Fascinated by the Hoover Dam

Sounds kind of weird, right? I thought that someday I might visit the Hoover Dam because it is such an iconic structure. But I can’t say it made it to my bucket list. Well, I finally visited. Last month, on a vacation to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, we took a side trip to it. I was pleasantly surprised that the story of the Hoover Dam project was way more interesting than I expected. Here’s some of what I learned:

• The Hoover Dam was built primarily to control or prevent the sometimes devasting floods that the Colorado River could cause. However, it was also was built to provide hydroelectric power to portions of Arizona, Nevada and California.
• It took three decades to conceive of it, pick a location and get funding, but less than five years to build. It was finished 2.5 years ahead of schedule. (The contract called for stiff fines if the project finished late, so where possible work was performed 24 hours a day.)
• The dam location was in the desert at a place called Black Canyon. Practically, the middle of nowhere. One of the earliest tasks was to build roads to get equipment and people to the site.
• Because it was so remote, there were few local workers. Thousands of workers came from distant locations to work on the project. “Boulder City”, as it became known, was a town created on federal land to house them.
• Four huge tunnels almost a mile long were blasted through the surrounding canyon walls to divert the Colorado River around the construction site so they could work. Then they removed the riverbed dirt all the way down to bedrock. The dam’s foundation was directly on bedrock.
• The dam was to be made from huge amounts of concrete. To efficiently supply it, concrete processing plants were constructed near the dam site.
• Because it would have taken over a hundred years to cool and dry if the concrete was poured all at once, it was poured in smaller sections about five feet high that could cool faster. That is what gives the dam its light gray brick-like appearance.
• After the Pearl Harbor attack, it was feared that the Hoover Dam might be sabotaged. A machine gun bunker was built on a hill opposite the dam to defend it.
• For some reason I thought Harrison Ford’s character in The Fugitive jumped off the Hoover Dam to avoid capture. He didn’t; it was another dam. (One of the tour guides politely confirmed that.)
• The dam’s hydroelectric plant has 17 generators which on average produce electricity for 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California. The electricity is mostly to help meet peak demands. The plant’s capacity varies with the level of the river, which currently is low.
• The Hoover Dam does not rely on tax dollars for funding; it sustains itself from the proceeds from its daily visitors.

I had originally envisioned our visit to be pretty short (the main tour of the power plant lasts only 20 minutes). But they also had self-guided tours which explained how the dam was built, the innovation they were forced to do, and the risks they overcame. That’s the part that hooked us unexpectedly. We ended up spending three hours. Time well spent!