"The Greatest Dam in the World":  Building Hoover Dam
"The Greatest Dam in the World":  Building Hoover Dam
(Bureau of Reclamation; Andrew Pernick, photographer)
H
oover Dam is as tall as a  60-story building.  It was the highest  dam in the world when it was completed in 1935.  Its base is as thick as two football fields are long.  Each spillway, designed to let floodwaters  pass without harming the dam itself, can handle the volume of water that flows  over Niagara Falls.  The amount of  concrete used in building it was enough to pave a road stretching from San  Francisco to New York City. 
The dam had to be big.  It held back what was then, and still is, the  largest man-made lake in the United States.  The amount of water in the lake, when full, could cover the whole state  of Connecticut ten feet deep.  Only a  huge dam could stand up to the pressure of so much water.
Building such a mammoth  structure presented unprecedented challenges to the engineers of the Bureau of  Reclamation.  It stretched the abilities  of its builders to the limits.  It  claimed the lives of 96 of the 21,000 men who worked on it.
Construction began in  1931.  Americans began coming to see the  big dam long before it was completed four years later.  Most had to travel many miles, at the end  through a hostile desert, to reach this location on the border between Nevada  and Arizona.  The builders soon constructed  an observation platform on the canyon rim to keep the tourists away from the  construction site.
Hoover Dam did, and continues to do, all the things  its supporters hoped it would.  It protects  southern California and Arizona from the disastrous floods for which the  Colorado had been famous.  It provides  water to irrigate farm fields.  It  supplies water and power to Los Angeles and other rapidly growing cities in the  Southwest.  But the dam also had an  entirely unexpected result, one that began while it was still under  construction.  For millions of people in  the 1930s, including those who would never visit it, Hoover Dam came to  symbolize what American industry and American workers could do, even in the  depths of the Great Depression.  In the  early 21st century, almost a million people still come to visit the  huge dam every year.
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