the portals are in good shape. Most of the tunnels are collapsed inside.
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| Jim Long commented on his post |
In 2022-23, California got a lot of rain.
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| Norcal FireWeather posted Karen Yuhasz: Mount Shasta is looking good too. When I drove through there last summer, the lake was so low and the mountain had very little snow. This is great! |
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| Bureau of Reclamation posted Across the West, Reclamation is investing in our aging infrastructure to enhance safety, reliability, and clean energy production. At Shasta Dam—one of our most iconic hydroelectric facilities—crews are replacing five transfer switches that have been in service since the 1940s. They’re also installing thousands of feet of conduit and nearly four miles of new high-voltage cable through the dam’s interior. These upgrades will boost operational safety, reduce environmental risks, and strengthen the resilience of Shasta’s power systems—helping us continue to deliver renewable energy to millions. This work reflects Reclamation’s long-term commitment to sustaining the nation’s critical water and power infrastructure for generations to come. Ron Seymour: How will you maintain, even upgrade operations after funding is rescinded and your budget and staffing are reduced due to "waste and inefficacies"? |
(new window) via WaterEducation
That spalled concrete on the spillway is kinda scary.
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