Trucking milestones: 1982 – engine power to create hydropower

Series: Trucking milestones

The world’s largest construction site.

300 Mercedes-Benz trucks get to work building the Itaipu hydroelectric dam in the early 1980s.

The Itaipu hydroelectric dam stretches seven kilometres in length and reaches a height of 196 metres.
The Itaipu hydroelectric dam stretches seven kilometres in length and reaches a height of 196 metres.

It’s a spectacular project, and the numbers show this – the gigantic Itaipu hydroelectric dam is built on the border between Paraguay and Brazil, with up to 40.000 people involved in the project. They work on building the seven-kilometre-long dam, which reaches a height of 196 metres.


In the process, they move 56 million cubic metres of earth and use a mind-boggling 12 million cubic metres of reinforced concrete – a volume that would cover all the building shells of a city of four million inhabitants. Among the workers: 300 trucks from Mercedes‑Benz, which are constantly on the go.

The trucks deliver just about everything that’s needed on the “world’s largest construction site”, from construction machinery and explosives to structural steel and cement. Additional hauls are also necessary, including a 1.5-kilometre-long cable car system with 55 cars to transport concrete.

To ensure that the individual parts of the turbines can be brought to the construction site, the road surface of the delivery route is reinforced by a thickness of 50 centimetres.


Also impressive is the powerhouse that is built in front of the dam. It goes on to house 18 turbogenerators, which “swallow” vast masses of water (700 cubic metres per second) and convert the hydropower into electricity over a drop height of 112 metres – up to 75 billion kilowatts per hour. The Itaipu hydroelectric dam remains the most powerful dam in the world until 2006.



Photos: Daimler Truck AG

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