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A free presentation on “Building Grand Coulee Dam,” by Raymond Paul Giroux, will discuss how the right conditions, people and engineering allowed it to happen at that time.

The Aug. 25 program will be presented at 6:30 p.m. at the Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center.

“During the early twentieth century, the Bureau of Reclamation was charged with harnessing the water potential of the western United States,” an Aug. 13 bureau press release states. “Critical to this vision was taming the mighty Columbia River. With river flows more than 300,000 cubic feet per second, building the biggest concrete dam in the world in a remote area of eastern Washington was seemingly impossible. … Mr. Giroux’s presentation highlights how the right men, the right machines, and the right methods all came together to build a project of unprecedented scope and challenges.”

Giroux has made presentations in the past on building the Hoover Dam, as well as the Panama Canal. He is the author of several bridge-design and civil-engineering history papers, and is an active speaker at engineering schools throughout the United States. In 2017, he was the recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers Roebling Award for Construction Engineering and was inducted into the Iowa State University Construction Engineering Hall of Fame in 2018.