Is Hoover Dam the biggest dam in the world?

Today, the Hoover Dam is the second highest dam in the country and the 18th highest in the world. It generates more than four billion kilowatt-hours a year -- that's enough to serve 1.3 million people! Here's how this dam stacks up against some of the biggest dams in the world.



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Located in the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan, the Usoi Dam is a feat of natural engineering. The dam's story reminds us of nature's astonishing power. At a whopping 1,860 feet (567 meters) tall, the Usoi Dam is by far the tallest in the world—more than two and a half times as high as the better-known Hoover Dam.

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World's Tallest Dam Today, Hoover Dam still ranks in the top 20 of the tallest dams in the world, but only in the concrete gravity and arch categories. Many other rock and earthfill dams have surpassed Hoover in height.

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Hoover Dam is as tall as a 60-story building. It was the highest dam in the world when it was completed in 1935. Its base is as thick as two football fields are long. Each spillway, designed to let floodwaters pass without harming the dam itself, can handle the volume of water that flows over Niagara Falls.

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Bratsk Dam The second biggest dam in the world by reservoir is located in Siberia, Russia. Built between 1954 and 1964, it holds 169 billion cubic metres of water, stretching for 5.4 square kilometres. It is 125 metres high and nearly 1.5 kilometres long with a railway and a highway running along it.

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Hoover Dam is made from a whopping 6.6 million metric tons of concrete and is also curved towards its abutments, making the 'arch' that directs much of the water pressure towards the hard canyon walls, which are formed from strong volcanic rock.

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Parker Dam is a concrete arch structure commonly called the 'deepest dam in the world'.

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The oldest operational dam in the world, the Lake Homs Dam in Syria, was built around 1300. The masonry gravity dam is over one mile long, 23 feet high, and creates Lake Homs, which still supplies water to the people of Homs today.

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If the Hoover Dam ever breaks, the entire region downriver would suffer from immense flooding, a loss of available water for consumption and irrigation would create a humanitarian crisis, and the region would lose access to some power in the short term.

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But Joseph Stevens, author of “Hoover Dam: An American Adventure,” says he doesn't think a project like the Hoover Dam would get off the ground if it were attempted today. “Worker safety rules and environmental impact assessments would make the Hoover Dam too expensive.”

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The smallest dam in the world is assumed to be the. Inks Dam on the Colorado River. However, it is 97 feet. (29.4 meters) tall and 1,550 feet (472 mt) long.

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The Dam Future While the dam is expected to last for centuries, engineers predict the structure could last for more than 10,000 years, surpassing most remnants of human civilization if humans were to disappear from the earth.

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