Humongous Hoover Dam

I’m not sure where to begin with on this one.

          Everything about it is a superlative and so very well done.

          Our destination yesterday was Hoover Dam. It spans the Colorado River just east of Las Vegas and is responsible for providing both water and power to this part of the Country.

          And it does its job well, provided of course, there is available water to use for these purposes, but that we’ll talk about that another time.

          There is nothing trivial about Hoover Dam. It’s list of firsts, statistics, and accomplishments are so significant that the place seems to be an entity, something with a personality, and is as proud of itself as a four-year old kid in a Batman tee-shirt.

          When it was built, and for many years after, the Hoover Dam held records for the usual Guinness Book-type records and even though those numbers have been eclipsed by some more modern structures both here and in China, they are nonetheless still incredibly impressive.

          Here are just a few:

          It is  726’ tall and 660’ wide at the base. This is over two football fields wide, filled with concrete.

          It is over 1200 ft wide, spanning the Black Gorge and holding back the Colorado River to form the largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead.

          Here’s a good one, probably not able to be accomplished today…..  It came in under budget and two years ahead of schedule. This is much like the Empire State Building that was constructed basically at the same time.

          There were obviously several engineering obstacles that needed to be overcome. The solutions to these obstacles had never been an issue before because nothing this massive had ever been attempted before! For example, if they had not come up with a way to help cure (dry) the concrete used in the making of the dam, it would have taken 125 years for it to completely dry.  Which means that not until 2060 would it really be ready.

          That obviously would not work!

          Enter the innovations.

          First they constructed the largest refrigeration plant in the world and made over 1000 TONS of ice a day so that they could make the cement with ice water instead of regular water. Second, they imbedded over 600 miles of pipe that had water pumped through to help carry away the heat caused by the curing of the concrete. Concrete cures not by evaporation, the drying is actually a chemical reaction that gives off heat in the process. This also led to them not using a “one total pour” process. They instead made forms in place and poured the concrete in giant blocks that can be seen on the face of the dam. Once the pouring process started, they made a cement “bucket” dump every 78 seconds for two years. By my calculations that is over 880,000 cement dumps made by giant buckets suspended by large cables over the building site.

          How about this one?

          How do you build a dam in a very deep canyon that has a raging river running through it?

          Their answer was to first bore four tunnels, two on each side, that were 56 feet in diameter to carry the flow of the river around the construction site and dump the water just past it downstream. Two of the tunnels are still used to divert water from the spillways when the water behind the dam gets too high. After the water was diverted they needed to scoop out over fifty feet of mud and sand from the riverbed in order to get down to bedrock where the base of the dam was fastened.

          How about workers?

          This is the desert; the only town is Las Vegas about 20 miles away and back then it had only about 5000 residents. The job site needed about 5000 workers, so that means that every man, woman , and child would be needed to work there!

          Enter “Boulder City”.

          The six companies that banded together to work on the project  and the Federal Government,  constructed “Boulder City” to house all of the workers and most of their families. Complete with a “Company Store’, parks, and neighborhoods, this city is still in existence today. It was finally incorporated in 1960 which means that it was finally self-governing and could elect its own mayor and council.

          We went on a tour of the generating station that is bout 500 feet down on the sides of the dam. We went through tunnels of that bedrock that the dam is fastened to and used elevators initially designed for the workers, that now carry an abundance of tourists, most of whom (as far as we could tell) were folks from Europe and Asia.

          It was nice to see that Hoover Dam has really held its own in the World of Wonders for all these many years.