Here are some pictures I took of the Hoover Dam on my recent vacation out West in December.
Here is also some Hoover Dam info I gleaned from wikipedia I'll insert among the pictures.
The dam was built on the border of Nevada and Arizona.
Hoover Dam was once commonly known as "Boulder Dam".
It is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River.
It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and dedicated by FDR in 1935.
It was constructed by thousands of workers and cost over 100 lives.
It was controversially named after President Herbert Hoover.
The dam impounds Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States by volume.
Generators from the dam empower public and private utilities in Nevada, Arizona, and California.
It is a major tourist attraction.
The original workers who removed the rock for the building of the dam were called "high scalers". They were suspended from the top of the canyon with ropes. They climbed down the canyon walls and removed loose rock with jackhammers and dynamite.
Falling objects were a common cause of death among the workers, so the high scalers’ work helped ensure greater safety for the majority of workers.
The “high scalers” had tourist fans back then.
I found this tidbit fascinating in the wikipedia site:
To protect themselves against falling objects, some high scalers took cloth hats and dipped them in tar, allowing them to harden. When workers wearing such headgear were struck hard enough to inflict broken jaws, but sustained no skull damage, Six Companies [the building coalition of the dam] ordered thousands of what initially were called "hard boiled hats" (later hard hats) and strongly encouraged their use.
Another interesting but sad revelation:
There were 112 deaths associated with the construction of the dam. Included in that total was J. G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned on December 20, 1922, while looking for an ideal spot for the dam. He is generally counted as the first man to die in the construction of Hoover Dam. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last man to die working on the dam's construction, 13 years to the day later. Ninety-six of the deaths occurred during construction at the site….
Still another:
Not included in the official fatalities number were deaths that were recorded as pneumonia. Workers alleged that this diagnosis was a cover for death from carbon monoxide poisoning, brought on by the use of gasoline-fueled vehicles in the diversion tunnels, and a classification used by Six Companies to avoid paying compensation claims. The site's diversion tunnels frequently reached 140 °F (60 °C), enveloped in thick plumes of vehicle exhaust gases. A total of 42 workers were recorded as having died from pneumonia; none was listed as having died from carbon monoxide poisoning. No deaths of non-workers from pneumonia were recorded in Boulder City during the construction period.
Water from the Hoover dam irrigates over one million acres and water from the lake serves 8 million people in Arizona, Nevada and California.
Re the controversy of the name Hoover Dam vs. Boulder Dam, Secretary of the Interior Ickes under FDR in 1933 ordered it be referred to as "Boulder Dam." The name "Hoover Dam" Ickes asserted was undeserved by Hoover and had never been ratified by Congress. Ickes felt just because Hoover was the sitting president (and it was, after all, at the time of the Great Depression!) when the dam was being built, didn't mean he deserved to have it carry his name. Nevertheless, for years people used the names interchangeably. It challenged map makers in particular.
Hoover’s reputation mellowed with time. His good works during and after WWII apparently influenced the use of his name for the dam. In 1947, a bill passed both Houses of Congress unanimously restoring the name to "Hoover Dam".
I was awed by this incredible American "wonder" and also noticed I suffer the sensation of vertigo more readily than I had thought!
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