From April to August 1992, New Zealand's Clyde Dam and Lake Dunstan was progressively filled. This video shows the lake filling from closing of the dam gates through to the final flooding of the old Cromwell Bridge.
I remember crossing the bridges as a kid. My parents went there just to do it one last time. Mum actually cried. I've seen people scuba dive the bridges and it just seems unreal..
It was. And one of the stupidest of them all. The locals tried to warn them this was a moronic location to build a dam and they were completely ignored. Then less than half way though the build they decide "you know what, there really is a fault directly across the foundations of the dam we're building after all".
My old man worked on this dam. Putting down the steel reinforcing for concrete. I crossed that road bridge many times & I liked the old township but that's progress.
i ALSO WAS WORKING ON THIS Dam ..Lived in Clyde,live with mum and dad...Have so many pics ..Was in the concrete gang ..shaft change ..Day, Afternoon and night..
Was pretty cool returning to Cromwell and there being a lake! After living there so many years with a river and then there was just a lake all of sudden!
Very interesting hydro-dam. Just curious; what is the smaller floodgate right in the centre of the dam, between the 4 main spillway gates and turbine intakes (but lower down)?
That is the Sluice Gate which can be used in high flows along with the Spillway gates. It contains a radial gate 9.6m high by 6m with a maximum flow of 1430 cumecs.
Open the gates and the lake would empty in no time? Will the gate hold the pressure created by the depth of the water when dam is full? I always thought that they used a by pass tunnel to diver water until dam was finished, then block tunnel to fill dam?
The gates that you see closing are known as the Sluice Gates and provided the bypass for the river during dam construction. They are strong enough to hold back the pressure of the water once the dam is full and can be used again in the future to dewater the dam.
It's not uncommon for a dam to have a single lifting mechanism that moves from gate to gate. This might be the case here. There's a dam near us that has a gantry that rolls along railings on the top of the dam to have access to the length of the dam. Current pictures of Clyde Dam seem to have a similar gantry parked at one end of the dam.
@@brentmulqueen377 OMG, are you kidding?, why would anyone build a dam on a fault line?. I was on a dam once as a kid with my parents and I was so scared the whole time, it had one of those whirl pool things, the stuff of nightmares.
to my other answer they had to drill holes into the rocks fill them with concrete to make them more stable as I had a friend who did this for a job on the site
@@brentmulqueen377 It is, if I'm correct, the most earthquake proof hydroelectric dam in the country and at one point was the most monitored hydroelectric plant in the world.
