Hoover Dam - An Engineering Wonder

Although I’m not an engineer (or maybe precisely for that reason) I am absolutely fascinated with “engineering wonders” like the Hoover Dam. I admire the vision, persistence, and execution of ideas that not only stand the test of time, but more so the test of natural forces.

Standing on top of the majestic Hoover Dam wall, I try to envision the area between Nevada and Arizona before it was build. A stream of water dividing the two US states, rocks and barren land all around, a place subject to nature’s whims of drought or flood.

Someone looked at those parameters in the first quarter of the 20st century and did not find them as hostile and inhabitable as I might have. They saw an opportunity to make the desert fertile, to feed the growing number of settlers flooding the west to cash in on its natural resources. Human benefits aside, I think the engineers saw a challenge to apply known, and develop new technologies to show the desert who is boss!

They sure did! For the next five years, from 1931 to 1936, the Hoover Dam was build. For two years, workers poured concrete eight hours a day to build the dam wall, which at its bottom is two soccer fields wide (appr. 100m). Amazingly, the dam wall is not connected to the surrounding rocks. Rather, it is jammed into them by the water pressure created through Lake Mead (which, by the way is named after civil irrigation engineer Elwood Mead who was commissioner during the planning and construction of the Boulder Canyon Project, which created the dam and lake). After completion of the wall, it took another six years to fill the dam with water.

During my recent trip to Hoover Dam I learned, to my surprise, that the dam’s main objective was not power generation but irrigation. Power generation is a welcomed by-product of the water-security objective. A side-effect that make the operation self-sustaining.

As we crawled into the belly of the dam, we saw the giant turbines. Most of them idle, as the water reservoir levels are rather low these days. Only if there is enough water in the lake, will it be channeled through the turbines to release the pressure and thereby generate power. In his decades long experience working at the dam, our guide had only once seen the floodgates open, spitting out excess water from both sides of the canyon without going through the turbines. Current energy treaties between the surrounding states expire in 2017.

The Society of Civil Engineering selected Hoover Dam as one of the seven “Modern Civil Engineering Wonders of the United States”. I can see why. I think it is also a wonder that the dam, at times, works in two time zones. Arizona does not change its clocks to daylight savings time. I want to see the dam’s time and work schedule for the months of March to November!