Hoover Dam: concrete giants that stopped the Colorado River and the Great Depression

PRAGUE - It is not the tallest, the largest, or the most expensive, it has not required the most victims, yet it is a legend. The 220-meter high dam of the Hoover Dam, located 50 kilometers south of Las Vegas, was not only a revolutionary engineering feat. The material used, which would reportedly suffice to build a highway connecting New York to Los Angeles, became one of the cornerstones in the recovery from the economic crisis of the 1930s. Seventy years ago, on March 1, 1936, one of the symbols of America was finally completed.
Essentially, it was about how to tame the Colorado River. This river was one of the primary sources of water in the parched Southwest, but the regular spring snowmelt caused damage to anyone who tried to settle near this resource. After ten years of preparation, President Coolidge issued the order to commence construction in 1928. Since the creation of the Great Pyramid in Giza, it was to be the largest construction block in the history of mankind. Three years later, the consortium Six Companies Inc. began construction.
Just in time. The American economy, and indeed the world economy, was drowning in the Great Depression, and the construction of the Boulder Dam - originally named, it was named after Herbert Hoover in 1947 - fit seamlessly into Roosevelt's New Deal. Thousands of workers began to flock to the borders of Nevada and Arizona, for whom the average wage of four dollars a day was salvation.
On the banks of the river in the Mojave Desert, Ragtown sprang up, from which 3,500 people set out to work every morning (a total of 16,000 people were involved in the construction of the dam, 96 of them died during the construction). In incredible heat – the temperature in 1931, according to the memories of witnesses, soared above 50 degrees Celsius at nine o'clock in the morning and remained there for 12 hours – workers began to prepare the site for the dam. At the time, it was unique not only for its size but also for its art deco design.
It took two years for the workers, numbering around 16,000, to remove over a million cubic meters of earth and rock and create the conditions for the pouring of concrete blocks to begin. By then, the builders had already experienced their first strike over poor working conditions and workers moving from Ragtown - which today lies at the bottom of Lake Mead - to better conditions in Boulder City. The country was clawing its way out of the economic crisis, and construction progressed more quickly than planned, even compared to the tight deadlines. Two years before the scheduled completion in 1938, Americans could start filling the reservoir. The $49 million project was completed.
Behind the 221-meter high dam, which is 198 meters wide at its base, 13 meters thick at the top, 379 meters long, and weighs 6.6 million tons, is now Lake Mead, a lake 180 kilometers long capable of holding two spring runoff volumes of the Colorado River. Seventeen turbines generate 2,080 megawatts. Moreover, Americans have made the dam one of the pilgrimage sites. Since 1985, the Hoover Dam has been a national landmark, attracting 13,000 tourists daily for a tour of its interiors. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Hoover Dam became one of the most intensively guarded places.