In the aftermath of World War II, the leaders of Switzerland decided that the country needed to urgently modernize, and concluded that a remote and picturesque valley high in the Alps could be developed for hydropower. Nearly 350 square miles of snow and ice covered the mountains there, and much of it turned to liquid in the spring and summer, a force of water that, if harnessed correctly, could turn turbines and create electricity. And so a plan was hatched to conquer this “white coal” by building the tallest concrete gravity dam the world had ever seen: the Grande Dixence. At nearly 1,000 feet high, it’d surpass the Hoover Dam and be only slightly shorter than the Empire State Building, then the tallest building in the world.
From 1951 onwards, around 3,000 geologists, hydrologists, surveyors, guides and laborers, outfitted with an assemblage of trucks, diggers, dumpsters and drills, advanced like an army into a mostly untouched area of the Alps. To paraphrase Leo Marx: The machines had entered the garden.
Up there, the workers were met with freezing temperatures that seared the chest and burst the lips, a blazing sun that burned the skin, and a constant threat of avalanches. They lacked waterproof clothing and lived in makeshift shacks, at least until social services forced the construction of an accommodation block that they nicknamed “the Ritz.” The fine dust of pulverized rock coated their lungs, developing, for some, into a slow and deadly disease called silicosis. The site had its own chaplain, Pastor Pache, who was available to counsel the men about their confrontations with nature and death.
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Ultimately, the job these men performed, more than anything else, was pouring concrete, and at a nearly unimaginable scale: more than 200 million cubic feet of it, just about enough to build a wall five feet high and four inches wide around the equator. Cableways carried an endless procession of 880-pound buckets of cement (a primary ingredient in concrete alongside sand, gravel and water) up and down the mountains at a pace of 220 tons each hour.
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