Hoover Dam
“’Ten years ago the place where we are gathered was an unpeopled, forbidding desert. In the bottom of a gloomy canyon, whose precipitous walls rose to a height of more than a thousand feet, flowed a turbulent, dangerous river. The mountains on either side of the canyon were difficult to access with neither road nor trail, and their rocks were protected by neither trees nor grass from the blazing heat of the sun. The site of Boulder City was a cactus-covered waste. The transformation wrought here in these years is a twentieth-century marvel’” (Aldridge 84). These remarks by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the dedication ceremony for the Hoover Dam highlight the harsh and hostile conditions that had to be overcome in the construction of this colossal structure. Even though the Hoover Dam was built during the Great Depression with limited resources and required many hardships to be endured by the people involved, it is an amazing architectural marvel that tamed the Colorado River which has stood the test of time and is still in operation today.
The spectacular Hoover Dam did not rise easily because of the variety of different hazards to overcome. The construction of the Hoover Dam involved six companies employing five thousand people to fill the jobs (Zuchlke 19). The construction process took five years to complete and all materials were brought to the site by boat (Aldridge 68). The project started with four diversion tunnels being blasted from the rock. This task required one ton of dynamite for every fourteen feet of the rock. After the workers blasted the tunnels, they cleaned the bottoms of all the debris and lined them with concrete. It took fourteen months to complete the tunnels; they opened on November 14, 1932, and closed after the dam was finished, which resulted in the formation of Lake Meade (Aldridge 70). To keep the worksite from flooding, building the cofferdams was the next task, using rubble from the diversion tunnels (Zuchlke 22).
The spectacular Hoover Dam did not rise easily because of the variety of different hazards to overcome. The construction of the Hoover Dam involved six companies employing five thousand people to fill the jobs (Zuchlke 19). The construction process took five years to complete and all materials were brought to the site by boat (Aldridge 68). The project started with four diversion tunnels being blasted from the rock. This task required one ton of dynamite for every fourteen feet of the rock. After the workers blasted the tunnels, they cleaned the bottoms of all the debris and lined them with concrete. It took fourteen months to complete the tunnels; they opened on November 14, 1932, and closed after the dam was finished, which resulted in the formation of Lake Meade (Aldridge 70). To keep the worksite from flooding, building the cofferdams was the next task, using rubble from the diversion tunnels (Zuchlke 22).