30 April: The Hoover Dam

On this date in 1947, Boulder Dam was renamed in honour of Herbert Hoover, and became the Hoover Dam. Here are some facts about Hoover Dam.

1. When the building project first opened, the then Secretary of the Interior attended the opening. It was he who declared the dam should be called the Hoover Dam, after his boss. Hoover, however, wasn't a popular president - he was blamed for the great depression - so the next Secretary of the Interior declared it should be called the Boulder Dam instead. Herbert Hoover wasn't invited to the opening ceremony in 1935 and wasn't even mentioned in Franklin D Roosevelt's speech. In 1947, President Harry Truman signed a law restoring the Hoover name, acknowledging that Hoover had helped bring the dam into existence.
2. The Hoover Dam is a Concrete gravity-arch dam across the Colorado River. It is 1,244 ft (379m) long and 726.4 ft (221.4m) tall. When it opened, it was the tallest dam in the world, and remained so for 20 years until Switzerland’s 820-foot-tall Mauvoisin Dam was built in 1957. The reservoir created by the dam is the largest in the USA. It is called Lake Mead, and it contains enough water to flood the entire state of New York.
3. That's a lot of concrete. 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete to be exact, plus another 1.11 million cubic yards for the power plant and additional facilities. This is enough concrete to build a 3,000 mile highway from one side of the US to the other.
4. Energy produced by the dam provides power for 1.3 million people across the states of California, Arizona, and Nevada.
5. Construction of a dam that size was going to be a major enterprise creating huge numbers of jobs. A total of 21,000 men worked on the dam; an average of 3,500 each day - and they all had to live somewhere. Cities in the area all wanted to house the workforce because it would boost their economies. Las Vegas even went to the lengths of closing its speakeasies and brothels for the day when Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, to project a more clean cut image. It didn't work, however - it was decided to build an entire new purpose built city for the workers instead. The community, Boulder City, is still there.
6. There is a popular myth that several workers were buried alive in the concrete. That isn't true, but there were 96 deaths officially related to the construction. While there was a nod to health and safety, given that hard hats were used for the first time on this project, health and safety was largely ignored by a bunch of workers known as “high scalers,” whose job it was to remove loose rock from the walls of the canyon. People actually used to go just to watch their death defying stunts. One in particular, Louis Fagan, used to draw the crowds. He was nicknamed “The Human Pendulum” because his fellow workers used him as a means of getting from one work spot to the next. Fagan would dangle from a rope; the worker would wrap his arms and legs around him and be swung to his next spot. Even more impressive was Oliver Cowan who acted quickly when a supervisor lost his hold on a safety line. He caught the man and stopped him from falling to his death.
7. One of the problems construction engineers had to solve was how to cool the concrete, which, left to itself, would take years and weaken the structure. So, they constructed what may well have been the biggest Fridge ever made, which dispensed over a thousand tons of ice onto the concrete every day. As it happened, that summer was one of the hottest on record with an average temperature of 119 degrees Fahrenheit every day.
8. There is a road running along the top of the dam - Route 93, a two lane highway. However, increasing congestion and concerns about security after 9/11 led to the building of a bypass bridge. The Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge is 1,905 feet long and 900 feet above the Colorado River. It's the longest single-span concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere and the second-highest bridge of any type in America.
9. The dam almost fell to a Dambusters style Nazi plot. In 1939, the United States government learned about a couple of German Nazi agents who were planning to bomb the Hoover Dam and its power facilities to damage California’s aviation manufacturing industry. The US government discussed camouflaging the dam with a paint job or building a decoy; but in the end the plot was foiled without any need to go to such efforts.
10. Swimming across the river in front of the dam is illegal, because it is massively dangerous - anyone attempting the feat is likely to get sucked into the dam's turbines and killed. However, somebody did it in 2017, and survived - a drunken Brit on a stag do. Arron Hughes and his mates were in Las Vegas, and after several hours of hard partying and lots of booze, he decided he'd go for a swim. He was lucky - only one of the ten turbines was switched on at the time - even so, he reported that he felt the pull. This "hold my beer" stunt took half an hour. Once Hughes reached the other side of the river, he jumped in again and swam back, straight into the arms of the law. He was arrested and fined $330.

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