Hoover Dam Lake Mead NV

Hoover Dam Lake Mead NV was one of those places that we have been before, but it was so long ago that it beckoned us to return.

Our drive to Hoover Dam took us through part of the Mojave Desert and the Lake Mead Recreation area. The scenery alone was worth the trip. But when we arrived at Hoover Dam it became apparent to us that we had totally forgotten just how spectacular a feat of engineer this was.

According to Wikipedia “Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” But there is so much more to know about this amazing structure!

Things to know about Hoover Dam Lake Mead NV

Hoover Dam Lake Mead NV

This engineering marvel was dedicated in September 1930. But the name was a source of controversy.

Let’s start at the beginning. Originally, surveyors thought that the dam should be built at Boulder Canyon and felt it should be called the Boulder Canyon Dam Project. Later, Black Canyon was thought to be a better location for the new structure. However, it continued to be referred to as the Boulder Dam. But on September 17, 1930. at a ceremony to mark the start of construction on a railroad line to the dam site, it was announced that the dam would be named for the President, Herbert Hoover.

In 1933, Hoover was succeeded in the White House by Franklin Roosevelt. Harold Ickes, the new secretary of the interior, who was no fan of Hoover, declared the structure would once again be called Boulder Dam. By that point, the name Herbert Hoover also had taken on negative associations for a number of Americans, who blamed him for the Great Depression.

No one was buried alive in the concrete

The cost of building the dam was too much for one company to tackle alone during the Great Depression. Because of that, a group of construction firms banded together and, using the name Six Companies, submitted a winning bid of $48.8 million for the project. At the time, it was the largest contract awarded by the federal government. A total of 21,000 men worked on the dam, with an average of 3,500 working each day. In June 1934 the daily figure of workers peaked at more than 5,200.

Building the dam was difficult, dangerous work, for which men were paid an hourly wage ranging from 50 cents to $1.25. Officially, the project had 96 construction related fatalities. Some sources contend that the number likely was higher. Some 4.3 million cubic yards of concrete were used to build the dam, its power plant and auxiliary features, enough concrete to pave a 16-foot-wide, 8-inch-thick road from San Francisco to New York City, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. But contrary to popular myth, no workers were buried alive in the dam’s concrete as it was poured.

Once was the Earth’s tallest dam

At 726.4 feet high, Hoover Dam was the world’s tallest dam when it was built in the 1930s. These days, it’s the second-tallest dam in the U.S. It has been surpassed by the 770-foot high Oroville Dam in Northern California, which opened in 1968.

The globe’s tallest dam is the 1,001-foot-high Jinping-I Dam in Liangshan, Sichuan, China, which became operational in 2013.

Hoover Dam’s power plant was the world’s largest hydroelectric station from 1939 to 1949. It has an installed capacity of 2,080 megawatts (MW) and currently generates around 4 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of hydroelectric power annually, for homes and business in Nevada, Arizona and California.

During World War II, the dam was the target of a German bomb plot

In November 1939, with World War II underway, United States officials learned of an alleged plot by German agents to bomb Hoover Dam by planting bombs at the intake towers to sabotage the power supply to Southern California’s aviation manufacturing industry. After American authorities got wind of the plot, private boats were prohibited in the Black Canyon, stricter regulations for dam employees and visitors were enacted and a variety of other security measures such as physical barriers and increased lighting were put in place.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the dam was closed to visitors for the remainder of the war. The dam had its own police force, but the Army provided some personnel to help guard the dam. Additionally, government officials investigated various possibilities for protecting the dam from an aerial attack, such as large-scale smoke screens or the construction of a decoy dam, but none of these options were used. Hoover Dam reopened to the general public in September 1945.

America’s second-highest bridge now reroutes traffic from the top of the dam

Since the 1930s, U.S. Route 93 ran right along the top of the dam. However, the two-lane highway was hazardous and had grown increasingly congested over the years. In an effort to remedy these problems, construction began on a dam bypass bridge in 2005. The bridge was completed five years later. Named the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, it measures 1,905-feet long and soars nearly 900 feet above the Colorado River. That makes it the longest single span concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere! It’s also the second highest bridge of any type in America. The structure, which cost $114 million, is named for Donal Neil “Mike” O’Callaghan, who was a Korean War veteran and two term Nevada governor during the 1970s. It’s also named for Pat Tillman, who gave up a professional football career with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army in 2002. He died in Afghanistan in 2004.

Plan a visit

If you are in Las Vegas, or anywhere near Lake Mead for that matter, I urge you to plan a visit to Hoover Dam! Just the drive there is worth the trip. Be sure to bring your camera, fully charged, and make sure you allow enough time for tours so that you can fully appreciate this unbelievable feat of engineering.