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The construction of Hoover Dam is considered to be one of Americas finest engineering achievements. However the dam that rose from the floor of Black Canyon was not only a structural accomplishment, it was a proposition firmly rooted in practicalities. The necessity of such a dam had been obvious for more than two decades. The Colorado Rivers cycles of drought and flood in the American southwest incapacitated the growth of the agricultural industry. It was felt that a dam that could control the river would also provide hydroelectric power, eventually rendering the dam self-financing.
The growth of Las Vegas and Southern California as major metropolitan centers also depended, to a large extent, on the availability of water and power. Almost from the beginning of its construction, the dam possessed an epic quality that stimulated the national imagination. It was apparent that the meaning of the dam itself was beyond even that of a structure that equaled the vast landscape it inhabited. The dam, and the people who built it, began controlling nature in a new and powerful way. Although construction actually began on the Hoover Dam in 1931, site testing for the project had begun early in the 1920 s. In 1927 the Swing-Johnson bill was passed by Congress and President Coolidge, which gave the go ahead on Hoover Dam project.
So many construction companies around the country began to evaluate the proposals. Most agreed that the plan was too ambitious, too difficult, the landscape was too unforgiving, and the technology was not advanced enough to build a dam of that size. But on March 11, 1931; Six Companies Incorporated, a conglomeration of six smaller construction companies, won the job with a bid of $ 48, 890, 955. (The Story Since this dam site was so remote, the first task was to lay roads and railroad lines, so that all the materials would be easily accessible. The Colorado River, most importantly, had to be diverted. Four diversion tunnels were cut over a period of a year through the bedrock of Black Canyon. A temporary dam was constructed which diverted the water into the diversion tunnels.
Meanwhile, the loose rock had to be removed from the canyon walls. Special men were required for the job, they were called high-scalers. They had to climb down the canyon walls tied to ropes. The high-scalers used jackhammers and dynamite to strip away the rock. The men who chose to do this work came from many backgrounds.
Some were former sailors, some circus acrobats, others were American Indians. All of them had to be agile men, unafraid to swing out over the canyon hanging by a rope. It was hard and dangerous work, perhaps the most physically demanding work on the entire project. They scaled the walls with a forty-four pound jack hammer chipping away at the rock and then placing dynamite around boulders too large to demolish by hand.
The scalers had to do all this while moving about, avoiding live air hoses and electrical lines, it was not For all men on the job the danger of being hit from falling rocks and dropped tools was the most common cause of death during the building of the dam. Ninety- six men were killed in industrial accidents while building the dam. So for their own protection the men started making improvised hard hats for themselves by coating cloth hats with coal tar. These hard-boiled hats, were extremely effective when being hit by falling objects.
The Six Companies eventually distributed commercially made hard hats and issued one to every man on the project. The risk and high visibility of the job gave it a certain status which appealed to some types of men. When the formen were not looking, these men would often swing out from the cliffs and attempt stunts, in competition with other scalers. One standout scaler used these acrobatic skills for a useful service.
Louis The Human Pendulum Fagan transported a crew of shifters around a projecting boulder on the Arizona side. The man to be transferred would wrap his legs around Fagan's waist, grasp the rope, and with a mighty leap, the would sail out into the air and swing around the boulder. Fagan then returned for the next man in the crew. But perhaps the most famous feat of the high scaler was performing a daring midair rescue. Burl R.
Rutledge, a Bureau of Reclamation engineer fell from the canyon rim, only to be caught by a scaler, twenty-five feet below. The scaler was Oliver Cowan, who had heard Rutledge slip. Without a moments hesitation he swung himself out and seized Rutledge's leg. A few seconds later, high scaler Arnold Parks swung over and pinned Rutledge's body to the canyon wall. The scalers held Rutledge until a line was dropped and secured him and secured around him and the shaken engineer was pulled, unharmed, to safety. Once the canyon walls had been cleared and the river floor dredged down to bedrock, only then could the pouring of the concrete begin.
A major problem with a structure as large as the Hoover Dam was the cooling of the concrete because of the immense heat in the desert. Engineers calculated that the massive amount of concrete would take over one hundred years to cool, and if not fully cooled the dam would crack. To avoid this, the dam was poured in rows and columns of blocks. Refrigerated water was then pumped through the blocks in pipes, and the pipes were then filled with concrete. This technique made the dam entirely one piece.
The dam itself was completed two years ahead of schedule, in 1935. In 1936 power generation began and turbines continued to be added until 1961. The remote nature of the Hoover Dam site presented its builders with a problem of housing laborers. The unemployment caused by the Great Depression and the publicity the project received, brought workers from all over the country to the Las Vegas offices of Six Companies, Inc. , the firm that contracted to build the dam. Before the building had even begun, the offices had received over 2, 400 job application and more than 12, 000 letters of inquiry from job seekers.
Many men arrived with all of their possessions and their families, ready to begin a new life in the desert. As soon as construction activity began in April of 1931, people rapidly abandoned the Las Vegas area and moved closer to the actual site. The cluster of makeshift homes that emerged was named Ragtown, and as the summer of 1931 passed, it became a living hell. The average temperature in July was 119 degrees. (Hoover Dam Visitor Center) Despite the availability of waster from the Colorado, more than two dozen dam workers and Ragtown family members died of heat exhaustion between June and July of the year. Although Six Companies quickly erected a river camp, a group of buildings for single men on the side of the river, the population of Ragtown increased to 1400 by the end of the summer. At the height of the Hoover Dam construction, some 5000 men would be working on it.
Fortunately, the federal government had anticipated this problem and had made plans to build a modern city to house the workers and their families near the dam site. This was on the federal land that surrounded it, r...
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Research essay sample on Hoover Dam Las Vegas
