Infrastructure Facts

203 million dollars is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.

Sweden has more telephones per capita than any country on earth.

Laungi Bhuiyan spent about 30 years digging a 3-km canal by hand through the hills of Gaya, Bihar - alone, while grazing his cattle - so his drought-stricken village could irrigate their fields. The canal now channels rainwater to 8-10 villages. When the story went viral in 2020, Anand Mahindra called the canal "as impressive a monument as the Taj or the Pyramids."

They turned Niagara Falls off. In 1969, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped 28,000 tons of rock into the Niagara River, stopping the American Falls completely for five months. Tourists walked the dry riverbed and found millions of coins - and engineers discovered the fallen boulders below were holding the falls up.

Galveston jacked its entire city into the sky. After the 1900 hurricane killed an estimated 8,000 people, crews put 2,000+ buildings on hand-cranked jackscrews, raising some up to 17 feet, including this 3,000-ton church. The 1915 hurricane killed only 11.

Hoover Dam's spillway tunnel tore itself open in 1941. After a gate dropped without warning, water roaring down the Arizona spillway gouged a hole about 115 feet long, 30 feet wide and 45 feet deep, through the concrete and into the rock. The 1983 flood damaged the tunnels again. Today Lake Mead sits so low that the dam's two spillways stand bone dry, about 165 feet above the water.