Owyhee Dam A project of the Bureau of Reclamation, they hired General Construction Company from Seattle to build the dam. Former Oregonian and then United States President Herbert Hoover dedicated what was the highest dam of its type in the world on July 17, 1932. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur delivered Hoover's message at the dam. Owyhee's construction served as a prototype for the larger Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, including the use of refrigeration to cool the concrete. The dam cost $6,000,000, with the total reclamation project costing $18,000,000. Owyhee was designed by Frank A. Banks, who also
Roller-compacted concrete had been suggested 18 years earlier. In the quarter century since Willow Creek, considerable research and experimentation have yielded innumerable improvements in concrete mix designs, dam designs and construction methods for roller-compacted concrete dams; by 2008, about 350 RCC dams existed worldwide. Currently the highest dam of this type is the Chinese Longtan Dam, at 216 m, with the Pakistani Diamer-Bhasha Dam under construction at 272 m. Roller-compacted concrete Roller-compacted concrete (RCC) or rolled concrete (rollcrete) is a special blend of concrete that has essentially the same ingredients as conventional concrete but in different ratios, and increasingly with partial substitution