Essay 2: Hoover Dam
The Hoover Dam, once known as the Boulder Dam, is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between Arizona and Nevada. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and it was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result involving thousands of workers and unfortunately cost over one hundred lives. The dam was controversially named after President Herbert Hoover.
The center of Boulder City, Elm Street, had been surrounded by the Grace Community Church. Reverend Thomas Stevenson was sure of delivering forgiveness to the town over the corruption of the project of the reservation. Most likely it would gather many citizens of Nevada, but mostly to prove if Tom Stevenson was part of it, then it had to be done.
Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium called Six Companies, Inc., which began construction on the dam in early 1931. Such a large concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques were unproven. The fervid summer weather and the lack of facilitates near the site also presented difficulties. Nevertheless, Six Companies turned over the dam to the federal government on March 1, 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule. The dam's generators provide power for the public and private utilities in Nevada, Arizona, and California.
As the United States developed the southwest, the Colorado River was seen as a potential source of irrigation water. An initial attempt at diverting the river for irrigation purposes in the late 1890s. After a catastrophic breach that caused the Colorado River to fill the Salton Sea, the Southern Pacific Railroad spent $3 million in 1906-07 to stabilize the waterway, an amount it hoped vainly would be reimbursed by the Federal Government. Even after the waterway was stabilized, it proved unsatisfactory because of the constant dispute with landowners on the Mexican border side.
As the technology of electric power transmission improved, the Lower Colorado was considered for its hydroelectric-power potential. In 1902, the Edison Electric Company of Los Angeles surveyed the river in the hope of building a rock dam which could generate. However, at the time, the limit of transmission of electric power was, and there were few customers within that limit. Edison allowed land options it held on the river to lapse—including an option for what became the site of Hoover Dam.
In the following years, the Bureau of Reclamation, known as the Reclamation Service at the time, also considered the Lower Colorado as the site of a dam. Service chief Arthur Powell Davis proposed using dynamite to collapse the walls of Boulder Canyon, north of the eventual dam site, into the river. The river would carry off the smaller pieces of debris, and a dam would be built incorporating the remaining rubble. In 1922, after considering it for several years, the Reclamation Service finally rejected the proposal, citing doubts about the unproven technique and questions as to whether it would in fact save money.
In 1922, the Reclamation Service presented a report calling for the development of a dam on the Colorado for flood control and electric power generation. The report was principally authored by Davis, and was called the Fall-Davis report after Interior Secretary Albert Fall. The Fall-Davis report cited use of the Colorado River as a federal concern, because the river's basin covered several states, and the river eventually entered Mexico. Though the Fall-Davis report called for a dam "at or near Boulder Canyon", the Reclamation Service found that canyon unsuitable. One potential site at Boulder Canyon was bisected by a geologic fault; two others were so narrow there was no space for a construction camp at the bottom of the canyon or for a spillway. The Service investigated Black Canyon and found it ideal; a railway could be laid from the railhead in Las Vegas to the top of the dam site. Despite the site change, the dam project was referred to as the "Boulder Canyon Project".