Day 21 (Thursday, July 15th) Hoover Dam, NV & AZ

We rented a car this morning so we figured we'd make the best of a bad situation. After a leisurely breakfast, we drove down to take the dam tour at Hoover Dam. There may be bigger dams in use today, but it's still an engineering marvel! The dam is over 726 feet high and 1,244 feet across. It's 45 feet wide at the top and 660 feet wide at the bottom. I also found it interesting that the dam has it's own police department, but it's so far away from anything else that it's understandable. The dam is also such a high risk for terrorism that they're building a whole new highway and bridge to bypass the dam (see picture). That highway should open in a few months and no one will ever be able to drive across the dam again. They have a relatively new parking garage for visitors taking tours so we parked in the shade and walked down to take the Dam Tour. There, we first watched a video about the constuction in 1931-1935. They ran 24/7 shifts the whole time and finished early and under budget; pretty amazing by today's standards of delays and cost overruns. After the video we took an elevator down to see one of the gigantic intake tunnels, called "penstocks" where we got a lecture on how the dam operates currently. From there, the water goes down tubes that get smaller and smaller so that the water moves faster and faster, and finally spins the turbines. When we finished there, we went to the turbine room on the Nevada side of the river (8 turbines on Nevada side; Arizona has 9). It was pretty impressive to find out that we were standing 425 feet below the level of the water in the lake behind the dam! The turbine area was huge and really impressed the boys even though we could only see the top third of the turbines! The pictures don't really let you realize the scale they built on! They had to build factories, on site, to manufacture a lot of the parts because they were too big to transport from the outside! They built an entire city (Boulder City) to house all the workers (and their families) for the dam project. That included stores, hotels, schools, and hospitals. They told us that 96 men died during the construction, but the myth that they were drowned in the cement is fiction. They dumped in such vast areas that new deposits were only a few inches deep. An interesting piece of trivia is that Hoover Dam (originally Boulder Dam) isn't even in Boulder Canyon; that was just the original favorite of the two original prospective sites. Because they were already calling it Boulder Dam, they kept the name even though they actually built it in site #2, Black Canyon. Of course, it was later renamed for President Hoover, who was a strong proponent of the project before he became president. Another neat piece of trivia is that electricity generation is actually a side product of dam. I had always thought it was built primarily to make electricity, but the dam's main purpose it actually to ensure the steady and continuous flow of water to all the farm lands and orchards below it, in southern California and even in Mexico. Without the dam, all that farmland will flood like areas around the Mississippi do. Lake Mead also provides drinking water for areas as far away as Tuscon, Arizona. They just use this regulated, released water to make electricity as a bonus. The sale of that electricity paid off all building costs and continues to pay for operation and maintenance of the entire place. The dam doesn't cost taxpayers a cent. After the tour, we walked around the outside of the dam and walked across to Arizona and back to Nevada. The dam is so big, you can't even get the whole thing in one picture without a wide-angle lens or taking a helicopter tour.