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Hoover Dam
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Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona.
It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Originally known as Boulder Dam from 1933, it was officially renamed Hoover Dam for President Herbert Hoover by a joint resolution of Congress in 1947.
When Hoover Dam was built, it would be the most expensive engineer project that the US had ever started. The cost was $49 million, which is about $700 million today.
It was initially created to help control local flooding and provide some infrastructure for irrigation. In 1936, just one year after it was finished, electrical power generation was also added to the dam’s purpose.
Lake Mead was created as a reservoir behind the dam, and it is the largest artificial reservoir of its kind in the US. It offers visitors over 500 miles of shoreline and its deepest point when full has a depth of 590 feet.
Numerous films have used the dam as a backdrop including Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur and Superman the Movie.
Part of the Hoover Dam complex today includes the O’CallaghanTillman Bridge. The bridge itself is the widest and longest type of structure in its design in the Western Hemisphere.
Five million barrels of cement was used to create the dam. Imagine a four-foot-wide sidewalk wrapped completely around the Earth at the equator. That’s how much concrete it took to build the dam, which is 726 feet tall and 1,244 feet long. At its base, the dam is 660 feet thick at its top 45 feet thick.
The dam is about 30 minutes from Las Vegas.
Nevada’s Boulder City didn’t exist before the Hoover Dam project. The city was built in 1930 solely to house the 5,000 workers employed to build the dam.
Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, Hoover Dam was closed to all visitors until the war ended in 1945.
