Yah, hey.
The A-C engineer who designed the internals of the Hoover Dam lived around the corner from us...
Sad. The Company was key to the manufacture of Fat Boy (machining), built about 1/3rd of the tractors/combines in the USA, built marine engines bigger than most duplexes, etc., etc.--and now its main manufacturing facility is used as a K-Mart.
The company's name and (negative) assets were sold to--get this--a manufacturer of brassiere-padding (!!!!) for the tax-loss-carryforward.
You can bet that the knowledge on how to create such projects went with him. Years worth of experience on what works, what didn't, and how to analyze the process are the property of senior engineers who have been forced out for the past twenty years without passing on that knowledge. There is no text book that tells you how to build a pump as big as a house.
Yet on this forum we read the opinions of complete fools (who no doubt are working careers in marketing and finance) that America is losing none of its manufacturing capabilities or can build anything it wants to at any time.