Arizona Wouldn't Exist Without This Insane Engineering

In June 1983, workers at a dam in northern Arizona started bolting plywood to the top of its spillway gates. The lake behind it was rising about a foot a day, and one of its spillway tunnels had started spitting concrete into the river. That dam is number one on our list. We count down twelve pieces of engineering that built Arizona, ranked by how impossible the job looked, how much was riding on it, and whether it still works today. A freeway buried under a park in downtown Phoenix. A glass world near Oracle that ran short of air. A mountain highway built by a prison camp with no fences. A steel arch thrown across Marble Canyon. Giant telescope mirrors cast under a football stadium. A copper mine that swallowed its own town. A nuclear plant cooled with the Valley's treated wastewater. Hoover Dam from the Arizona side, the Hohokam canals dug centuries before it, Roosevelt Dam and the road built to reach it, and a canal that lifts a river nearly three thousand feet uphill. Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@ArizonaRevealed?sub_confirmation=1 Watch Next: https://youtu.be/6WLXX92BkS4?si=nIq32e4vMIPEgNgZ Is there a canal, bridge, dam or road near your town that the old-timers still talk about? Tell us in the comments what it was built to carry. Names, dates and figures are drawn from the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Central Arizona Project, Freeport-McMoRan, the Arizona Republic and published reporting. Lake levels are dated where they appear. Some footage is illustrative. #Arizona #ArizonaHistory #Engineering PHOTO CREDITS (CC BY 2.0/2.5/3.0/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Flickr) — photos by: • Grand Canyon National Park, Katja Schulz, Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA, Alex Proimos, CGP Grey, NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Ronen Perry, DrStarbuck at Flickr, International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, LSST, PCHS-NJROTC, Atomicdragon136, burke31415 (, Chris M Morris, CWanamaker, D&RG Railfan, D&RG Railfan, David Ratledge, Frost Museum, Image courtesy of the family of Fred T. Korematsu, Image courtesy of the Korematsu family, Jeffrey S. Kingsley/UA Steward Observatory, Kenny Bills, Kjkolb, KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/D. Keller, Kurt Nordstrom, Ljgdsaa78900, Luca Nebuloni, Mark S. Süever, Mr. Lunastorta, Naula Ayisabun Aningore, Pavel Špindler, Raquel Baranow, Stephanie Salisbury, V. Krabbendam/ NOIRLab/ Vera C. Rubin Observatory/ NSF/ AURA, Wolfgang Staudt, Xander Ashburn. Public-domain archive photos and film: Wikimedia Commons, public-domain archives, NASA, destockd / FedFlix, Moving Image Archive. Original score composed for this video. No AI-generated images or video.