The year 1929 was coming to an end. Las Vegas was a small and insignificant town somewhere in the inhospitable American West. The nearby Colorodo River flowed mightily, but not unkindly: flooding in the spring, leaving people destitute in the autumn on the parched land. For more than two decades, engineers have tried to tame it, but time and again they have found it impossible. But now, like a flash, rumours have spread that it is about to be the site of a dam as mighty as any in the world. People did not wait to find out when. After Black Thursday, when the US stock market crashed on 24 October 1929, was followed by the Great Depression or economic crisis, almost a quarter of Americans lost their jobs. The news that the government would finance the construction of the world’s tallest, heaviest and largest dam was a bright ray in the gloomy despair of everyday life – the promise of work, earnings and livelihood.
The families boarded the train and set off into the unknown. Most of them had never been to a place so dry, desolate and hot, and never had so many people flocked to Las Vegas as they did that day. Accommodation was so scarce that thousands of new ‘burghers’ could not have found a roof over their heads even if they had the money, but many of them were homeless. They spent everything they had on travel, and there was no work and no money to be made.
The actual start of the work was still months away and people had to survive as best they knew how. Some settled in the railway station, others lived on the streets. Friendly locals helped them to survive.
Hell at the gates of hell
The third moved closer to the future work site, in the desert near the Colorado River. Confident that they would surely get work if they were “on hand”, where there was nothing but dust and heat, settlements began to rise, made up of tents and cardboard “houses”, with only white tarpaulins to protect people from the infernal heat.
They spent weeks under them, which stretched into months. There was no cold water and no fresh food. Since they had no refrigerators and no electricity, they could only eat as much canned food as they could buy. They were more or less starving.
The worst was in the community of Ragtown, or, to translate the name very loosely, the City of Fools. The people who lived and died there were the poorest of the poor. They survived only thanks to the help of the people of Las Vegas, who brought them food and sometimes lent them their clothes to protect them in the icy desert nights.
They were completely desperate. “It was the worst nightmare you could imagine,” Ila Clements-Davey, the daughter of one of the workers who lived in Ragtown in Black Canyon, later recalled. No infrastructure, no sanitation. “Nothing. You threw your family somewhere in the middle of the desert and that was it.” Where they were staying, the sun was 55 degrees Celsius, but her “father and mother didn’t even have a tent”.
But for the 1 400 people who were soon to live in Ragtown, even “homes” made of cardboard and rags offered no protection from the heat of the day and the cold of the night, and living conditions only worsened with time. At its peak, as many as 5000 men, women and children were living in Ragtown.
But life was just too hard. In June and July 1931, when the summer was at its hottest on record and average July temperatures soared to 55 degrees Celsius, the exhausted people couldn’t take it anymore. More than 25 died, even as they cooled off in the muddy Colorado River, where they washed, bathed and, above all, soaked their children to survive.
Most of them had already lived a year and a half in hell, because even in the mid-1930s the government did not know who was going to build the bridge, let alone start work. Most engineers were so convinced that a dam on the Colorado could not be built at all, but now it turns out that the project, while possible, is far too complex for a single contractor, even though experts have been working on it since the turn of the century, when western farmers set out to tame the river.
The land was dry and they wanted to use the river water for irrigation. They built a canal, turned lower California into an oasis and lived happily ever after until, in 1905, a massive flood turned their fertile fields into a giant lake that hid their farms beneath its 240 square metres of surface.
The Colorado, one of America’s wildest rivers, was not so easily tamed. He wound his way through seven US states and finally visited Mexico. On his 2330 kilometre journey, which also took him through the Grand Canyon, he created dramatic canyons and stunned with wild rapids, but he also continually terrified people with his relentless spring bank crossings.
Will there or won’t there be a dam?
With no sign of the Colorado calming down on its own, the government’s Irrigation Department began exploring how to tame it in 1907. By 1917, they were convinced that a dam would be a great idea, but it was not clear where it should stand.
They started looking for the perfect place for it. They were combing miles of riverbed when, in December 1922, J.G. Tierney, one of the members of the geological expedition, fell overboard. Almost a decade before the dam was built, he became its first victim. Exactly 13 years later, on 20 December 1935, the dam claimed its last life. Patrick Tierney fell from the water tower and drowned. He was the son of J. G. Tierney.
At the beginning, after four years of research, the engineers chose the perfect place to build it – Black Canyon, on the border between Nevada and Arizona, which share a border with California. They estimated that the dam would cost an unimaginable $165 million and would have to be approved by Congress.
But it was not only the amount that was controversial, but also the fact that so much money should have gone to the West. As long as it had a water problem, it was subjugated; if we could solve the problem by flooding the Colorado and irrigating the parched land, it would flourish.
The men in ties on the East Coast, in Washington, the centre of decision-making, did not like the strong West. They simply did not give the green light to build the dam, even though the then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training, had already in 1922 got seven western countries to agree on how they would share the rights to the water to be covered by the planned dam.
How to convince congressmen that the dam is not only necessary for the local population, but also worthwhile for America? Its proponents came up with a solution: if the dam were also a hydroelectric power plant, the cost of construction would be covered by the sale of electricity, because not only would the surrounding agriculture boom thanks to the water and electricity, but so would cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix in Nevada, Los Angeles in California and others.
But even this argument did not convince the congressmen to open the pouch, and it took 12 years from the idea of the dam to the moment when the funds for its construction were finally approved in 1929. Coincidentally, this coincided with the Great Depression, and any job was welcome, so people flocked to Las Vegas as soon as word got out that a dam was going to be built nearby, even though most of them had never seen a construction site, let alone worked on one.
Las Vegas was a mecca of opportunity before it became the gambling capital of the world. Men young and old were convinced they were in for a life-changing experience, even though the employment office received 12,000 job applications just three weeks after the news of the construction was announced, and even at the peak of the work, there was only enough work for around 5,000 people on the site.
But they didn’t know that, and they didn’t know that construction wouldn’t start for at least another year, although the government did speed up the start of work when it saw the personal tragedies that people were experiencing in the desert. In June 1930, although they still did not have a contractor, they had started laying the telephone cables and the railway tracks connecting Las Vegas and the Black Canyon. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
They also had such big problems with the contractor because the job was simply too big for one company. In the end, six large construction companies got together, tendered and won.
Welcome to hell
On 17 September 1930, or a year after the news of the dam’s construction was announced, work finally began, but only then did the workers realise that they had now entered a new circle of hell, created jointly by a cruel nature and an implacable Chief Superintendent, Frank Crowe.
He used to design a dam in a government office, but when the government approved the construction, he quit his job and went to work among the builders because government engineers were not allowed to be involved in the implementation. He could not bear this. He wanted to be there, on the ground, among the workers, in the water and the dust. He wanted to see his dream take concrete form.
His ego was bigger than the universe, they said later, but only a man like that could have been convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could build the world’s biggest dam on one of America’s wildest rivers in the middle of the desert, where there is nothing, no roads, no electricity. The construction site became his sandbox, where he played days and nights under immense pressure.
There was no doubt about it: the dam would cost and be built at a cost of $125,392,000, or about $1,804,000,000,000 million, as it would cost today. Seven years to complete it? Not for Frank Crowe. He had no intention of paying the heavy penalties for every day of delay that the government had foreseen, so he turned the workers into modern-day slaves and drove them relentlessly.
He had no interest in human lives and, consequently, no interest in safety measures. The dam, which ended up costing $108 million, claimed 96 lives, or 112 if you add the workers who died at home from exhaustion, heat, poisoning, injuries or whatever else to the many who died on site.
Since no one knows how many workers ended up in hospital and died after leaving, the figure may be even higher. But Frank Crowe was ruthless. Without batting an eyelid, he was willing to pay any price to realise his dream.
It was highest during the first two years, when the Black Canyon inferno was at its most fierce. The river flowed at 850 cubic metres per second through a channel that should have been cut by a dam. In order to build the dam, the river had to be diverted through “bypass” tunnels, the riverbed had to be drained and the riverbed had to be prepared for the dam.
But there were no roads at that time, so the workers transported everything they needed to build the tunnels to the construction site by boat. Two tunnels had to be carved out of the living rock on one side of the river and two on the other. All four had to run parallel to the riverbed through the rock. Together, they were almost 6 kilometres long and so wide that today you could park a Boeing 747 without wings in them.
Working conditions were hellish. In winter, workers were buffeted by relentless winds, in summer temperatures soared to 50 degrees Celsius. Most workers had never experienced such heat, let alone worked in it. Water was scarce and not cold. They succumbed to heat strokes and died.
But the deeper they went, the worse it got. In summer, temperatures in the tunnels reached 60 degrees Celsius. The so-called ice and water unit was on constant alert. It jumped as soon as anyone lost consciousness, but 14 workers still lost their lives.
Toxic pneumonia
But the tunnels were not only hellishly hot, the air was also saturated with carbon monoxide. Even though Nevada law banned petrol-powered vehicles, they were of course used in the tunnels because Crowe and the contractors used the excuse that they were subject to federal laws, not state ones. They didn’t even think about proper ventilation, of course, because it would have taken too much time.
The air was almost blue due to the toxic gases, but no workers died from poisoning. When one fainted and was rushed to hospital, the doctors found each time that he had fallen ill and died of pneumonia. During the same period, no local resident died of pneumonia, but the workers and their relatives could do nothing. If someone died of pneumonia, the contractors did not have to pay compensation.
And petrol powered everything, including the so-called “rotating elephants”. At first, the tunnels were built by slowly digging a path through the living rock with about 500 workers. They set up a scaffolding in front of it, climbed on it, drilled holes in the rock for dynamite, demolished the scaffolding and blew up the wall. A layer of rock fell off, they put the scaffolding back up and repeated the process.
Frank Crowe had to build the tunnels in two years, so this approach was far too time-consuming for him. So he and his colleagues came up with the idea of “drilling elephants”, or trucks with an open back. 24 to 30 workers with their drills would line up on the edge of the truck and the truck would be parked by leaning it against a rock.
Now the workers were at a reasonable height without scaffolding and could drill into the rock all at once. When they had finished, dynamite was placed in the cracks. The workers with the drills were taken to another location and continued working while their colleagues blew up the rock.
Now the work was going much faster, or so fast that it was like an anthill in the tunnels, except that everywhere was a complete mess. Often uninsulated electric cables were snaking through the tunnels, killing workers. There were drills, power tools and dynamite everywhere. Trucks were constantly hauling rocks back and forth.
The noise was unbearable, the air full of dust. Rocks fell from the heights or men stumbled over them on the ground. Because there was no time to install adequate lighting, some parts of the tunnel were in total darkness, and elsewhere workers could hardly see what they were doing.
But no matter how fast they rushed, they were never fast enough. Supervisors were constantly pushing them. Someone later recalled that they were always on his heels.
But one day he looked up and saw a worker working at height. Suddenly, he flew towards the ground. He landed on the ground not far from him. He quickly checked whether there might be a lorry crashing towards him, because there were always lorries crashing there, and rushed to the unfortunate worker. He was dead.
At that moment, one of the supervisors appeared by his side. The worker told him that someone had killed himself there. The supervisor was not interested. He scolded him, “And what are you going to do with all these trucks? Are you going to eat them? Move them! This one won’t do anything to anybody.” The worker quickly went back to work.
Like everyone else, he worked seven days a week, in three shifts. If he wanted a day off, he would have been fired. There were always enough workers waiting in line. They only had two days off a year, the 4th of July and Christmas. They were not paid for any of them, and in the spring of 1931 they were told that their hourly rate would be cut.
When another record heat wave hit in the summer of 1931, the workers could take no more. Organised in the Industrial Workers of the World union, they went on strike on 7 August, not only because of low wages, but also because of their poor working and living conditions.
Their list of demands included clean water and flush toilets, cold water for drinking, the removal of uninsulated electrical cables, safe storage of the dynamite now lying around, respect for the mining laws of Nevada and Arizona, and so on.
Supervisor Frank Crowe, who earned the nickname Hurry Up Craw for his badgering of workers, refused all the demands. He took the strike personally, as if the workers had betrayed him completely unjustifiably, and stood firm on his position.
Workers were pushed against the wall. Desperate, they appealed to the Federal Minister of Labour to intervene on their behalf, because the construction of the dam is a state project, but he refused. After six days, they knew they had lost.
Fearing job losses, they agreed to return to the construction site. While the exposed leaders of the mutiny had to say goodbye to their jobs, the contractors tightened their control over the workers and introduced a service entrance to the site to make it easier to control them.
All the workers achieved was to give them cold drinking water and better lighting on the site, and they accelerated the construction of the workers’ town of Boulder, named after the initial plan for the dam, the Boulder Project.
City of Boulder
The living conditions in the desert were so appalling that neither the government officials nor the contractors could turn a blind eye to them, so they hastily built makeshift houses, a school, a church, a shop, a canteen and so on.
Single workers were placed in bachelor’s homes and families in houses that stood in rows one behind the other. They were set up so quickly that the workers did not even recognise the neighbourhood they had left in the evening, and often wandered into someone else’s house. Houses were also built at night, and the pounding of hammers became a night song in the middle of an otherwise silent desert.
The rent for the house – the minimum was $15 – was deducted from their wages. They were not allowed to serve alcohol or gamble in the city, as they were in Las Vegas, 50 kilometres away, and other rules set by their employers governed their lives.
The city was fenced and barricaded like a military base, but after suffering in the desert, the workers were happy to give up their freedom for a few small comforts. A large canteen prepared 6,000 meals a day and 12 tonnes of fruit and vegetables, 5 tonnes of meat and two and a half tonnes of eggs arrived in the city every week. A worker got three meals for $1.15 and ate as much as he could for that money.
Relations between the people who lived in the city were good, but there was not a single African-American among them. They were not hired by the contractors, nor were Indians or Mexicans, and the Chinese had no business being there.
The first black American was not hired until 1933, when the government forced them to do so, but even at the peak of the work, there were only 24 of the 5,000 workers.None of them were allowed to live in Boulder, or even set foot in it. They commuted in segregated buses from Las Vegas, 50 kilometres away, and then worked in the worst jobs that could be found.
Circus performers on a construction site
But they had a job to do, and no matter what, it always went on. The hardest ones were the workers who blasted and cleaned the canyon walls. They had to be smooth and solid so that the concrete dam could fit neatly on them later.
At the beginning of the working day, they tied themselves to ropes and used them to descend down the canyon from the top of the canyon. Behind them, the compressed air hammers came down the ropes. Each one was about 20 kilograms heavy, but the worker had to use it to drill into the rock while hanging suspended from the rope.
He made a hole and put dynamite in it, and then the wall was blown up and he had to remove all the rocks that weren’t completely solid.
The work was hard and dangerous, but above all it required nerves of steel, so it is no wonder that most of these workers were circus acrobats, although there were also, for example, sailors. One of Frank Crow’s greatest achievements, for example, was that the dam was built without fault by people who knew nothing about construction work, but he managed them so efficiently that everyone got the job done without fault.
If he survived, of course. Workers working at height had to avoid uninsulated electrical cables whizzing around, improvised ventilation pipes, falling rocks and even a flying hammer.
Most often they died because something fell on their heads, because of course they didn’t have helmets, at least not until they started making them themselves. They dipped a garment in tar and moulded it to their head. When the tar dried, the improvised helmet offered such effective protection that employers even commissioned them to start making them commercially.
But helmets didn’t help when it came to the “unusual” work. Louis Fegan, for example, had to “transfer” a worker to the other side of the work site. The worker grabbed onto his waist with his legs and held on to the rope, while Fegan pushed off hard and swung through the air with him. When they landed on the other side, he dropped the worker, swung with a powerful jolt to the starting point and picked up the next worker. He did this twice a day, taking colleagues to work and taking them back home.
On one occasion, the site was visited by Burl R. Rutledge, a government engineer. He stepped a little too far over the edge and fell over the edge of the canyon. About seven and a half metres below, Oliver Cowan was working on the rope. He heard a slip. Without hesitation, he swung to one side and was in the right place when Rutledge fell past him. He caught him by the leg just as Arnold Parkers was swinging towards them on his rope.
He pushed Rutledge against a rock, and they held him in the air until the rope was lowered to tie him down and he was pulled to safety unharmed.
Working at height was so dangerous that workers earned 40% more than their colleagues, but even on that money it was hard to get by day after day and month after month.
In the meantime, two more temporary dams were being built with the rocks removed from the tunnels, with the intention of forcing the water to divert into the tunnels. But to build them, they first had to remove 67 500 tonnes of river silt.
The completed dams were 9 metres higher than the tunnels, except that one was delayed behind the other. Where it was supposed to stand, workers were still working at height, so working on the ground was too dangerous even for the ruthless Frank Crowe.
But they were in a hurry. The tunnels were completed in record time in November 1932, and the dams started to be built in September 1932. They had to be completed before the spring floods of 1933. Of course, they beat the deadline again. Now they were on the ropes: would the dams withstand the pressure of the river?
On the day the truth was revealed, workers were frantically dumping the last tonnes of rock into the riverbed. By morning, the barrier was high enough that the water could neither break it down nor cross it. For the first time in 12 million years, the Colorado River had diverted its course and flowed through tunnels equipped with powerful lift gates.
Frank Crow scored another personal victory: he overcame the river, which bordered on the miraculous, and won the race against time, beating the date set for the completion of the preparatory work by 11 months. Workers were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. The hardest part was behind them and now they could finally start building the dam on the dry river bed.
Concrete, concrete and more concrete
They decided that it would be made of concrete. This was not unusual, as concrete dams have been built for 50 years, but never anything as huge as they were planning to build now.
They faced difficulties from the start. Where to find enough material of the right quality to make concrete? Concrete is made up of four substances, including cement, all of which must be of the right quality and mixed in the right proportions.
And where to find 175 tonnes of cement? There was none nearby, but it was hauled from San Francisco to the site on horse-drawn carts. Other materials were equally difficult to find, and the huge demand for concrete meant that another cement works had to be built. The first cement plant had already been built by the time the tunnels were finished, because the walls of the tunnels were also lined with concrete.
It was chosen because its weight presses against the ground and the dam’s material alone makes it stronger. But to ensure that the dam would not really give way under the pressure of the water, they also decided to make it in a semicircular shape, which transfers the pressure of the water to the left and right, so that the water presses against the walls of the canyon, not against the dam.
But it would be very difficult to build such a dam if it did not require an unimaginable 3.4 million cubic metres of concrete, which has its own laws. Chemical reactions take place between its constituent parts, which is why high temperatures are released during the pouring process.
If the dam were made in one piece and poured like a wall, the concrete would take 125 years to dry, because the more there is, the slower it dries. So that option was out of the question, and they decided to follow the example of Hermann Schussler, a German engineer with Swiss roots.
He built his Lower Crystal Springs Dam in California out of concrete blocks. Because they were small, the concrete in them dried faster, but Schussler knew he couldn’t just stack them on top of each other. Even if he had filled the joints between them with mortar, such a dam would have been far too vulnerable and could easily have given way under more water pressure.
So instead of squares, he opted for concrete rectangles, which he shaped like a “puzzle” around the edges so that they locked into each other. In this way, he created a kind of giant three-dimensional concrete jigsaw puzzle, which later proved to be extremely strong.
And it had to be, because the Lower Crystal Springs Dam stood in close proximity to the San Adreas fault, some 1 300 kilometres long. When it broke in 1906, for example, more than 3 000 people died in San Francisco, so it would have been easy to “bury” one dam.
Now they were building the Hoover Dam, following Schussler’s example, but they couldn’t just transfer good practice to their own site. The Hoover Dam was 20 times heavier than Schussler’s, and no one had ever tried to build anything so big with interlocking concrete clads.
The engineers decided to vary the length and width of the cladding for better strength. For example, the largest measured 7.5 metres by 18 metres, but they were all the same height. This meant that the dam grew in height in steps of 1.5 metres.
The first row of concrete casting moulds was thus stacked side by side. To cool it faster, the moulds were punctured on the sides and water pipes were pulled through the holes. If the concrete cooled too slowly, it would crack and the dam would be vulnerable.
The joints between the concrete blocks also had to be filled, using mortar. But all this was again a battle against time and the desert sun. It burned without mercy, so the mix, which must have been very dry anyway, dried out before it could be poured into the mould.
To solve the problem, a system of pulleys and ropes was introduced, along which the concrete containers travelled to reach their destination as quickly as possible. The workers who guided them had to be fast and precise, which is why they were the best paid. They earned $1.25 an hour, with a minimum hourly wage of 50 cents an hour.
As soon as the concrete was in place, seven workers started smoothing it by hand with shovels to get it into shape. In this way, each mould was filled layer by layer until it was full. And because they worked in layers, today we can say with certainty that the legend that persists that the bodies of the workers are “buried” in the concrete claddings is not true.
When the first layer of concrete was poured into the mould, river water was piped in, followed by a second layer of water that was cooled in the cold store, another of the dam’s assets in the middle of the desert.
The first concrete was poured on 6 June 1933 and since then 5000 workers have been working day after day in a chaos even greater than before in the tunnels. Supervisor Frank Crowe made it his main task to ensure that workers did not accidentally kill each other. So far, 65 people have lost their lives, but the contractors have been overtaking deadlines with inhuman haste, and have already made more than 3 million dollars in profits.
A bitter triumph
Together with the dam, four water towers for the hydroelectric power station were built on the rocks and on 6 February 1935 the last concrete reel was filled. The dam was completed, 2 years, 1 month and 28 days ahead of schedule, and, above all, 15 million cheaper than anticipated and at the cost of 112 lives.
Now the tunnels have been lowered and the Colorado River is back on its course, but the dam has stopped it from flowing any further. The water pressure at the foot of the dam is about the same as four elephants standing on a man’s head. If there had been any major flaw in the structure of the building, it would have shown up now.
But it wasn’t. The strength of the dam was already taken care of by the weight of the concrete, and the engineers took the precaution of bending the dam, making it out of interlocking concrete blocks and cooling the concrete very carefully.
For the next six years, the artificial Lake Mead, 24 kilometres long and 150 metres deep, was filled behind the dam, during which time construction continued on two hydroelectric power stations, one on each side of the dam. Together they have 17 turbines and generate more than 2 trillion watts of electricity, or enough to meet the needs of 1.3 million people.
The West boomed overnight, thanks to what was then the largest electricity generation in America, even though 56% of the electricity was “grabbed” by Los Angeles and Southern California. Lake Mead became the largest reservoir in America. When it was full, the water was so heavy that cracks formed in the earth’s surface and earthquakes occurred. Together, the reservoir and the dam weigh 41 trillion tonnes.
Water has also submerged most of the construction site and Ragtown, for example, and the dam, which was built as a tourist attraction in the first place, is very visible. The basic design may have been done by engineers, but the final art deco look was given by architect Gordon Kaufmann, who also decorated it with ornaments.
This is what people saw on 30 September 1935, when President Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the dam in front of a crowd of 20,000 people. The dam, 221 metres high and 201 metres wide at the base, was hailed with great enthusiasm as the Eighth Wonder of the World.
